What is Microsoft's Power Platform?

Before we dive into the individual technologies which together form the Power Platform, we want to take the time to summarise what the Power Platform is, the Power Platform's purpose, and the benefits organisations can leverage when using the technologies together.

Content:

• Growing demand for application development in a data rich world
• The Citizen developer
• Analyse. Act. Automate.
• Customer Success Story: Heathrow Airport

Over the last decade you have seen organisations invest heavily in IT infrastructure and IT services to enhance data capture, data processing and data storage, living up to the often heard phrase, that data is becoming the new oil.

Traditionally, in order for organisations to make use of this data, organisations would rely heavily on professional developers with deep technical insight and domain knowledge. Organisations would hire in-house or contract developers to develop dashboards, allowing their businesses to gain valuable insights, as well as develop line of business applications for their employees to use on a day-to-day basis.

At Microsoft Inspire, Satya Nadella said:

"500 million apps are going to get created in the next five years. Think about that. That's more apps than the last 40 years … The challenge of 500 million applications [is that] we're just not going to have professional developers to build these applications. So we need citizen developers. Empowering citizen developers is what the Power Platform has been built for."

The issue with this traditional model of only relying on professional developers is its lack of sustainability and scale in terms of keeping up with app demand and the cost.

The solution to deal with the demand for application development is the birth and rise of the Citizen Developer. What does that mean?

A Citizen Developer is an enthusiastic business user who leverages IT tools, to proactively develop solutions to solve a problem(s) within their role, function or business. The real benefit of a Citizen Developer is their knowledge of the business around workflows, interactions between roles, and business realities, which they get exposure to when doing their day job, something a professional developer may lack.

When you look at that definition, anyone can be a Citizen Developer within a workforce as long as they are given the appropriate IT tools. This approach is how organisations can deal with the scale of demand for applications and solutions, by empowering their workforce to build the solutions themselves at a rapid pace.

The Power Platform is the set of IT tools that integrates across third-party software and systems, as well as the Microsoft stack, to empower your workforce to become Citizen Developers.

Microsoft's Power Platform is made up of three technologies:

• Power BI - a tool which empowers everyone to turn data into insightful visualizations they can analyse to make business decisions quickly and confidently.
• Power Apps - a tool which empowers everyone to act and build custom line of business applications in hours, that connect to your existing data and systems to help solve specific process and business needs.
• Power Automate- a tool which empowers everyone to construct automated workflows in minutes across hundreds of popular apps and services
• Power Virtual Agents - a tool which empowers everyone to create chat bots to manage processes

The sum of these technologies create the Power Platform, a platform which requires little technical ability or previous experience to leverage.

London Heathrow Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, and funnels through the largest number of passengers than any other airport in Europe. Heathrow sees a plane land or take off every 45 seconds!

Below is a 5-minute video which highlights how Heathrow Airport are making use of the Power Platform.

Actions for You:

• Browse Microsoft's Power Platform website

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