Mar 30, 2020
I try and sneak up on Charles Lamanna a third time, but he was ready for it, "fool me once". Recently promoted to CVP, Citizen Application Platform I wanted to check in with Charles, who was working from home, about some of the things that are going on. We covered a lot of topics, including the post-virus workplace, RPA, API Limits, Multiplexing and Restricted Entities. Enjoy!
BTW, don't forget, Mark Smith (@nz365guy) and I do PowerUpLive every Tuesday at 5PM EST, click here to be alerted, and here's a link to the replays!
Full transcript follows:
Charles Lamanna:
Hello, it's Charles Lamanna.
Steve Mordue:
Charles, Steve Mordue. How's it going?
Charles Lamanna:
Hey Steve. I guess this is being recorded, huh?
Steve Mordue:
You bet. This is our third time. Have you got some time?
Charles Lamanna:
I do, always. I have a lot of time locked in my house right
now.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah. It's going to be interesting for people who are listening to
this in the future, we are recording this on March 27th 2020. The
country is on lockdown and we're still heading upwards, so we don't
know where this thing will go or end or what things will look like,
but that's where we are now and the whole campus has been basically
shut down except for essential people. You're all working from
home.
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah, for a little over three weeks now actually. We did the MVP
Summit from home, we did the partner advisory council from home. We
even did a virtual offsite where for four days, we all joined a
Teams meeting for eight hours each day.
Steve Mordue:
Oh my God. How are you finding it, compared to going in the office
and being with the team. It was massive loss of productivity of
your stuff or is it still okay?
Charles Lamanna:
I'd say there definitely is a slight loss of productivity. It's not
as bad as I thought it would be, but I mean, never thought I'd miss
my office so much. I really miss just ... you get used to it for a
few years, you get everything in place.
Steve Mordue:
There's a bunch of businesses, I look up my apartment window to
downtown Tampa at all these office buildings that are full of law
firms and all sorts of people, with bunch of cubicle farms within
them with people that could actually be doing their job from
anywhere and could have for years and now of course are, and I'm
wondering how many of these companies that were reluctant to do
remote, that felt like I need to keep eyes on you, by the time we
get through this, we'll have figured out how to do it remote. I
wonder how many of those remote workers will end up coming back to
an office. It could be a huge shift.
Charles Lamanna:
It definitely will. It's interesting. I was in a talk yesterday and
we were talking about how when the original SARS outbreak happened,
that actually is what launched eCommerce in APJ, and it's around
then this jd.com and Ali basically like mobile ordering took off
during that time because people were locked at home and then the
rest is history, right? Those are the second largest eCommerce
properties out there in the world second only to Amazon. So
definitely, I would imagine the way people work and the technology
people use will be fundamentally different on the other side of
this.
Steve Mordue:
Well, I'll tell you what, it's almost prescient the way you guys
decided to invest deeply in Teams over the past year before any of
this was out there. And now looking back, that's looking like
really brilliant move.
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah, there's a lot of impact. A lot of people are in trouble, but
it's just, it's so exciting to be able to use something like Teams
to do remote learning and tele-health and just video plus chat plus
meetings integrated, Teams is really the only one doing that right
now and it's just phenomenal for someone working remote or working
virtually like us right now.
Steve Mordue:
You said we did recently go through MVP Summit, which converted
into a virtual event at the last minute and it was not horrible for
a virtual event first-time scrambled together. But I'm also
wondering about events in the future if this may change a lot of
events into virtual events even when they don't need to be anymore.
But it feels like the technology needs to get one step better on
the idea. It wasn't really built for virtual events at scale like
that. But it seems like you guys are in a spot to really, you know
what, we could figure that out and make a virtual event application
actually built specifically for that purpose and potentially get
rid of a lot of future ... because I tell you, there's no executive
out there that's happy about approving travel expenses for his team
to go to some in person event if he could sit at home or sit
online, what for?
