Celebrity Encounters and Anchor Apps: A Hilarious Dive into Power Platform's Enterprise Impact

Our other colleagues in crime haven't been able to make the show family commitments et cetera preventing it , but we're going to have a fun day today , and today one of my pet things at the moment is a term coined by none other than Steve Mordu .

In a discussion that we were having with Ryan Cunningham at the recent MVP Summit , steve Mordu arranged a side meeting with Ryan . We went back to his offices and we discussed something , a concern . Are you just name dropping ? I'm name dropping ? Of course I'm name dropping . What is this ? Guess what , guess what . Not only was Ryan Cunningham in the room .

Ryan Jones was also in the room . How many other names do you want me to ?

In addition to that , about an hour and 38 minutes sleep . I get in my uh , my cabin on the , my carriage on the train and this guy walks in . I'm like I recognize that guy . He gets his breakfast from a little breakfast trolley and , yeah , he speaks to the lady . I was like , no , and you may only get this if you've been long enough in England .

He was the guy from grand designs , kevin McLeod , oh wow .

But if anyone's gonna bother me at that time in that state , I'm glad it was kevin mcleod , because he and the irony was he was about to go and get his portrait painted and he was going to do a talk throughout that about how he stays away from technology . So we , uh , we got that .

And so one day a gentleman going into my local bookstore on the high street opened the door for me and I looked up and it was like , oh my gosh , professor McGonagall from , was it McGonagall ? It was one of the professors from Harry Potter .

And then another day , walking down the street , the lady that was the really mean lady that became the principal in Harry Potter .

You know what is an app that is such an anchor inside an organization and let's define the term further , because it is one that has been invented at the moment is this concept of an app that is so large that there's no way the organization can go on a whim ? Let's get rid of that and replace it with something else . It's a serious application .

Think of you know in the past , you know , erp systems . I'd never get updated less than seven years of life , right , normally 10 plus years , right , you'd update an ERP . How it came about . I've got a you know , in the company that I told you that I had resigned from and I finished from in two weeks time .

One of our customers is a large , a large customer that has 44 000 premium license seats sold on an ea , of course , ea standing for enterprise agreement , something we want to make clear . We're not talking about enterprise architects that was two episodes ago that was two episodes ago yes , yes , new ea my challenge was to ryan was this is that .

Ryan who Mark Cunningham , Is that so many times enterprise licenses are sold into organizations , often without the actual organization knowing what they're buying .

In other words , a line item of a package of licenses has been put in there and with the onus on Microsoft sellers to turn that into consumption over the term of the enterprise agreement , along with all the other licenses that have been bundled in there .

And so my concern was this is that if that organization has been sold on low code , no code , we don't say low code anymore , mark , no more low code .

If the organization has been sold on that concept , which they have for the last since 2016 , 2019 , maybe what's happened is that , to coin another phrase of steve modu , a lot of shitty little apps have been built that are really the modern info path form type apps .

as I see them , or as as Ryan Jones name drop again calls them craplets , a lot of craplets have been built across the organization , and the thing is is that none of these are anchor apps , because , at a sweep of a pen , a red line through an Excel spreadsheet if you could do such a thing that line item can be deleted and replaced with another app solution

that's available off the shelf in the market . And so my concern was why aren't we telling the big enterprise app stories , those ones that have , you know , 10,000 terabytes of data sitting in Dataverse and then , of course , flowing over into a data lake of some sort ?

Where are the apps that are , you know , evidence collection for federal agencies , that are , the data that they collect are presented in court and decisions are made right ? These are key kind of app technologies made right . These are key kind of app technologies .

Um , where are the apps that are used to um , coordinate all military personnel in a battle formation that in my career I've built on dynamics 365 right , butchering the sales app in the past into an xrm solution and built this for one of the five nations in the world I didn't't know New Zealand had an army . I wasn't working in that country at the time .

They all have something in common they were all colonized by colonized by the british .

Nobody makes bonus for a net neutral EA . In other words , it didn't go up , it didn't go down , it just stayed static on renewal time .

My concern is this everybody's talking about co-pilot and so if you've got two lines in your EA agreement one wanting to go and call co-pilot for everybody and one going you know we've got these tens of thousands of seats of Power Platform and only 300 of them have ever been used in production . Why don't we get rid of the Power App story and go co-pilot ?

