 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite brought to you by Cohesity. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Donna Sarkar. She is the advocate lead Microsoft Power Platform at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. Hi. Q-Bland, so tell us a little bit about Power Platform. It's something we're hearing some buzz about, but we still need the overview. What is it all about? All right, so for years, decades, we in the tech industry have been on this mission where we say everyone in the world can benefit from learning to code, right? Whether you're a farmer, an accountant, a teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, some sort of code will help you do your job better and you'll be able to automate away-boring tasks and make apps and websites to solve your business problems, right? We've been saying this forever. And soon we started to realize like, why are we asking everyone to learn to code when the end goal is to solve those business problems, right? So instead of learning to code, why not create a suite of low-code or no-code tools? So all of these people who we call citizen developers who may not be professional developers as in they didn't go to computer science school, they didn't do a coding bootcamp, they don't live in Visual Studio all day. How can they use these low-code tools to solve their specific business problems? So that's like the vision of Power Platform and there I would say six independent pillars of it. The first one, the one that most people know is Power BI, which is a dashboard to visualize data and traction in your business and all of that. So that's the one that most of the Fortune 500 are like quite familiar with. The second one that I think a lot of people have used, used to be called Microsoft Flow. So this is a automation tool where you'd say, if I get an email, send me a text, a kind of a if this happens, then that happens. It's just a logical tool that connects lots and lots of services in our life together. That has been renamed to Power Automate to focus more on the automation that many businesses have that we actually have not thought about for decades. How do we automate some of these processes that people have to do all the time? Third thing. If I could, so one of the new announcements this week, Power Automate is the RPA piece come out there. So I guess it's a suite and this is a new offering as far as that. Yes, so RPA, the robotic process automation is how we can do UI automation, which is a huge pain in the neck. It's terrible because you say, oh, click box, wait three seconds, wait for this thing to happen, sleep 10 seconds, it is terrible. I've done UI automation, I hated UI automation so much. So RPA, what it does for you is you perform the actions and the code is generated and it replays. So that is this powerful tool for anyone who has to do any sort of repetitive scan form, scan form, scan form, you know, sort of thing. So Power Automate, the third pillar is Power Apps, which I think everyone hears a lot about today, which is apps that are generated from whatever data source that you've got. Say you've got an Excel spreadsheet having, and I saw all of your guests are all tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, right? Donna's coming now, Christina's coming next, and there's Christina now. And imagine you can see them in an app instead, and all of you have this app on your phone. You can say, oh, what's on the docket for today, right? Donna's showing up at 11, Christina's at 11.30. What are the questions we want to ask Donna? Click on the Donna tab, you get all the questions you want to talk to her about, et cetera. So Power Apps is a way to quickly generate an app from a data source without code. We have a whole bunch of templates depending on what you're trying to do. So maybe you're trying to make a gallery of photos, or you're trying to make like an expense tool or like a gas mileage tool, or whatever you're trying to do, that every single business in the world has the same tools, slightly different. So the fourth thing is a new announcement called Power Virtual Assist, which is think about it as simplified chatbots, right? Chatbots are everywhere. The way people think about making them is, oh, I have to go get Azure Cognitive Services and learn it deeply, and become an AI expert, and learn to like speak natural language processing stuff. But in fact, you can build a chatbot in five minutes using Power Virtual Assist, which is fantastic and really cool. And running through all of this is my favorite that I learned a lot about this week, which is called the AI Builder. And AI Builder is a tool, really, that brings intelligence to all of these things. It makes you feel like kind of a badass. I'm like, oh, I trained an AI model and deployed it and tested it on stage. That's crazy and cool. And I learned to do that in five minutes. And believe you me, I'm not a data scientist. So it was a really, really cool set of tools that I personally, even as a pro developer, I'm very excited about. Well, I want to dig into the tools more of what they can do. But I first want to ask you a personal question. You're new to the role. You've been there two weeks. What made you, what was exciting to you about working with Power Platforms? So I've been at Microsoft for 14 years and I've always been in the Windows division. And I've always worked in a software engineering function. So always dealing with like C++ code, COM code, how do we, what product code do we, changes do we make to Windows, the OS? And recently I've been realizing that my personal mission, that