Charles Lamanna:
And what's really interesting is, I read Ben Thompson, he has a
article called Stratechery and it's one of my favorite things to
read and he talks about like is this the end of large conferences?
Because when you move to all digital and you realize you get such
bigger reach. I mean, you get 100,000 people, no problem. That's
almost impossible to do in person and for a fraction of the cost
and it can be way more tailored and you don't have to worry about
double booking. That's another example where maybe things start to
change fundamentally in the future.
Steve Mordue:
And I think conferences for years have been more about, or at least
equally about, the social aspect, seeing people in person going out
to the bar after the event, having fun going out to dinner, seeing
some town, that sort of thing. And that part of course is probably
what causes a lot of people want to go to a conerence and I have
guys you and I both know that go to a conference and don't go to
any sessions. Guys like myself and Mark Smith, we don't go to any
sessions. We just go out there. We do that little things like we
had you on and stuff like that just for fun and mainly are out
there for the drinking. So we're going to miss it.
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah. Well I guess, the one thing too is just having a group of 20
... that's the only thing I've learned for ... like Teams is
amazing, like four people, you can have a really good conversation
or a big broadcast, but if you want to have a group discussion it's
hard. And that's something that works so well because you get all
these people together that would never be in the room at the same
time in person at these conferences and you can have some really
interesting conversations.
Steve Mordue:
That would be the thing to figure out because in person in like MVP
Summit, you guys get up in front of, I don't know, a hundred of us
and we're all raising our hand, taking our turns, asking questions
until we run you guys off the stage in fear. But now in this
virtual, there's no real raise your hand. It's just the loudest
person, the one that doesn't stop talking gets to continue until
his questions gets out of his mouth and that would be an area that
it seems like they could do some improvement.
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah, and I think [crosstalk 00:06:35] is raise your hand in Teams
so you can press the button to raise your hand. I can't wait for
that.
Steve Mordue:
That would be awesome. So you could mute everybody and they'd have
to raise their hand and ... well, there you go. That's already
heading the direction it would need to because that's what you'd
need really for some kind of a virtual conference.
Charles Lamanna:
Yes. That way also I can just never answer you when you raise your
hand. No, I'm just kidding.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah, exactly. "Oh, it's Steve raising his hand again. We'll just
ignore him."
Charles Lamanna:
Yep.
Steve Mordue:
A lot of stuff that you guys announced at MVP Summit and of course
as everybody knows that's mostly NDA for now so we can't talk about
a lot of that stuff, but there's a couple of things that we could
talk about. One theme I think I heard, which I wouldn't think is
NDA, was this idea of make everything we have work better. And when
you guys are building like you've been building at the pace you've
been building. It's like somebody threw matches in a box of
fireworks at stuff that's coming out. It takes a while for all of
those wires to get connected and everything to be singing like
you'd want it. And sometimes it's like, you know what, this is
working darn good. Let's get this other thing launched and then we
get a bunch of stuff that's working darn good but not perfect. So
it definitely feels like there's a motion now to let's go back over
top of all this awesome stuff we've launched and let's connect
those last few wires. Let's get this stuff really working as good
as it could work. Is that a fair statement?
Charles Lamanna:
That's exactly right. And the mantra we keep repeating internally
is "end-to-end" because what you'll see is there'll be components
that work well individually but they'll just be huge seams or gaps
when you try to wire them up together and our whole vision has been
that you want to wire these things together. That's why we talk
about one Dynamics 365, one power platform. So we have this big
focus on making sure scenarios that span applications or expand
parts of the platform actually work well end to end and it's going
in and wiring those things up and spackling over the creases and
putting a new coat of paint on it. It's not fundamental and it's
not necessarily something that will pop in a demo or in a keynote,
but it'll just make a huge difference for our customers. And we see
it already, we track our net promoter score very closely, like what
are the makers, end users rate the product as they leverage it, and
we just see it as we systematically improve these end-to-end
experiences. That net promoter score just keeps going up and up and
up and up.
Steve Mordue:
I know we're a one Microsoft now, which is a nice term, but in
reality, these are lots of groups that are focused on their things.
You've got the Office group focusing on their things, Biz Apps
focusing on theirs, Azure focusing on theirs and you've got within
your own group of bag things like VRP and power platform that
they're wiring there you're working on and at least that's in your
realm. You can make that happen, but then you get Azure AD group go
do something out there that messes up something for us, or you talk
about a gap, like a gap maybe between something we're doing over
here and something's has happened over in the Office side and those
are kinds of things that you don't have direct control. You got to
try and influence and almost make a case internally to those teams
that, hey, this is good or get Sacha to make a case, get somebody
to make the case.
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah, and I think like that is a challenge. As any organization
gets bigger you have, like I'd say it's not perfectly well mixed.
Kind of like the ocean, right? The ocean is big enough. It's not
perfectly well mixed, but I think the fact that it's actually a
cultural tenant of Microsoft now to operate in the one Microsoft
interest, useful listening and being willing to have the dialogue
on is this truly better at the macro level? Is this a global maxima
for Microsoft to go do this capability? Even if the things you
directly own, it's maybe not a maxima for you and this opens the
door to have that dialogue of hey, we need this feature for say the
Outlook at [inaudible 00:10:38] so that our Outlook mail app can be
better and we can get people off the comm at it. That's an example
of a really tight partnership between Outlook and us.
Charles Lamanna:
And systematically, the Outlook team is completely willing and has
shipped feature after feature to go make that Dynamics and Power
Apps mail app richer and richer. And just the most recent example
is to finally bring delegation to the mail app and that's come over
the last three and a half months. So that definitely is a
challenge, but it's eminently surmountable and solvable.
Steve Mordue:
I would imagine there's to some degree of quid pro quo, right? I
mean, hey, you guys helped me out with this. I know there's nothing
in it for you, but it'll help me. And then when I have an
opportunity later to help you guys out. So we're all kind of open
arm instead of crossed arms when [inaudible 00:11:27] approaching
these other things. So how big is your list of things you owe other
people?
Charles Lamanna:
For Power Apps, I owe a lot. But what's great is a lot of these
things aren't like a zero sum in that in order for it to be good
for one product or one team at Microsoft has to be bad for the
other. The reality is Power Apps inside of Teams, I'll use that as
an example. As Power Apps, we're very excited about that because
are asking for an integrated experience inside Teams. I want it by
my left rail for the app bar or I want it as a tab inside my
channel. Those are real customer demands and on the other side,
Teams wants to go support as many line of business applications as
possible inside Teams. And we all know what's the fastest way to go
create a bunch of line of business apps? It's not to go write code
is to go use a low-code solution like Power Apps. So you actually
can go help accelerate the platform and the line of business
awareness and teams and you can go up Power Apps, reach new
customers at a broader base just by doing that one feature.
Charles Lamanna:
So it is a very much win-win situation and adopting that mentality
through one Microsoft that really the Microsoft cloud is what
customers want and customers want to go trust and transact with
Microsoft and not individual product teams. It is just a cultural
shift that has really grown under Satya with great success. So I
would say, I don't know if a product like Power Apps could have
been successful 15 years ago, but it definitely, we have the
environment where you can't have something like Power Apps embedded
in SharePoint, embedded in Teams, the platform for Dynamics and a
standalone business and having that not be dissonance or in
conflict.
Steve Mordue:
It's interesting, I think that the companies that have embraced
Teams, and it was frankly a slow go to get people to bite on
because it looked a lot different than what they were used to and
how they did business. But now the ones that have really gone into
it are like, they're maniacal about Teams and Teams is like their
new desktop. They're operating in Teams all day long now and like I
can't imagine how we ever did anything before Teams. So we're still
at that inflection point with Teams where I think there's a huge
number of customers yet to discover what a lot of customers have
about how transformative that can be. So you had to have Power Apps
along for that ride. I think that ride is just getting started.
Steve Mordue:
It's interesting these times right now, there's an awkwardness
about marketing or promoting things that make sense because of a
virus. For example, I tactfully tried to write a couple of posts
here recently and stood back. I was thinking, does that look
opportunistic? But the one was this idea that I'd mentioned
earlier, lots of people sending people home to work from home.
Well, these companies that have had on-premise systems and still
have them been reluctant to move to the cloud, that moved to remote
workforce is going to be much more complicated than it would have
been for those that had already gone full cloud, people just
logging in. They got all the security they need to get. Some of
these VPN solutions just were never designed or reinvested enough
into to support the entire workforce. What are your thoughts about
that? Do you have an opinion on that?
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah. I think the way we view it is number one, things have changed
right now. That's just the reality. People are in different working
environments, people are under a different economic pressure.
There's very real frontline response necessary to go and combat
COVID-19 out in the field. So things have changed. That's number
one. And the second thing that we've adopted is because things have
changed, we need to be flexible. And if you look across what we've
done at Microsoft, even just specifically in the area that I work
on, we took the April release or the 2020 wave 1 release.
Originally it was going to be mandatory upgrade in April. Talking
to a lot of customers, they said, "We can't get the workforce to
test it. Please don't do this change, we can't take it."
Charles Lamanna:
So we extended the opt in window for the wave 1 release to May for
an extra month and we'll keep evaluating stuff like that
constantly. But we did that and that's a big change for us because
we really have trumpeted that clockwork. It's always in April, it's
going to come up. But we just felt like that was the right thing to
do. Or we've also done a bunch of programs where for six months you
can get Power Apps or Dynamics CE free if you're in healthcare,
hospitals, life science or government organization because we want
to go help. So there's literally dozens and dozens and dozens of
state local government, hospitals that we're working with right now
inside my team. And we wanted to make sure we could help them in a
way where it was clear we were not trying to profiteer off of the
crisis.
Steve Mordue:
It is that fine line though, because obviously there'll be a lot to
these folks that'll take you up on those opportunities. And then
when all this stuff passes, at some point you guys are going to
reach out and say, "Hey, that thing we were giving you for free for
so long, we like it back or have you start paying," and it is a
fine line about, the super cynics could look at it very cynically I
guess. The other thing that is interesting to me, I was talking
about how in this time of business, revenue is going to be a
challenge for businesses right now. Revenue is going to drop for
most businesses that are out there. There'll be certain businesses
certainly that will ... in every crisis there's always some
businesses that do better than others but most are going to have a
little downturn. And their revenue growth is going to be largely
out of their control at the moment. And the government could shut
down the people that are buying your product or who knows and it's
not something you could control like you could before.
Steve Mordue:
So what you can control though is your costs. That's really all you
can control right now. It's the cost side and both those drop to
the bottom line the same way, right?
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah.
Steve Mordue:
And obviously you laying off people as people are doing that, but
it seems like the time for people to really look into their
organization for where money is leaking out. Because I look at
historically to solve a problem like that, maybe with a business
application, we're looking at Dynamics 365 or Salesforce or some
big applications, costs a lot of money, a lot of time to get
implemented to plug up a leaky ship that's losing some money. Where
now with Power Apps, we really had the ability to go, let's
identify those leaks. Let's spin up a Power App in a week or two
weeks and solve this problem.
Steve Mordue:
We're doing one right now for a Fortune 500 company that discovered
[inaudible 00:18:20] $50,000 a month. And in a big company, you can
not notice that. I would notice it, but they didn't notice it until
someone suddenly noticed it. We're literally going to plug that
hole with a Power App at a total development cost of about 15
grand. And it's just amazing, amazing when you think about how many
of those sorts of things and now's a good time for people to really
focus on where's money leaking out of your business and there's
some lower costs, low-code, quick tools now that could potentially
plug those leaks that we didn't even have before.
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah. And if we look at as a company, we actually view Power Apps
and Power Automate together as two products that will be envisioned
doing quite well even during an economic downturn for that reason.
Because you don't have to hire a very expensive developer to maybe
go solve the solution or even if you go work with a services
company to implement it, they can implement it much more quickly
than they would if they had to go write code. And we're working
with I said like a Fortune 100, like very large company just I was
talking to this week and they said, well before we were talking
about Power Apps all about like transformation. How do we go drive
revenue forward and now for the next six months we're going to
pivot and we're going to be focused on driving efficiencies in our
business process and retiring other IT solutions which overlap and
can be replaced with Power Apps.
Charles Lamanna:
So they're now going to go hunt for like this licensing thing, they
pay one million bucks a year. This one, they paid two million bucks
a year. Can they just spend a little bit of effort, move that to
Power Apps and be able to shut down those licenses once and for
all. So that's the benefit of the flexibility of the platform and
just the ROI is so clean that we think that there's going to be a
lot of opportunity between Power Apps and Power Automate with the
new RPA capabilities.
Steve Mordue:
And talking about RPA in a second, but you did make a point there
that it's funny how their original thought was to use it to grow
revenue. And because of the situation we're in now, they're looking
at another use case, which frankly was just as valid before any
virus or anything else was out there. It's interesting that it took
something like that to have them say, well what's the other hugely
obviously we could solve.
Charles Lamanna:
Exactly.
Steve Mordue:
So RPA is an interesting one. There was a lot of talk, a lot of
excitement about RPA. And I know that you're probably still
somewhat limited on what you can talk about, but whatever you can
say, what are you thinking about that?
Charles Lamanna:
The RPA, we're going to be GA in that with the April wave. So wave
1, just in a week or so. We announced the licensing details for RPA
four weeks ago or so I think on March 2nd and what's exciting
between the capabilities of it being a true low-code offering like
typical power platform offering plus the reasonable licensing
options that we have, which are generally like I'd say, the most
affordable you're going to find out there for an RPA solution, we
think we can actually start to democratize enterprise grade
automation. Make it possible to really have business users, IT, pro
developers, partners, service companies all use the same platform
to go automate and drive efficiencies. So that's the exciting bit,
because Power Automate and Flow have been around, Microsoft Flow
before that had been around for a while but have really been, I'd
say capped to a degree around personal and team and light
departmental automation.
Charles Lamanna:
But now with the RPA functionality, we're starting to see
enterprise wide invoice processing, quarterly earnings preparation,
accounts, basically resolving receivable accounts, things like
that. Very heavy workloads built on top of Power Automate, the same
low-code tool has been there for a few years. So we're very excited
about it for that reason. And in a world where you want to go trim
costs, there's real opportunity to go drive efficiency using Power
Automate over time.
Steve Mordue:
Yep. Definitely. It wouldn't be a talk with me if I didn't bust
your balls about some stuff.
Charles Lamanna:
Let me hear it. What is it about?
Steve Mordue:
In one of our last calls we talked about the hot topic at the time
was about these API limits and you said, this isn't something we
want customers to think about. We actually thought of it more as
like an asterisk on your cable bill. It shouldn't be a factor. Yet
it continues to persist in people's minds. The conversation has not
gone away. We've got people claiming that they're running into
limits and doing stuff like that. And what are your thoughts around
that now that it's actually out there and we're seeing how it's
landed in people's organizations.
Charles Lamanna:
I do still hear a little bit of noise from customers or partners
that are running into it. But it is dramatically less because it
doesn't impact 99% of customers, it wouldn't impact that 99% of
customers. So since it's kind of rolled out, we've heard a lot less
noise but there's still does exist some noise. And the thing that
we could-
Steve Mordue:
Would you call it air? Would you just call it a false noise?
Because you guys have the analytics in the background, you know
what's exactly happening. You know if once you launch this that
suddenly half of our customer base is hitting this wall and you
know that that's not happening. So is it still the feeling that the
ones that are squawking either of that small percentage or just
fear mongers?
Charles Lamanna:
I think there are ... I'd say I'd break down three very valid
concerns that we hear. The first is, we don't have enough reporting
to make it clear and easy to understand where you stand for the API
limits. We have early stage reporting and power platform admin
center, but we don't have enough. So there's a lot of improvements
coming for that by wave two of this year. So by the end of the next
wave, release wave for Dynamics, you'll be able to go in and
understand exactly how your API limits are being used and if
there's any risk. And that's just going to be exposing telemetry
that we ourselves look at today and we think that will help with a
lot of the concern that people are facing. So that's one.
Charles Lamanna:
The second is we have people that are using a lot of the Dynamics
products. They're using customer insights, they're using Power
Apps, they're using customer engagement, you're using marketing.
And their concern is all these application workflows. Like imagine
customer insights taking data from CE or marketing doing
segmentation on CE are actually generating a lot of API calls. So
as they actually keep adding more and more apps, which we like of
course, and we think that's the whole special value prop of
Dynamics, they are generating a huge amount of API calls. And so
this is something we're going back and looking at to see how do we
count the application API calls from Microsoft delivered apps and
also what API inclusions should come with those other licenses. So
that is something we're looking at and we don't have enforcement
today so people aren't really feeling the pinch, but people are
looking at it and saying, "Hey, I can see that I'm making a lot of
API calls because of these other apps." That's the second one.
Charles Lamanna:
And third thing is we have customers who have a web app or some
other service which calls into CPS in the background and that
generates a lot of load and that is causing friction. Those are
probably the people that we intended to have impact from these
changes. And because those are people where maybe they have 10 user
licenses but they generate like a billion API calls a day. So
that's probably not correct. But we are seeing noise in a few
places there. And that last one I think is probably, we're not
going to do anything to simplify, whereas the first two are things
we're going to go try to simplify and improve over time.
Steve Mordue:
Couple of other things before I let you go. One is, multiplexing is
a concept that's been around for a very, very long time. Back when
we had CALS, back when it was a physical app installed on machines
and stuff like that. Now we're in this different world with all
these cloud apps and services bumping into each other. But
multiplexing is still this big gray box for lots of folks. And even
in the Microsoft documentation, it's kind of contradictory in some
places. What's the story with, we've got Salesforce Connectors, we
got SAP Connectors, we've got all these other kinds of connectors
that almost seem to be in direct conflict with some of this
multiplexing. How do you guys get to figure that out? What does
multiplexing going to look like in the future?
Charles Lamanna:
I would say the spirit of the law when it comes to multiplexing is,
if you're doing something to reduce the number of user licenses
you'd have to get for users, then you're probably doing
multiplexing. And the problem is to convert that to a letter of the
law is we create confusion historically to a degree as well as
accidentally prevent things that we don't want to prevent based on
how the language is written. And I'll give an example. So if I use
a connector to say Salesforce or SAP, I still have to be licensed
through Power Apps to Salesforce or SAP because you're running with
your identity to Salesforce and SAP. So we feel like that's totally
aligned with the spirit and those partners feel good with it.
Charles Lamanna:
One of the places where there was some weirdness was like say I
have a Power App connecting to my Dynamics CE data, but I'm not
using any of the Dynamics CE logic. Is that multiplexing?
Technically four months ago that was multiplexing as the way the
licensee guide was written. But that was not the intent and that
was not the spirit of the law. So we've gone and changed that
actually to say if you're licensed for Power Apps, you're writing a
Power App to connect to Dynamics data, but not using the Dynamics
app logic or app experience, then that's totally fine and not
multiplexing. And that was changed I think in late January, early
February because some people pointed out, like this doesn't make
sense. And then we said, "You know you're right. That's not where
we want to have the impact of that being." So we went and changed
it.
Charles Lamanna:
But at its core, if you're using or doing something to circumvent a
user license and you'll know you're doing it because it will feel
unnatural because the system's not built to behave that way, that's
multiplexing and not allowed. Everything else, the intent is to
have it be allowed.
Steve Mordue:
So if your goal is to game the system, you're multiplexing.
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah, and you'll know it. If you're like, okay, I'm going to create
one system account and people will use a web portal I build in
Azure and the system account will then have to fake authorization
talking to CDN, you're like in bad territory when you're doing
that.
Steve Mordue:
Yeah. A lot of that comes from customers. Customers are like,
"Can't we take a Power App and then have a custom entity that by
workflow goes and recreates a record in a restricted entity." I'm
like, "No, what are you talking about?" Anything you're doing to
try and go around the fence, it's probably going to fall into that
funny territory. But-
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah. And a challenge we always have is, how do we convert these
ideas into a digestible licensing guide? And I think it's almost
like running a law, like legislating, but there are no judges to
actually go interpret the law.
Steve Mordue:
And we also know that when it's written down in a licensing guide,
it almost might as well not be said. If we can't get it technically
enforced at various levels, we can point back to the licensing
guide. We as partners should be telling customers, "Yep, not
allowed to do that." But without technical enforcement, these
licensing guides are just something you could beat them over the
head with when they misbehave. And speaking of restricted entities,
when we last talked, you had mentioned, yep, there may be some more
coming. That was a very long time ago and we haven't seen them. Is
the thinking still along the lines of that is how we're going to
protect some of the first party IP or we maybe have some different
thoughts of different ways to protect it in this new world of a
common data service, open source, data model, et cetera.
Charles Lamanna:
We actually do ... we are working on something, I can't quite tip
my hand yet, that will better allow you to share data and share
schema from the common data model, the common data service in the
apps without running into the concept of the restricted entities.
So there is something in the works that we're working towards and I
would say at a high level, restricted entities as a concept are
largely antithetical to our common data service, common data model
and vision. And they were just like the least bad option to go make
sure that we appropriately can license Dynamics apps. So we are
working feverously on many proposals to get out of that restricted
entity business, but still have a model which more appropriately
captures and protects the value of the Dynamics apps without
introducing restricted entities. So there, I'd say stay tuned.
There definitely the best minds are working on it and I've seen a
very digestible and good proposal that is running up the chain
right now and that'll get us in a much better place later this
year.
Steve Mordue:
I had that assumption since you talked about adding some and so
much time had gone by and my thinking was, because I never liked
the idea of the restricted entities for reasons you just said. It
felt like a quick down and dirty temporary solution and I had the
assumption that since we hadn't heard any more that you guys were
actually coming up with a better idea. So very glad to hear that.
I'm sure everybody would be glad to hear that. So I know you got to
get back to work. You're a busy guy. Anything else you want to
convey to folks out there right now?
Charles Lamanna:
The biggest go do I'd have for folks right now at this point in
time, it would be go play with Power Automate, learn the new RPA
functionality. It's a huge addition to dynamic CE. It's a great
thing for support and customer service workloads. It's a great
thing for finance workloads. Like we have one customer that went
from 22 finance ops people down to three just using Power Automate
and RPA. Plus if you use Power Apps, it's a great way to go extend
it. So I say go give Power Automate and RPA a try. That is the
number one thing I think to pay attention to and that's the number
one thing we're going to be talking about at the virtual launch
event. That would be my call to action. That'd be the one thing I'd
say. And the second thing would be, I even wore short thinking
Steve would maybe video call me today, but it's too bad you can't
see it.
Steve Mordue:
That's very nice.
Charles Lamanna:
But maybe I take a picture and send it to you about a merry pigmas.
So that's the current state here is I work from home, but I
say-
Steve Mordue:
We're all letting the hair grow and-
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah, I had a call with our PR and AR folks, our analyst relations
folks because I had an interview on Wednesday and they said,
"You're going to shave, right? You're going to shave before you get
on the camera with him." So yeah. But anyway, exciting times. As
always, pleasure.
Steve Mordue:
Listen, you never have to shave to talk to me.
Charles Lamanna:
Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that.
Steve Mordue:
All right Charles, thanks for the time.
Charles Lamanna:
Yeah, always good to chat with you, Steve. Have a good weekend.
Stay safe.