A revolution within the digital revolution: Power Apps is changing how businesses approach app development

The only way forward in today’s digital world is app innovation – collaborative, relentless, impactful, agile, cost-effective app innovation. This task cannot be left to tech developers alone, who are in short supply anyway; it needs to be guided and supported by people with expertise and hands-on experience of the specific industry domain or business function. Envisioning such a new era of computing and app development, Satya Nadella recently remarked, “Going forward, every organization will need a more distributed, more intelligent, more autonomous computing fabric – one that they can use to rapidly build, manage and deploy applications anywhere. And they will need new tools that bring together both pro developers and domain experts.”?

Today, as organizations increasingly turn to low-code platforms to accelerate app development and save time and cost, five areas assume great importance: Enterprise Trust, AI Anywhere, Remote Work, Fusion Teams, and Hyper Automation. The low-code Microsoft Power Platform covers all these aspects and enables solutions that deliver greater efficiency, agility and security.?

World-leading organizations have used Power Apps to great effect

Today, almost 97 percent of the Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Power Platform in many different ways. IT solutions provider Mphasis used Microsoft Power Apps to achieve the twin goal of employee safety and productivity during the pandemic-induced lockdown. The solution tracked the health of employees and their families without compromising on their privacy; equipped them with work-from-home facilities; monitored their work hours; and resolved IT complaints. G&J Pepsi achieved savings of $1.5 million through lower development costs and higher resource optimization when they used Azure services and Power Platform to develop apps that integrated with their existing systems. GSK, meanwhile, leveraged the Power Platform for its Digital Factory Transformation initiative, enabling those closest to the problem to create the solution, without the need for coding skills.?

There are multiple benefits of empowering citizen developers and moving away from monolithic architectures

There is a big shift in the way Enterprise Apps are being built. Around 500 million new apps will be built in the next five years – more than what were built in the past 40 years. Demand for mobile apps is growing five times faster than IT departments can handle. However, there is a massive developer shortfall of one million. For the first time, last year, more developers were hired by non-tech companies than tech companies. In the light of this situation, the biggest advantage of Power Apps is that it allows citizen developers to leverage capabilities that were once only reserved for high-end development tools. Moreover, it is easy to learn and use. At Microsoft, we frequently partner with customers for ‘App in a day’ hackathons, where business users try and solve their business problems with Power App-led automation, often meeting with success at their very first attempt.?

Meanwhile, many industries are realizing the advantages of moving away from monolithic system architectures. Take banking, for instance. Power Apps can extend the development of various core banking microservice applications to citizen developers in a non-IT-led, user-friendly way. Any of these microservices can be halted, modified, or upgraded without affecting the rest of architecture. Scaling the architecture up or down is also easier with smaller components. One of India’s largest public sector banks has more than a hundred Power Apps in their environment, serving various last-mile needs, developed fully by citizen developers in the bank.

Power App-led development results in efficiencies of scale, simplicity, and security

The average cost to develop an application is 74 percent less with Power Apps. Mobile applications developed with Power Apps are more secure than would likely otherwise have been developed. Because these applications and workflows tie into Azure Active Directory and other Microsoft security solutions, IT can control permissions at the data and application levels. With Power Apps, you can empower your team to build and launch apps using prebuilt templates, drag-and-drop simplicity, and quick deployment, and then make continuous improvements, as may be needed. Power Apps enables a broad range of app scenarios to be created that infuse digital transformation into manual and outdated processes.

New users can start with building apps for areas like employee engagement to gain confidence and familiarize themselves with the platform. The future, of course, will also see many Metaverse applications powered by Microsoft Cloud, but that’s a topic for another day. Today, we are seeing good momentum for the Power Platform and Power Apps, with 35 million monthly active users. In October 2021 alone, more than 20 million creators had used the Power Platform to address their own challenges and opportunities, as well as those of their communities and society. Power Apps has the potential to usher in a great cultural change in how businesses approach app development. Are you ready for it??

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