Accelerate innovation with low-code applications using Power Platform

By Julie Strauss, General Manager, Power Platform Pro Developer and Admin Experiences

November 2, 2021

Content type
Announcements

We used to talk about why low-code is important and why companies need to embrace it. We have moved beyond that and most organizations get it. The demand for apps is unprecedented and you aren’t able to hire enough technical talent to meet demand; without low-code you are simply not able to keep up. We see that today and see that in the statistics for companies embracing low-code, and embracing fusion teams, where pro developers, citizen developers, and IT professionals come together to build, deploy, and manage apps in collaboration.

With a forecast shortage of four million developers in the next four years,¹ 84 percent of organizations are already using fusion teams for app delivery and 43 percent of those organizations’ fusion teams are sitting outside IT.² There is clear momentum for you to embrace low-code as part of your development process.

By connecting your pro developers with citizen developers in the business, and your IT teams directly, Microsoft Power Platform can increase your organization’s low-code application development value with much faster ROI, time to market, and reduction in your overall development costs.

Powerful initiatives to get started with low-code in your organization

Introduce low-code to your organization, beginning with your pro developers. The Power Apps developer plan allows developers to begin their journey with a fully-featured environment, for free. Explore the Fusion Team development learning path and learn how Power Apps and citizen development ensures security and compliance through low-code, allowing your IT admins a quick way to manage your fusion development process.
Historically, when your developers were ready to deploy their Microsoft Power Platform solutions to your end-users, it meant that they’d need to acquire pre-paid, subscription licenses. This process may add time to getting solutions built and delivered, and licenses assigned. To simplify this and get apps into your user’s hands more quickly, developers now have the flexibility to use a Microsoft Azure subscription to license users with the Power Apps per app pay-as-you-go. Power Apps pay-as-you-go is available in preview today.
Microsoft Power Apps pay-as-you-go with Azure Subscription
Scale your digital transformation through low-code with fusion teams throughout your organization. By allowing your pro developers to engage citizen developers, and your IT teams directly, Microsoft Power Platform can scale innovation quickly. When your makers collaborate, their applications, automations, and bots come to life and bring value more quickly, with a comfortable, familiar “Office-like” look and feel. Collaboration with comments lets you contextually add notes, feedback, and conversations with others directly while you build your app, flow, or chatbot, just like you would in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Comment on a screen in your Power Apps app, so a colleague can help with a formula. Remind your team about changes to a specific step in your Power Automate flow. Collaborate with subject matter experts on building complex Power Virtual Agents bots. Collaboration is available in preview today.
With rich capability to add logic with Power Fx, the formula language of Power Apps— we’ve already enabled your makers to build sophisticated Power Apps. By enabling open source collaboration of Power Fx via our GitHub and developer communities, we’re allowing developers to participate in the process by adding advanced logic as part of their fusion process and enabling Power Fx and Power Apps makers throughout their organization. Power Fx is available in preview today.
Power Fx expressions
Meeting your developers where they are is key to unlocking accelerated app delivery, and ROI on your fusion team investments. By allowing developers to manage GitHub Codespaces and their code repos through Visual Studio Code, we’re ensuring we unblock developers and remove barriers to their success. We’re announcing new Microsoft Power Platform features for GitHub Codespaces, and Azure API Management, along with experimental Git version control, available in preview today.
Microsoft Power Platform extension in GitHub Codespaces

Microsoft Power Platform blade in Azure API Management

GitHub version control allowing co-authoring
Distribute your Power Apps at scale. We have continued to innovate on app form factor and delivery paths. Through rich user experiences on the web and Bing integration, in Microsoft Teams and our mobile clients, to including external users in Power Apps Portals, we’ve always met your users where they are. Today, we’re announcing Power Apps mobile apps, available in preview on December 1, 2021, enabling you to package and natively distribute fully-branded mobile apps to your employees through low-code.
Power Apps mobile apps

Customers are accelerating digital transformation with Microsoft Power Platform

Learn how T-Mobile is removing friction in their development process and using Azure subscriptions within their fusion teams, to deliver Power Apps apps and services at scale with centers of excellence.

“One of the great things about Power Platform is that you can provision a team an environment and they can build, test, and deploy solutions without having to constantly pull in other teams for things like provisioning databases, granting access to resources, or procuring licenses. Pay-As-You-Go for Power Platform continues the reduced reliance on external teams and resources by automating the license procurement, assignment, scaling, and billing so the development teams can focus on what is important; solving problems and pleasing customers. Pay-As-You-Go licensing also greatly reduces the friction of starting up new solutions or POCs because the licensing will scale with you instead of having to either plan for the end state and procuring a bulk licensing purchase, or making multiple requests of procurement to procure additional licenses as the solutions grow.”—Brian Hodel, Microsoft Power Platform Developer, T-Mobile

Additional resources to help you get started with fusion teams in your organization

Attend the upcoming Power Apps developer roundtable.
View the Mechanics session to go in-depth on all of these announcements.
Microsoft is a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms.
Watch the Azure API Management, Microsoft Power Platform, and Teams fusion development webinar.
Learn about low-code application development with Azure and Power Apps.
Learn how to seamlessly orchestrate robotic process automation (RPA) deployments using the new Azure Virtual Desktop starter kit for Power Automate.
Drive innovation and business performance by empowering your developer teams.
Determine your low-code value using Microsoft Power Platform and Azure with our Forrester TEI report.
Fusion development learning path gets your team skilled and certified quickly.
Download the Fusion development e-book for in-depth learning.
Ensure Microsoft Power Platform success in your organization through a Center of Excellence.
Fusion teams 101 low-code apps with Microsoft Power Platform webinar.
Get started with the Power Apps developer plan.
Get started with Microsoft Power Platform.

¹IDC, Quantifying the Worldwide Shortage of Full-Time Developers, Doc # US48223621, September 2021

²Gartner®, Fusion Teams: A New Model for Digital Delivery, 4 February 2021, GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.