Because , wow , that's the talk of the town at the moment . And I said the problem is it's net neutral to Microsoft . One got swapped out for the other . The agreement didn't grow . That was my concern . That's brought me back into this whole concept and that's where Steve Mourou goes .

Oh , you're talking about anchor apps , an app that is so large in the account that to pull it out , you know , would be like ripping up the seabed um from the , the anchor effect .

And so , and what I realized is that back in the xrm days and this is a you know if you've heard that term this was a concept that actually was coined by microsoft and it lasted only about six months . And then there were so many complaints inside microsoft about the concept of xrM that all of a sudden everybody stopped talking about .

It was just like don't talk about XRM . And the concept was , if you took CRM customer relationship management dropped off the C , you could have anything relationship management .

And so it could be , you know , guide dog relationship management , which was something back in my early start of my career was done for training guide dogs , their vet bills , how they get placed , all their care , all their training , that type of thing . And you saw it . You know grants management , or grants relationship management .

You know first aid relationship , and so what we built is these big solutions that had nothing to do with CRM but did a massive thing . Right , they were epic large solutions that were deployed , and when I look back across my career , some of these were built over 10 years ago and guess what ? They're still in production , they're still being used .

Nobody's getting rid of them because they are mission critical to an organization . So I don't know if we define a mission sorry , an anchor app as mission critical . Is it got like ? I just came off a call this morning from somebody in Portugal that has 10,000 users a day using the app . That's pretty important to their business right Internally .

So I can say , okay , that's pretty important to their business right Internally . So I can say , okay , that's an anchor app . We've got the one , andrew , that we've discussed , which has 10 terabytes of data in it . That's pretty mission critical . What are you guys seeing in ? What are these big anchor apps and why organizations need ?

And what I'm trying to do is saying , hey , the Power Platform is not just for children with low code , it's actually for building big enterprise juicy applications .

Ie , if the solution goes down , the business is either limping along or has to stop . A really important solution . It's not like it's a HR system which , yeah , it's an important solution , but if it goes down , it can come up the next day or the day after . It's going to be okay . This is your manufacturing IoT management solution .

It's got to be something that will really affect . But then the other thing you said , which ? But this app has 10 000 users . So what's the graduation curve for something to become an anchor app ?

So is it the amount of people that has been shared with , the types of people it's been shared with , and actually the fact that an app can go from something that's classes of productivity type application , like you know , dave the receptionist just building out a way for people to to check in and out of the uh of the office all the way through to .

Then dave extends that to making sure that when we do our our pat testing on our electrics . That all goes through , they get signed off .

Then all of a sudden , all our air conditioning units , then all our other units are offices and suddenly it's a full office management app that affects your ISO accreditation , et cetera , et cetera , et cetera being used by loads . So I like the categorization first as the graduation path there .

And I think that at the time because I had come from the background of building anchor apps I mean , that's that's what I did for for a number of years is I built anchor apps , first with Dynamics and then with Power Platform , and at the time I just sort of took it for granted . Of course we're going to be building critical , mission-critical solutions .

In later times we referred to those apps as being core business systems or part of the core business systems neighborhood in ecosystem-oriented architecture . So you could have an anchor app , the technology used to build the anchor app . It could be Power Platform , it could be SAP , it could be Oracle , it could be Workday .

It could be something very , very bespoke that you build atop , say , azure SQL , as your data service , that you build atop , say , azure SQL , as your data service . But what defines the Anchor app is that it is critical to the functioning of the business .

An outage in this solution , downtime in this solution , is going to stop a critical business function , one or more critical business functions , from moving forward right . So these apps are out there in the world .

Just not enough of them are being built with Power Platform or Power Platform plus Azure , and the result is that one companies have these highly , highly fragmented application landscapes right there .

They've got anchor apps that are reliant on multiple different technologies , which means that those technologies need to be supported and maintained and secured and governed , all in isolation of one another , and they're squandering these , this investment that they've made in their premium power platform licenses .

I think they're not being talked about , they're not being identified , and one of the things I'm hoping is that , if you're listening to this podcast and you know of and as something , that what we've talked about here , about an anchor app that exists , that you would reach out to me directly because I'd like to have a chat with you about it .

I want to do a uh , a five-part podcast series just dedicated to five mega apps that are out there in the wild that kind of nobody knows about , and just to give a , to really give examples of the art of the possible .

So , when people are , because I think it's a mindset that's been set we've had a mindset since 2016 and these low code app you , you know the Power App , you know , starting with Power Apps and then in 2019 , the Power Platform is that it's only low-code , it's only for craplets .

