Jeff DeVerter 0:01 To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, it's no small mission. But it is the mission of Microsoft. And Microsoft has been extraordinarily busy advancing operating systems and data centers and Azure services, enhancing 365, Office 365 and revolutionizing the device market. Several years ago, they set out to grow and mature the capabilities for a new class of software developer, which we now know, as the citizen developer. So, now joining me today to dig deeper into the persona and the life of the citizen developer, is longtime Microsoft employee, Mr Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud and AI group over at Microsoft. Scott, thanks so much for joining. Scott Guthrie 0:45 Thanks for having me. Jeff DeVerter 0:47 It's great to have you here. We've known each other for a little while. So it's fun to get to do something like this finally. Scott Guthrie 0:52 Definitely. Jeff DeVerter 0:53 Okay. So how many years at Microsoft? Scott Guthrie 0:57 This is my 24th year. Jeff DeVerter 0:58 24th year. And what was your very first job? Scott Guthrie 1:02 I was an intern in 1996, working on the Windows NT Operating System. Jeff DeVerter 1:08 Wow. So in 1995, was when I took my first Microsoft certification on Windows NT and Exchange 5 and all the other fun things. Scott Guthrie 1:23 Awesome. Time flies in the technology space. Jeff DeVerter 1:27 It really does. So over here at Rackspace, we've been thinking a lot about, and watching a lot, and observing and listening to our customers around this whole citizen developer, the whole low-code/no-code thing. From Microsoft's perspective, let's define it, before we jump in any farther. Scott Guthrie 1:44 Well, I think, the low-code/no-code model. I think is really around, how do you empower more people in an organization to build and adapt solutions? And not require that you have to write professional codes like C# or Java. So have something that's very approachable, but at the same time, I think one thing we've learned from low-code/no-code is you still need some level of IT control, and security, compliance, policy, those are all really important as well. And so, what we've tried to do at Microsoft with our Power Platform, which includes Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agent is set up SaaS based tools that can be used standalone. They'll work great with Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure and hundreds of other SaaS applications, and really enable you to as a professional IT or citizen developer, build great solutions, and hopefully achieve more. Jeff DeVerter 2:50 Yeah, hopefully achieve more along the way. But it's not a new venture, that whole Power Platform, how its matured today. You guys have been about empowering the business community inside of organizations for years. It started way back, you could even say even in the early parts of the Office suite. But there have been attempts in the past, not attempts that's the wrong way to put it. There have been pushes with specific products that have really helped enable individuals to be more productive. I think about stuff like Microsoft Access for one. Where you could take and give a business person access to some tooling that would enable them to create simple solutions on their desktop, initially, to create some solutions to help them solve their day. Scott Guthrie 3:35 Yeah, I think one of the things that we've always recognized at Microsoft is, there's a long tail of applications and business problems that organizations want to solve. And there's going to be tier one apps that are mission critical to your organization. And those typically is where you do put professional developers or professional teams involved. But there's literally thousands of small problems and small business processes that, historically, were done with paper. Now they're being done with email, worksheets and yet they're important problems. And so you could create tools whether it was Access and SharePoint historically, or Excel even way back when. Or more recently, our Power Platform, that can really enable someone to build a solution and do it quickly and solve a key problem. You can really make that person a hero in the environment and really help the company transform at a much faster pace. Jeff DeVerter 4:39 Right. I think, we look at how that has evolved. I think that SharePoint was really one of those early applications. I think it really lended itself to its meteoric rise and adoption. It finally gave IT some arms to wrap around what the business was doing and manage that data, while still giving individuals some freedom to create solutions that would solve specific problems. I worked for, a number of years ago, a large financial services firm. And they created a solution. It was a solution in SharePoint, even just on on Team Server, WSS at the time. And it was simply a way for them to track, for their customers, their most important customers, when specific life events would occur that they would need to reach back out. They would happen in three months, six months or 12 months intervals. But a lot of times, the personnel in that department would move. So they went knocking on IT's