Microsoft Power Platform Released with New Low Code Updates at Microsoft Build

The News: This week at Microsoft Build, Microsoft released new updates to its Microsoft Power Platform. New capabilities and improvements including several low-code updates, will make the platform faster and easier to use for developers. Read more about the updates on the Microsoft blog.

Microsoft Power Platform Released with New Low Code Updates at Microsoft Build

Analyst Take: While the Microsoft Power Platform has been around for a few years, the updates this year at Microsoft Build further cements its status as a key platform in the low-code space. The platform, which has been received warmly by the market, was designed to enable non-technical developers and users to create, automate and analyze data without a coding background. This minimizes the help needed from IT and empowers employees across the enterprise to build the applications they need.

This year, Microsoft rolled out several new updates including the following:

• Power Pages. This standalone product empowers anyone to create and build modern, business-centric and data-powered websites. This low-code application makes it easy to style, configure and launch new websites.
• Express Design for Power Apps. Users can now build apps from images, Figma design files, PDFs, paper forms, or even hand-drawn notes. The AI-powered platform scans the file and creates working app controls within a few seconds. With a few clicks, apps will be ready to launch.
• Power Virtual Agents and evolved conversational AI bots. Microsoft is combining the power of low-code and pro-code development in one platform in the new intelligent bot authoring platform. The experience combines the power of Azure’s Bot Framework Composer with the ease of Power Virtual Agent’s platform making it easier for users to collaborate in one unified place.
• Scaled automation. A new preview of hosted RPA bots, now available in Power Automate, offers a true software-as-a-service experience for RPA that can scale easily across hosted virtual machines, powered by Azure.
• Datamart in Power BI. A self-service capability that makes it easier to ingest data from multiple data sources. The platform extracts and loads the data through Power Query to create datasets for data reports regardless of data level experience.

Updates Showcase Microsoft’s Commitment to Low-Code

The updates to Microsoft Power Platform continue to showcase to Microsoft’s commitment to improving low-code/no-code access across the enterprise. By minimizing the level of involvement from IT departments and skilled developers, organizations can quickly launch applications and programs that they need to improve productivity and efficiency. Businesses today are dealing with limited resources and staffing issues. Microsoft Power Platform eliminates the impact of those issues at a time when it matters most.

I particularly like to see some of the innovation in website development, intelligent document management, and conversational AI. The latter being something that Microsoft has been talking a lot about over the past few years. The next wave of intelligent bots with next generation conversational AI will be imperative to meeting consumer expectations for customer experience.

The advancements to the automation capabilities are also being delivered in a timely fashion as a tight labor market is forcing companies to up the ante on automation. This week has seen a lot of attention on RPA and intelligent automation as the Power Platform announcements dropped at the same time as ServiceNow further rolled out its NOW Platform, which is heavily focused on RPA as well.

All of this takes us full circle. As I see it, the low-code/no-code space is incredibly crowded and increasingly competitive, but this continued investment and innovation will be critical for Microsoft to continue its momentum and grab a more significant share of the available market—which is growing. I expect to see continued progress, products, and capabilities from Microsoft and the Power Platform as its popularity has been well documented and the demand for low and no/code is only going to increase.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.

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Image Credit: Microsoft Power Platform

The original version of this article was first published on Futurum Research.