But when you go , anybody can build with this and that productivity space , they go oh , it's the modern Excel . Oh , we don't have to worry about that , we don't . Whatever people do , it's Excel . It's just Excel in the cloud . That's fine , let them do what they want . We're never going to build our evidence collection process in Excel .

You know , as a law enforcement agency , we'll never do that . We'll go and get a proper system , not realizing that they actually have the proper system . But their mindset is you can't do that in the spot on . Anyone can build on it's a perception .

But you can't do that with low code , where we suddenly have to reel off all the clients that they will know of that they would have used a power app solution for that they would have never known , like we've rolled out some of the largest ones for for central government clients that everybody in the uk has to use and they'll have no idea they're going through

a power pages portal type of approach there I .

It drives me crazy when I hear experienced professional people , right , who do this every day and have true , bona fide expertise in this technology , refer to themselves as citizen developers . It drives me crazy because it it just , first of all , it discredits them and , second of all , it discredits the technology that they and so many others work on .

There are legitimate people out there who are building you , you know , who are citizen developers and who are building some some mighty useful uh . Uh , I'm not going to call them craplets , I'm going to call them toys .

Um , I'm going to , I'm going to be be positive here Uh , and they're mighty useful , so I don't , but , legitimately , I don't want to take anything away from someone who is using the technology to make the work life of them or their team better , right , but there's so much more that can be done in the hands of engineers .

So when you look at what actually business users build and I hate the term system developer , I refuse to use it anymore it's business users . When they're using the productivity side of those tools the equal sum and plus and minus they build some really cool stuff .

But to make it scalable , to make it appropriate and to use it in a professional way , then we know that it's a lot more hardcore than that and I think we do need a better term for it . You know , because we've got a tool that can be used in an advanced way or a simple way , and I don't like the term system developer .

We would take the product and turn it into something else and we used to beg Microsoft back then why don't you give us what we , what back then we called a headless SKU ? Don't give us all that , Just give us the whole model-driven piece and let us build .

They turned around and they gave us that with the Power Platform and Dataverse , right , they gave us that and then they stopped talking and then they never talked about how amazing it is . And you know , here's the other thing why do we talk about ?

You know five different workloads that sit on the power platform , and what I'm talking about power apps , power automate , power BI , power pages and now Copilot Studio . Why don't we just talk about , like , everything has all those in it . Why don't we call it the power platform , right ? And like why don't we have a sales sorry , a sales SKU , a license SKU ?

That's for the power platform that allows you to build solutions , right , it's not just about apps , it's not just about automation , it's about the whole story . Absolutely one ring to rule them all . Yeah , I like that yes , well , okay .

Back in the day we built an xrm solution that managed the every piece of road , every bridge , every light fixture , every signpost on that entire network in what we would modernly call Dynamics 365 , sales . Right , there was no sales component . What we did is that we used that offline comm component .

We put it in a toughened device that sit ahead and road workers trucks . We put ArcGIS into the mix . When that person went down the road , if they saw a pothole , they would GPS dot it with the circle on screen to say it was this size , and it would auto-calculate what type of fix needed to be done no , human .

And this was like eight , nine years ago , right before the Power Platform ever existed or anything . Now , if you did that today , you would 100% not use a dynamic SKU , you would use the Power Platform .

Right , it's still . And you know what ? That organization ain't ripping it out in five minutes because it's every one of the hivers , folks out on the road . They know how to use that app now , eight years on , they know how to do it . They know how to put in data . When it came back to the office and got Wi-Fi access , it would do a sync .

It would then assign out all the work orders for the . You know it would decide . You know , if the defect ratio on a one kilometer or one mile strip was X , it needed the whole resurface done .

If it was lower than Y , it would only have the you know rudimentary fixes done to the potholes on that area , and I'm just giving you as an example that's what I call an anchor app . It's an enterprise-grade app . It won't get pulled out within five years . Yep .

That did a combination of things that everything from keeping track of who's jumping out of which plane and how many times they've jumped , to human resources , managing HR and personnel across organizations with 100,000 people in it right , managing the electronic medical records of thousands and thousands of people .

One of the cases , one of the anchor apps that I and it's not even an anchor app , it was like an . It was an anchor ecosystem of apps , so we didn't call it this at the time . So we didn't call it this at the time . I worked with the US and New Zealand mission to Antarctica , the scientific mission to Antarctica . All of HR happened right .

