 Hey everyone, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking today with Amit. How's it going? It's going good. So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? So I'm based out of Hyderabad, India, and I'm a Power BI community super user for last two years. And I recently got MVP for data platform this month. Congratulations. I know it's always, I try to keep track of an instance that I see people that got or are new or renewed that I've not yet had participate in this program that I don't know around the world to reach out. And so it's always great to hear from brand spanking new MVPs. And so how'd you get started? Like what was your path to becoming an MVP? Okay. So let me go a little bit back and then we'll come to the Microsoft path. So I started my career in 2002. And then I joined Oracle in 2003. And I was part of Antik's team. And then I went ahead with one startup where we were creating our own BI tool. And at some time after I we decided to move out. And then I decided to move out. That's what the time when I started working on Power BI. And I fall in the passion of Power BI. And I came to community around three years back for my own issues, which I was facing, I want to learn something, I want to get help. And then I found that, you know, I can, you know, help out people on the community. And I can, you know, learn more things about using that one, because, you know, you have limited scope in your project to learn. But when you go to community, there are all sort of challenging problems are there, other folks are facing. And you can solve those are initial days I used to wait for it to get solved. Because if I don't know the answer, what's the answer going to be coming? So there used to be, you know, super users who want to answer that problem. And you wait for that, you subscribe to the issues. And you wait for the solution to come in. And then you try it out. Or there's some time you have complex problem, which, which you try, which, you know, the data has been provided, you take that data, you try to solve it yourself, and then validate your answer when it is correct or not. So that's how I started. And then I developed that interest. And then I spent a spare time, I have other than my work, I used to contribute a lot. And then corona blessing disguise has given a lot of opportunity to, you know, continue to work on that. And I became community super user and post that I continued to work there. I had given 15,000 solution on Power BI community till now, which is highest in number. And other than that, I ran a YouTube channel, which is having around 450 videos. I keep on writing down blog on Power BI community and medium. I'm pretty active, active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, in fact, on Instagram also. And people keep on, other than community, people keep on asking me questions on these forums. So I try to encourage everybody to go to community for that. But yes, I do answer on those forums whenever I'm available on those forums. So this was my path. And then I got nominated in the, in July this year. And that's where I got it. Prior to that, I got nominated couple of times where I was not able to make it up. You know, it just made me think that, you know, that we have like the MVPs that kind of found that they, they had more time since they weren't commuting, working the same hours, you know, during the pandemic that we're able to really focus on community activities. So it's like, it's, it's almost like, you know, we have baby boomers, like, you know, people that were conceived during the post war period, the baby boom period, we almost have like pandemic babies for MVPs. And so it'll be interesting to go a few years from now and look back over, hey, did we have kind of a growth spurt the program around it? But the other point, I love that too, is that there's a lot of people that are wondering like, how do I get involved? And I think it's a great thing to say. It's like, you don't have it to participate in community. It might be initially that all you're doing is consuming information, listening in, trying out the solutions that other people are, are presenting at asking other questions, where you're not sharing anything back. That's still a great way to participate in community. Start to be familiar with what kinds of questions are people asking? What kind of problems are they trying to solve? Because over time, as you get more comfortable in the space, you start asking those questions as you're testing things out. I'm sure you went back and asked other follow up questions or had to tweak it slightly for the needs of, you know, the nuances of your business. That's a great way to get started in the community for those that are wondering, like, where to start? Yeah, I think sharing is learning. So if you are a Power BI community and if you are one user who are not aware that, you know, you can get help on Power BI. So Power BI community is the place I think you can start with getting help. And if you know a little bit and you, you know, a little bit of expertise on that and start helping out. And you know, when I go back to my work, I found that, you know, the problems are easy most of the time. And the reason being, because I have tried solving all those problems on the community, and that's making easy at my workplace, because I might have solved similar kind of problems and I've seen it. And there are so many different kind of requirements that you go and explore, you go and explore features, otherwise you might have missed out. So that's being on community gives that, you know, advantage that, you know, every features will be asked, everybody's doing some different stuff, hundreds of things getting explored at the same time and which you might not explore in your project. Because once after that particular time, your project will become as, you know, in a stage where you are only developing few things. So in that way, I think community is a great place. And anyone who wanted to go on a path of super user or MVP, my advice would be go ahead and start helping out on the community. Completely agree with that. So what else? So you talked about Power BI a few times and that's kind of the focus of like your MVP. What else are you passionate about right now? What are you excited about from recent announcements or other things that, you know, is happening within the ecosystem? So I'm pretty excited the way Power BI ecosystem is expanding. Like, you know, we have Power App integration, we have Power Automating integration, then the Power Virtual Agent coming in, and then we have this AI integration, which is happening in into the Power BI. That's give, you know, a lot of things because what happens is usually the BI tools are, you know, what we call is read only they don't write back. Now with Power App, you can go out and write back. Then with Power Automate, you can, you know, run certain flows by, you know, sending it back data, you can share email out and all those. So this complete ecosystem, which is developing out is actually is a great advantage. And this is also giving us opportunity to learn something outside the BI world and, you know, explore those things like automation, app development and all those. So I'm pretty excited about, you know, the complete Power Platform. Yeah, it's incredible how quickly that ecosystem, the Power Platform world and the community around that is growing so rapidly. Microsoft often talks about, Hey, this was our fastest product. This is, you know, and it was SharePoint was for a long time. That was my background. My initially was a SharePoint MVP, was the fastest growing product in Microsoft history. Surpassed by then, you know, Teams was the fastest growing product in, in, in history. And for years, just the, the, the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is just dominated. But now you have very rapidly user groups are kind of moving their focus over to Power Platform. And of course, all the products within that you're still within the Microsoft 365 community. It all fits in there together. But that segment of community is growing so rapidly. It's incredible to see that it's having been in three different complete, completely different technology ecosystems. This seems to be like the golden era of Microsoft technology from a community standpoint. It's just on fire again. I don't know if you're seeing that where, where you are as well. I mean, that your user groups growing again. So user group going and when you solve the problem, you know, that amount of problem which is coming in like, you know, the number of problems you choose to come in 2019 and 2018, 19 when we started a number of problem when we see these days coming in and the kind of complex problems which are coming in, they have all increased widespread problem increase. We can say, you know, huge amount of, you know, questions are coming in. And that gives us an idea that, you know, okay, the product is, you know, getting a lot of attraction, a lot of new people are coming in, they're learning, and they're coming back to the community. Same thing we are seeing, you know, a lot of learning courses are coming in, a lot of people are teaching around it, a lot of YouTube channels are coming in, a lot of views are coming on the channels. And this means also that, you know, community is extending. And then there are more and more requirement of Power BI which is coming in. And also as a company, because we go into the market, we go a lot of get a lot of Power BI requirements. And they are increasing day by day means every day we get more requirements than we have yesterday. So that's why, you know, we are seeing huge growth. And the requirement sometimes comes with the need of power app, they come with power automated requirement. And that's give us, you know, real good thing that you're okay in the ecosystem, being in the ecosystem, we are going to solve those problems. And so for people that are new, maybe this is my last question for you is, where do you, where would you point somebody new coming in? Like where should they go and focus? What would you say that they need, they really should learn first? Or multiple things, but where would they go? Where do you point people? So my advice would be when you started learning on Power BI. So there's an official documentation we had for that. You can take in any of the courses from the experts which are available either on YouTube or some other places. And then once you have a little bit of knowledge, and that's where, you know, even if you when you face the challenge, you can come to community and, you know, ask questions. And once you learn a little bit of it, then you start, you know, solving some of the problems in community. And you don't have to, you know, think that, you know, I don't know, just wait for the solution is coming. There is the data you saw try to solve it, try to keep on attempting the problems more and more on the community. And keep on learning from the experience which other people are giving. They share some good links around those things. They share some videos. Community blog is another good place means we have so many blogs on so many topics. That is another place. So if you search rightly, you will definitely get a blog on community. So most of the time what happens is if we search it rightly, we will have some blog or other blog, we have major gallery where you can get, you know, the solutions on the major. Then we have, you know, a themes gallery, we have the videos gallery and all those where you can get a lot of things. You just need to explore community, all the things which we are providing in Power BI community. I think there's a lot of help available. So as a newcomer, my advice would be go to community and explore all the things which we have, we are providing there. Yeah, tons of stuff out in. So if you go to the Microsoft tech community, you know, and find just people that you like their voice, their, the content that they're providing, follow those blogs. It's always, I'm a huge advocate of that as well. Find people that you like, that you trust, reach out and connect with them, especially MVPs. The most approachable crowd on the planet, like, like we're there because we're connected in the community. Don't be shy, feel free to reach out. But some of the other resources too. So I know that like I'm, I'm actually going through a power platform training course through a group called collab 365, which is out of the UK. You have plural site, you have LinkedIn learning, you have YouTube videos. So free and paid, there are tons of training resources out there for power platform, of course across the board. And so, and then one of the favorite people in the whole world is Heather Newman who runs community for power platform. So you can always reach out and ask Heather questions as well. She's very approachable. But I'm really appreciate your time today. Folks that want to get, reach out and connect with you. What are the best ways to reach you? The best way to reach me is definitely if you're asking a problem in community, I will reply there. Some other folks will reply then I'm reachable on LinkedIn and Twitter pretty easy. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time and enjoy that beautiful San Francisco Bay area weather behind you.