door and they said, "Look, If you could give us some kind of a calendaring app that would have reminders, that would remind us of who to call when. We could probably make the company 50 million more dollars a year." And while everyone agreed and nodded their heads. IT with its current staff was solving for problems that measured measurably larger than that, and they didn't have time to work on it. So off to SharePoint, they went to create some customizations to a calendaring app and went off and made the company 15 million more dollars a year. I think it's a great example of enabling individuals with centrally managed tools. Scott Guthrie 6:09 Yeah, to give you another example. That's even more topical, given the current COVID-19 crisis, is something we heard from a lot of hospitals this spring. Where they were running out of masks and PPE equipment. And they had an immediate problem. It wasn't like they needed an RFP, it wasn't like they could hire professional developers to go build a solution. They basically needed to track by floor, by ward, how many masks do we have left? And how do we triage? And there's some commonality there. But there's a lot of princes per hospital in terms of how it's handled, floor size, inventories, etc. And someone in the Power Platform community built an app very quickly. And they were an hospital employee, they knew the domain, they understood a lot of the core requirements. And then they published it into the marketplace and made it free. And, we've now had more than 1400 hospitals deployed and implemented it, in the span of about seven days. And what's great is each hospital could then go in, and they could tweak it with their own custom domain or business rules. But again, not to require developers, these are people that are on the wards, in the hospital in a crisis situation. And they were able to have security, they were able to have compliance. And more importantly, they were able to solve a business need. That had to scale beyond what you could manage with paper and pen, which is how they historically, practice masks. They never had to worry about running out in the middle of the day. They would just at the end of the day, go and count them up manually and now it was automated. That type of speed to market of something that is a business problem that was paper and pen before, that's a curve dramatic example. But, if you think about your organization, or the companies you work with, there are thousands of business processes like that. And if you can automate those, and if you can solve them, you can really make a huge impact. And that really is what low-code/no-code is all about, letting someone who has domain knowledge of a problem solve it, and do it at scale for the organization. Jeff DeVerter 8:21 Such great example. And it calls out, of course, it's not just the fact that you can get it done because you don't have to go to IT necessarily for it. But the amount of time that gets just taken off of that entire project. Because you don't have to go through whole business requirements of helping somebody in IT or a contracting company understand what your businesses is. These are folks who live the business. I can imagine on those floors, it's nurses and everybody that serves in and around them being able to not only just utilize the thing, but make adjustments to it. So speed and time to market, that's an incredible benefit of the low-code/no-code. And with this mass digitization that we've seen this year, all the work that's happened this year was on the radar. But who was it I was talking to? Peter Coffee over at Salesforce said, "2022 sure got here a alot earlier than we planned on it." And so that just creates such a surface area of opportunity to go in and digitize these processes. Scott Guthrie 9:21 Yeah, I think it's 2020 has become fascinating, both in terms of just the amount of change that's happening in the world around the economy, health, business, process, everything. But then at the same time, I think we're also at a tipping point where pretty much every organization has either moved something to the cloud or is in the process of moving everything to the cloud. And we've seen this giant proliferation of cloud based platforms like Azure like AWS, etc. But then also the adoption of SaaS based solutions like Office 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, etc. And that ability to now have standardized cloud platforms with APIs that you can then use with a low-code/no-code environment and access in a programmatic way and a standard connector way. I think it's the confluence of both the need to make change and the standardization on the cloud that's happening, that's really enabling this sort of low-code/no-code revolution. Jeff DeVerter 10:27 Yeah, it really is such a perfect time for all of this to be occurring, and hate to even say it that way. But it's a perfect time for it to be occurring with the proliferance of 365 being on everybody's desktop. And it's not just like everyone's running Exchange in their office. They're running a common platform that has interconnected capabilities that has that clouds now able to connect your business cloud where your Power Platform runs it, like you said, through common API's, and through common connectors. And I think even more importantly, all of that through a common security model, which everybody's worried about these days, which they should be worried about these days. Scott Guthrie 11:01 Yeah. And then the security and the compliance aspect, I think, is key. Because you know, every organization is worried, "Hey, it's great, I can give you access to the API's of my data. But how do you not build an app that basically sucks the data out of my CRM system and posts it somewhere else?" And so balancing this trade-off of you want to empower citizen developers, and at the same time, you want to make sure that you can still meet your security and compliance requirements. If you get that balance right, it's incredibly powerful. But if you get it wrong, it also doesn't carry. And that's been our focus with the Power Platform has been - it's to enable the productivity, and at the same time, have the data loss protection capabilities, have the alerting and threat protection capabilities. And honor the DRM and rights protection when you apply on your data, and just have it be implicitly part of the workflow. And I don't want to claim that we're perfect. But I think we've got a good balance there, in terms of having both the flexibility and the appropriate controls that hopefully provide the right balance that enabled organizations to adopt it fast. Jeff DeVerter 12:17 Yeah, I think another aspect that is helping from an adoption perspective, is that so much more, and I think you've even had some announcements lately, is being presented through Teams. And that Teams being that one place. I mean, we're using it today so that we can see each other as we have our chat. But imagine all of your business, those rules, those applications showing up in that common location. Scott Guthrie 12:39 I think the whole world right now is going, or not the whole world, but pretty much the whole world is going through this experiment. Where we're all sitting doing video conferencing to connect to our peers in the organization with our customers. And in many ways, we become far more digital in terms of our meetings, which was often the thing that we previously weren't very digital on. And Teams for Office 365 customers is obviously the scaffolding that they're sort of living their lives through right now. And we have got literally hundreds of millions of people that are sitting every day or every month inside Teams. And part of what we try to do with both Power Apps, which lets you build low-code/no-code, application front-ends, but also Power BI and Power Virtual Agent, which allows you to build chat bots and automate bots, is embed them inside Teams. This ability to have a meeting or to work with a customer, or take advantage of a business process, and use that same Team scaffolding that you're using to see and talk to people and chat with people to digitize business processes. I think that is very timely and so many of our business problems, if you can surface them in a meeting where you can surface them in a easy, accessible chat based way that just makes it that much easier for an organization to get business value. Because it's front and center and it just feels natural. They're not learning a new user interface, they're already spending an awful lot of their time in today. And I think even post COVID we're going to see a lot more people using Teams on a regular basis. And I think we're gonna see this hybrid work model proliferate over the next couple years. And I think low-code/no-code is perfect to take advantage of that. Jeff DeVerter 14:30 Absolutely. One of the things, I'm really hoping is that all of the time where we've been locked in our bedrooms and offices at home. That once we're back in an office in some form, or fashion, that those folks who are remote will be more of a first class citizen in the meeting. In the past, it's too often too easy to turn our backs on the screen on the wall while we had a conversation with the person next to us. And I think we'll be a little more sensitive to that in the future. Scott Guthrie 14:54 Totally. Jeff DeVerter 14:56 So our audience who listens to the Cloud Talk podcast are IT decision makers. And so one of the things, I think it's also incumbent on us to call out is. It's not just the business going wild out there, creating things. Because they're doing it, to use your phrase, about Teams, under the scaffolding of their IT plans around data protection, around security, around authentication, but also around their existing development staff. Because lo-code/no-code doesn't mean these folks exist on an island. They do the stuff that's business sensitive, but they're oftentimes, there's some heavy lifting to be done in the dev side, that last mile, that last 10%. And in this model, an effectively deployed model, you've got your IT department, you've got your developers and your citizen developers who are working in concert together. Scott Guthrie 15:51 Yeah, and the key thing, I think with low-code/no-code is getting it balanced right. Not just on the security front. But also, what is business logic that someone pastes into a frontend versus what's the logic that really belongs in the backend as an API. And I think historically, like we've all seen, it's the VBA macro, that is 20,000 lines of code, which is a scary thing. And it's being emailed around the organization. And you're like, "Well, what's going on?" And we've tried it with Power Platform to really address that. And with Power Apps, for example, you don't create client side code. We do have a simple way to do Excel-like macros. But instead what we really push is, you should call an API for any substantial business logic. And that's something we build into the platform. So that we enforced that good design pattern. And then what we've done is made it really easy to build an API using Visual Studio and using Azure. And you can basically have a professional developer team that builds an API and publishes it into Azure. We have an API Management gateway in Azure that you can put in front of that API. And we wire it all up with Azure Active Directory for authentication. And then it just shows up as an API in the gallery and Power Apps. And then a citizen developer can access it, and use it. And that gives you the benefit of having the professional developers build the functionality that are talking to the tier one database that are doing e-logic or transaction flow. And at the same time, people that that can effectively assemble UI and assemble workflows, again in a governance based way. And then what we've done, just to make it even easier is Power Apps and Power Automate, are now licensed as part of Teams. And so for Office 365 customer who has Teams, and can use them for free inside Teams. There's no charge for hundreds of thousands of users that want to. And then what we announced at our Ignite conference last month, is you can now call with Azure API's, also for free with that. And so you effectively create legions of low-code/no-code developers that are publishing Teams based apps, calling your APIs on the backend inside Azure. And those APIs can be hosted serverless, so they can literally cost pennies per month if they aren't used that often. And you have a whole governance model end-to-end with a common security and compliance story that gives you the governance you need. And that we find really resonates. And hopefully in this time, where every company is trying to get more done with less budget, also really helps in terms of the ROI and the value, but also in terms of not requiring any additional costs. Jeff DeVerter 18:46 Isn't that incredible? It's a great call, and the fact that for those that are listening, who are still scratching their head, "Why now? Why is this exploding so much? Why does Gartner say that, 50 million apps, or more applications are going to be written in the next five years than were written in the previous 40 years of computing." It's what you're talking about. It's the fact. About five years ago, Scott, if somebody wanted, you went to IT and knocked on their door and asked them for an API that they could use in their application, regardless of what that might be. Or for Excel to connect to an API to do a thing. That would require a pretty serious project, an allocation of resources, new gear would probably have to be ordered in and figure how that all fits into the business logic of the organization. But now through the cloud through Azure, and the ability to create very simple, or very complex APIs and have them published in a standardized way through source control through all of the right resources and a transactional based consumed model becomes quite simple. Scott Guthrie 19:51 Yeah, I think we're gonna see over the next couple years more digital transformation period, happen in the world. Both because of what's happening with COVID. And then also, again the rise of the cloud and rise of this technology and your low-code/no-code is going to be key to enabling that digital transformation. Absolutely. Jeff DeVerter 20:11 So a question that just comes to mind on that. Now, we have people in the business where I think in the not too distant future, there will be an expectation that they have the ability to stitch together simple solutions to get their job done. Whether that's 100% of the workforce, or whether it's a percentage. What do you think that means to folks who are in school today? So take somebody who's going down a traditional business path. They're not a computer science student. They're not in the developer program. What can they be doing to prepare to make sure that they are ready to be a digital citizen inside of an organization and create value? Scott Guthrie 20:54 Yeah, I think it's going be. The analogy to maybe use would be like pivot tables. Maybe not everyone can do a pivot table. But millions of people in the world can do pivot tables. And if you work with Excel, and if you work with numbers, it's assumed that you know how to do a pivot table, or at least charting of some type, and relation of some type. And I think that'll be similar with some of these low-code/no-code solutions, everyone will be able to consume them. And then an awful lot, maybe 60% of the world, or 50% of the IT professionals will be able to build them, at least. What we're doing to try to help with