So it tracked every single employee , every single scientist , every single person being taken into the organization , what their medical workup was , their psychological profile , their medical history , their blood type , right . So if someone was injured in a remote place , you could identify the correct blood donor . We called it the walking blood bank . What else ?

It ran air terminal operations .

We built apps that ran air terminal operations at the coastal stations in Antarctica and at the South Pole and , because of the way that the Earth turns and the alignment of satellites , we had to deploy on-premise infrastructure at the South Pole because we would sometimes go a long time with you know , I mean a number of hours without connectivity .

And it also meant that I got to say that I was part of the team the only team , to my knowledge , that ever got to deploy Microsoft business applications at the South Pole which is one of the coolest Golden right , but once again , a great example , Will Will .

So keep that in mind through this . So two things . One of them is and I can't say the name , but it's going to be pretty obvious is a test that you take when you're around 17 . In the UK you have up to a million people take this , because it's not just the UK that actually feeds into the system and the Power Platform .

What people won't realize is the Power Platform actually manages all that . So all the behind-the-scenes booking , all the behind-the-scenes actually making sure that you attend on time , that you have the right people there , you're getting the right exams , you get the right questions , that's all managed by power , huge scalability .

But that also feeds into further down your journey that once you pass that test successfully and you get issued what you need to get issued from that , that if you have any criminal convictions , if you , if you receive anything that goes against that , that also gets stamped as well .

And then this goes further and further down to inspections of the thing that you're getting to use due to that certification you received .

We got approached by a , a company that specialism was actually building airports and then making sure they were operationally ready , and they wanted what they referred to as an operational readiness assessment test .

They can measure every single test , every single route they had to take and actually collect all the evidence , all from within the solution . It was absolutely humongous and the guy who actually built it was a guy called marco cruz . He still works at , uh , curve digital . Uh . Now he worked with me at hitachi .

In other words , this app that I'm thinking of only affected the executives in the organization . It had a $27 million impact per annum on that executive layer of the organization , so it won't be thrown out from that perspective .

But the other you know , 100,000 employees outside of that , you know 5,000-odd aren't using it , you know , because it's not designed for them .

That's not necessarily exactly what is best for consuming licenses from a Microsoft perspective . Or I think you can have an anchor app that is high impact and a lot of users . So to me , a couple examples that come to mind . There was one I worked with a Fortune 100 insurance firm several years ago and by the time we were done they were running .

They were using Power Platform to manage the entire process of updating their product lines , making rate adjustments , etc . Etc . And in that world right in financial services you make a small percentage adjustment and that can impact your profitability and other financial metrics wildly , wildly .

There probably weren't tens of thousands of users there , but at last count they were running about $2 billion of business through this solution .

On the other hand , I actively work with a law firm that We'll just say this is a law firm that has had a profound effect on people's lives , even though probably almost nobody has heard of it , and they have been in a process of completely replatforming case management onto Power Platform . So this is not customer service .

This is not you're running a call center or you're managing field service . This is managing legal matters and court cases . Right , this all happens for them on Power Platform .

There's not a single person in the organization who is not using this particular anchor app every single day to transact the core business , the core purpose that this firm exists , and it's all happening in Power Platform , and I think it's marvelous .

Okay , we're going to wrap up here , um , but my call to action folks , uh , if you're listening to this , please reach out , hit me up , uh , on linkedin um , I'm pretty findable there .

Um , send me a message and say hey , I've , I could tell you about an anchor app or you know an app that fits the profile of , like , what we've been talking about , and let's have a chat because , um , if everyone's happy , I would love to do just a dedicated podcast on that topic and really , you know , educate the market about the art of the possible on the

power platform , because it's so much better than when I started my career with XRM . It's so much more powerful , it can scale like never before . You know , one of the solutions I built in the past was a full payroll system on top of Dynamics 365 sales . It was the stupidest thing I could have ever done . It was when I believed that .

You know the hammer Dynamics CRM . Everything was a nail and I could smash it with it . The headaches that caused me , the technical debt it created was just off the Richter scale . Would I build it now on the Power Platform ?

Absolutely , because back then we never had Azure behind us and you could do the scale that we needed this payroll system to do and , mark , we need one .

If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show , please message me on LinkedIn . If you want to be a supporter of the show , please check out buymeacoffeecom . Forward slash NZ365guy . Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars .