A love letter to my team, Microsoft Partner of the Year for Power Apps and Power Automate
A bit over a year ago one of my AIS colleagues asked me what my goal was for our business applications group. I replied, “We’re going to be the best in the world when it comes to Power Platform.”
So today I am beyond excited to share that Applied Information Sciences (AIS) has been recognized as the Microsoft worldwide Partner of the Year for Power Apps and Power Automate. Permit me a brief love letter to my team… Emily Cartner is our solution architect who led the team behind much of what made this award possible. The rest of the group, too: Whether in India, Europe, or the United States, this business applications team is the world’s best (connect with some who keep active business applications themed Twitter profiles here: Yash Agarwal, Ritika Agarwal, Lee Baker, Nick Gill, Jeff Myers, Patrick O’Gorman, Andrea Pinillos, Jamie Willis-Rose). I am so grateful that these brilliant people (current and future) all choose to direct their talent and passion in the direction of our—and our clients’—collective success.
For a year now we’ve been hyper-focused on a big idea: Power Platform is a first-class citizen in the cloud transformation and app modernization journey for large, enterprise organizations alongside Azure and Microsoft 365 as one of Microsoft’s “three clouds”. Forward-thinking organizations in some of the most complex or regulated sectors understand that Power Platform is an enterprise-grade stack for enterprise-grade workloads.
We’ve committed to three key areas to drive successful Power Platform journeys with every organization we serve.
1. Leadership in the global business applications community
AIS has invested heavily in publishing and sharing the Power Platform Adoption Framework. But rather than horde the concept as proprietary IP, we’ve turned it over to be owned and driven by the global business applications community. This has been very personal to me, as it’s taken the time and talents of many of us, many close personal friends—across companies and continents—to create a global standard of best practices for adopting, managing, and governing the platform at scale. It’s owned by all of us, and anyone can find, use, and improve it on GitHub at www.PowerPlatform.af.
We also support our business applications experts at industry events and their work in community-driven efforts, including the global “Hack4Good” event in April where AIS teams took home 1st and 2nd place globally. We do this because we believe that a vibrant and thriving Power Platform community is good for everyone—Microsoft, customers, partners, and users. If you’ve not yet spent time with this incredible community, I hope you’ll make a point of joining us soon.
2. Excellence in enterprise-focused delivery
Core to my “first class citizen” concept is the importance of employing a platform-focused approach to building enterprise-grade solutions far beyond what citizen developers could achieve on their own. Our approach enables those business users, but we focus our Power Platform development teams on the upper complexity challenges so that citizen developers can focus on their teams’ and business units’ productivity.
I often say this to our team: “We’re not just here to meet requirements and fulfill deliverables—our job is to build beautiful and useful things that really delight the people who have trusted us to do so.”
3. Focus in the industries we know best
AIS has a long history helping customers in large, global, and often regulated industries through cloud transformation. First with Azure, then Modern Workplace, and now with Power Platform for the verticals we serve: financial services, non-profits and international NGOs, healthcare, consumer goods, travel and transportation, and government.
We recently launched industry-focused Power Platform offerings for Financial Services covering our solutions from initial adoption and governance to scaling and development. These offerings aren’t just ideas. We’ve delivered (and continue to deliver them) within several of the world’s leading financial services institutions, as well as for global humanitarian organizations, government, and across a range of other industries.
Our new Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) as a Service solution supports the platform turnkey or as a compliment to in-house enterprise IT that will adapt and keep pace with the way large organizations use the technology. And we’ve paired this solution with our proven IP: Deployable tooling, patterns, and models for building solutions and transforming organizations in the cloud as they adopt, manage, and govern Power Platform at scale.
Expect this and more from us in the year ahead: Commitment to and investment in the global business applications community, excellence in and focus on cloud transformation in global enterprises, IP that gets better all the time, and an obsession with an idea that supporting the world’s best technologists will lead naturally to being the world’s best partner.
Connect with me on twitter at @andrewdwelch.