that is, we have what we call the Microsoft Learn platform. Go to our website, just search on Microsoft Learn. And it's a free set of learning resources and set of modules, it's gamified, so you can earn badges. If your company really wants it, you can even take certifications and get a compliance certification. But without paying anything, you can get free online tests and badges and points. And we're trying to make learning fun. And frankly, like the 21st century. And so instead of it being a long book that you take, it's short modules, and it's designed for going to YouTube hackable like learning behavior. So spend a few minutes here and there. And we've got great learning paths now for Power BI, for Power Apps, for Power Automate, Power Virtual Agent. And I definitely encourage, if you want to learn more. And we're doing this with academia, we're doing it with all of our big customers. Check out Microsoft Learn, and we can train you to be a low-code/no-code expert, quickly. Jeff DeVerter 22:43 That's fantastic, as it should be. Low-code/no-code should also mean, low effort to get into it as well. Great for having that. With your title, and also having AI in it, not just the Azure bits, but the AI stuff. How does that play into low-code/no-code? Whether now or maybe some thoughts about the future? Scott Guthrie 23:01 I think what we've seen with AI is, there's a core set of data science capabilities that really do require that you have some degree of statistical or data science background. And, that's great. And there's going to be people and organizations, that focus on that and add value. Where I think the majority of us get value from AI is from models that are already built by the people. Or by models that have been built, that can be easily adapted and train, without us having to be data science experts. And that's where I think low-code/no-code comes into play. And so, whether it's in a Power BI, where you can take your chart data from anything in a spreadsheet, or a SQL database, or tera data in a warehouse. And you can in a single click, effectively say 'apply, show me insights', and it will apply inferencing and boosted trees and a whole bunch of data science you might not actually understand. But it will look at the data and basically highlight to you, "Hey, your supply chain is showing delays, based on historical data" and automatically highlight that for you. And again, allow you to apply AI in an easy way and some of those are built in AI models. But what's nice is, similar to how I mentioned you can access API's, you can access models trained by and built by your organization. And drop them into not just Power BI but also Power Apps, Power Automate, Empower Virtual Agent. And with our Power Apps model, we also have built in things like computer vision. And so we have retailers that are now building Power Apps, and their training, for example, the ability of the app the ability to take a picture, and you can do that with no code. And you can then apply an AI model. And for example, retailers that are looking for shelf optimizations and shelf doctor compliance, in other words is this brand of the product positioned correctly versus that brand? Now that you can do that with low-code/no-code all with AI built in. We also have built-in models for doing form recognizers. So, if you've got a printed worksheet, like a traditional paper form, we can actually do OCR on that form. You simply take a picture with your phone, and the Power App can automatically take the data and digitize it into a written form. And we've got a large retailer in the US as an example. And they're estimating now they're saving $25 million a year, simply by replacing what was previously faxes and someone typing in simple OCR capability. And it required no-code. I mean, it's just a built-in feature of Power Apps. And I think, again, this ability to apply AI is something that's is going to be standard going forward. Jeff DeVerter 26:02 Yeah. So the art of the possible for the business itself, it's really the sky's the limit. At this point, if they can look at a process and envision a better way to pull it together to utilize AI on the backend, to help make collate decisions, or at least information so that humans can make decisions to create applications then to action on that, it's a great example. But for the company that hasn't started yet. Let's talk about some strategies of how to dip in. I think you've already said the first one, go to Microsoft Learn and come up to speed on the toolset. But what are some strategies? And then how to harness that over time? Scott Guthrie 26:39 I probably recommend to someone who's listening. Just brainstorming your next team meeting, especially if it's over Teams. What is something that you're doing today in email? And I'd really look at, what are the workflows that are email driven today? And document driven either spreadsheet or a Word doc? And ask yourself, okay, what if we automated it? Let's just build a simple workflow that says, when an email arrives with this subject, let's kick off a workflow. And let's take this spreadsheet and let's pull out the value and let's do something with it. And you probably have a CRM system, it's probably either Dynamics 365, or Salesforce, there's a connector for that. You probably have your documents being stored in the SharePoint, or OneDrive, or maybe Google Drive or Box. There's an API for that and we have a connector built in. And even just simple stuff, someone emails you a spreadsheet, okay, great pull values out, save it in a different file or saving it your CRM system. If that takes a couple of minutes a day, and you apply it over a dozen people that actually adds up over a week to save you a couple hours of productivity. And, crackling the simple problems, and solving it with a domain expertise of the people that are close to the problem. And then rinse and repeat and go in. And that's a good way to get started. We do see organisations over time for those that are say CIOs or teams often create centers of excellence that can train and help individual departments start to adopt low-code/no-code. That's maybe more of a best practice once you've got maybe a few wins underneath your belt, you might want to get better. But an awful lot of our even biggest customers that have been successful in our apps, and Power BI, often started with one person who had an idea or solve for a problem and automated it. This isn't something that needs a CIO on high to make a call. I would definitely recommend starting to adopt it. And again, if you are using Office 365 customer included with Teams, you already have Power Apps and Power Automate, you don't need to buy anything, you don't need to pay anything more. You just need to start using it. Jeff DeVerter 29:08 Well, and you guys have been great about showcasing some of your customers who have done some pretty amazing things with just individuals down inside of the business. I think of, Inspire, the year before you had an individual there from South America who literally was looking at a manufacturing process and said, "I think I could write something for this." And lo and behold saved. Incredible value that happened there. Or construction companies where people recognized, "We could probably schedule this a little bit better." And found a way to do it, save tonnes of opportunity. Scott Guthrie 29:44 One of those heroes stories we like to tell and have shared is an employee Heathrow Airport. And he worked in the security, when you go through X rays. And never went to college and had no IT degree. But saw a problem, which is how do you do shift changes? How do you actually manage breaks? And, for many of us who have stood in a airport security screening line, you've probably all experienced the delays that sometimes happened. And they were managing it in a spreadsheet. And he said, "Hey, you know what? I want to try this Power Apps thing." And on the weekend, he built an app, and a workflow and brought it in, and they started using it. And it had huge success. I mean, it basically became the standard at Heathrow Airport, and he was subsequently promoted. And he now leads the Power Apps, Center of Excellence for Heathrow Airport. And I love that, because it's not someone who asked him to do this. It was just someone who saw, "Here's a spreadsheet. I'm sure there's something better than a spreadsheet and email to solve business problem." And he solved it, became the hero of that organization. Jeff DeVerter 31:02 And isn't that why we got into tech, and that was because you could see this as a tool. Now we're technologists. So technology's fun to play with anyway. But as a tool to be an enabler for individuals, whether that's large organizations, commercial organizations, whether they're nonprofits, whether they're, doesn't matter what it is. I think that this represents, the low-code/no-code represents such an enabler, and a transformer of the way everything happens today. And I think it's going to really be expected in the coming years that people actually look for and apply these sorts of changes inside of their organizations, at least the ones who are going to get promoted anyway. Scott Guthrie 31:41 Yeah, I agree. And it's going be exciting to see. Microsoft, and one of the things that we've always really celebrated, how do we try to make heroes out of everyone inside IT. And this is a great way to really have an impact inside an organization and really be a hero. And, I think that its great for the organizations you work for. But it's also great for you. And it can really be a win-win. And, something I'm looking forward to seeing, just how it helps in the years ahead. Jeff DeVerter 32:18 Incredible. Scott, thanks so much for taking a few minutes to sit down and talk about this. It's massive. And just to reiterate what we'd said earlier, it would not at all be possible, if it wasn't for the hard work that specifically you and the team have done in creating this in this global infrastructure of Azure. And then of course, the end tooling as well. But thank you for taking the time to visit with me today and to share with us Scott Guthrie 32:40 Thanks so much, Jeff. And it's been great to be here and really appreciate the chance to chat. Jeff DeVerter 32:46 Alright, have a great day and everyone. Thank you for listening and we'll be back next week with another episode of Cloud Talk.