• Microsoft is investing big in the low code space and has put together a collection of products that is hard for other companies to match, capped recently by the announcement of PowerFX.
• The target in their sights is the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) companies such as UIPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism who are closing big deals with big enterprises.
• The moat protecting the market share of the big RPA companies is created by the mature deployment systems that enable large enterprises to run hundreds or thousands of automated processes
• Microsoft’s recent low code announcements indicate that, instead of building a bespoke deployment system, Microsoft’s approach will be to incorporate low code software into an enterprise’s existing CI/CD workflows
• This approach befriends rather than alienates enterprise CIOs which will shorten sales cycles and improve deal flow.
• Further bad news for RPA companies is that AWS and Google have products equivalent to Microsoft’s collection in almost every category and can close the gap quickly.
• With billions of dollars in revenue on the line this will be one of the most exciting tech races to watch over the next few years.

Why does low code matter?

Low code refers to software development platforms that enable non-professional developers to build useful business applications.

The rationale behind low-code development is that business users who deeply understand a business process can contribute to building apps. And that this will enable companies to innovate faster than their competitors by leveraging the business expertise of business users and the development expertise of the IT teams.

Gartner predicts that by 2025 most enterprise apps will be developed in part using low code software.

A brief history of RPA and enterprise low code software

There are plenty of ways of characterising the history of low code software in the enterprise. If you wanted to, for example, you could go back to 4GL software in the 1990s. But for the purposes of this article, we’ll start our history from the early 2010s with the rise of Robotic Process Automation (RPA software).

In its early days, RPA software was only slightly more advanced than the screen-scraping systems from the days of green-screen terminals. But RPA software very quickly started to build out the other components of today’s low-code suite (data storage, integration / transformation, app interfaces and reporting). For example, many processes require human input or decisions at certain stages in the process (such as approving a payment) and so the RPA suites began building out the ability to create simple apps that allowed users to interact with the automated workflows.

The big innovation in RPA suites was their orchestration capability. This allows administrators to deploy and monitor hundreds or thousands of processes. When you hear someone state that an automation platform such as Microsoft’s Power Automate platform isn’t as mature as one of the big RPA tools such as UIPath, Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism, they are saying that Microsoft Power Automate’s monitoring and deployment are not as mature as the big three RPA tools.

It is this area that Microsoft is aimed at improving.

Microsoft’s journey toward becoming a low-code powerhouse

Microsoft has assembled all of the pieces required by an enterprise to deliver low code solutions. If they execute well on this strategy they are poised to become unassailable in the low-code world.

When Microsoft talks about low code, they have a pretty expansive view. The language they use when describing low code encompasses everything from an accountant writing a formula in Excel, to a software engineer using a pre-built connector to pull data from an API, to a consulting firm building a bespoke end-to-end claims management solution for a customer.

Microsoft realises that the real challenge with scaling low code is not writing low code applications - it’s deploying and monitoring low code applications. And it is firmly on a trajectory to solving this challenge.

Over the past 6 years, Microsoft has built or acquired the following components:

1. Data storage solution (Dataverse)

2. Integration and transformation pipelines (Logic apps)

3. App maker (Power Apps),

4. Reporting (Power BI)

5. They also have:

6. RPA solution (Power Automate)

7. Data extraction (Azure Cognitive Services Form Recognizer)

The missing pieces to the puzzle have been deployment and monitoring.

The big RPA suites solve these challenges by requiring customers to adopt their orchestrator systems.

But MS is taking a different approach. Microsoft is saying to development teams: “Don’t set up a new deployment and governance practice. Just use your existing CI/CD practices.” With the recent announcement of PowerFX, Microsoft is attempting to link all of these components using a common programming language that allows enterprises to deploy low-code apps using their existing CI/CD processes and governance framework.

This will give Microsoft a significant advantage over their low-code competitors because it will make Microsoft’s low code solution the safe choice for CIOs. When an enterprise chooses which low-code platforms they will allow to interact with their systems they’ll have a choice between using the Power Platform that fits with their current governance framework or using something else that does not. Many enterprises will just go with the Power Platform.

Microsoft has put together a pretty impressive strategy. I don’t know how much is by design and how much by tactical zigging and zagging but, judging by the dates that the company released each of the pieces in this strategy, it looks like sometime in 2019 someone at Microsoft had a lightbulb moment about how all this should fit together, and they’ve been executing against that strategy ever since.

Here’s what the journey looked like:

• 2015: Releases VS Code
• 2016: Releases PowerApps and CDS (now Dataverse)
• 2018: Acquires GitHub, and GitHub Actions released
• 2020: Acquires Softomotive RPA
• 2021: Announces PowerFX programming language

The journey combines continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) components used in professional software development with low-code and RPA products, and ties them together with a common programming language (PowerFX) that facilitates good governance of data and applications. A killer strategy!

#azure #low code #aws #architecture & design #article