anyone in the world should have my opportunities, it's, that's really important to me, right? I grew up under served society in Detroit, Michigan. Right? I don't, I often feel like I don't deserve this life that I have. And I fell into it because of luck and circumstance. And I want other people to have these opportunities and not feel that same kind of impostering. So I always believe that tech is this, you know, this sword, this weapon that you can wield. And it will, as you make your way through the world and it creates so many opportunities. Right? And anyone in the world wants to hire a software engineer. Every company, right? Every company wants to hire devs. It doesn't matter if you're like government or like oil rigs, you want software developers. And I thought, what an amazing economic power. And I want lots of people to have that. And lo and behold, I was offered the opportunity to head up a brand new advocacy team for the Power Platform as part of the Azure Advocates organization. And I said, oh, that's amazing to be able to line up my personal passion with a mission in the company. That doesn't come along very often. So I love my job. So it's interesting, Donna. I would love your viewpoint as someone that's been with Microsoft for 14 years because I know a lot of the advocacy people and many of them are ones that, if you ask them if they would have joined Microsoft five years ago, the answer is I'm not sure. So moving from Windows to there, tell us a little bit about culturally what's different about Microsoft today and much more obviously than just Windows. Yeah, I would say that there's three things that are dramatically different. There's a lot of things that people notice, but three things I think that are just, you can't even argue about it. One, we are definitely a learn it all mindset rather than a know it all. Where it's actually much better now to say I do not know. Let's go find out, let's go do an experiment, and then we'll have an answer. And that's much better than with great confidence saying something wrong, right? Oh, I know this will work for sure. I guarantee you, and then it not working because you're being a know it all rather than the learn it all. So that tolerance is off the charts. It's expected. If you come in with a strong opinion with no sort of experimental data to back it up, that's no longer a good thing, right? Now people almost are suspicious. Like really, why do you think that? Have you checked it? Have you done the experiment? The second thing is this co-creating with customers. Before, like you're asking about Windows, I've worked on Windows five versions and it always went a little like this, right? We as the developers would go and hide in Redmond, Washington for three and a half years. And one day we would show up and say here is your operating system. We'll see you in three years. Have fun using it, bye. And then we go off and make another operating system, right? We didn't stick around to figure out, is this operating system working for you? Are you being successful? What you're trying to do? Are your customers successful? We just went ahead and made what we thought was next, right? Because we were convinced we knew better. But with Windows 10 and every other product at Microsoft now we actually co-create with our customers, right? That feedback loop is part of the product cycle where we don't ship a product without having a feedback loop. So we ship something, how are we getting feedback? What is the time baked in to actually take that feedback and make changes? So that's one thing, it's dramatically different. It used to all be time to code product, time to fix bugs, that's it. Now it's code product, listen to customer feedback, fix bugs from customers. That's it. So it dramatically shortened the amount of time it took to build an operating system because we don't need to make a three year long product. Instead we make like a six month long product. And when I ran the Windows Insider program we were testing Windows every week, right? Twice a week we're rolling out versions of Windows to millions of people getting their feedback in real time. And the third thing I'd say that's been a dramatic transformation is this inclusivity of not just different kinds of race in the city but work styles, the kinds of businesses we do work with. Like we do Linux now, right? We do Linux. Our platform itself pulls from all sorts of data sources. We don't just say we only pull from Microsoft tech. Like if you have Excel, if you have access, if you have Azure, if you have SQL we support you and everyone else go the heck away. No, we're saying whatever data source you've got we don't care, we'll build you a power app based on your data source. Bring your whole self to work, right? It's that bring your whole self to work mindset that I think has permeated just across the company and it shows in our products. So you were talking about this feedback loop and I'm interested because the power platform was rolled out in 2018. We haven't seen any major revenue yet but Microsoft sees a ton of promise here. So what was the customer feedback you were given in terms of these updates that you just announced here at Ignite? And what were customers demanding, wanting, needing from these tools? Well, there's been a few things. One, the uptake in power platform, especially power apps is the fastest growth of any business app in Microsoft history. In the last like just two years we've reached 84% of the Fortune 500 are running power apps now. That's kind of wild, right? When you think these are normally traditional companies who can be quite conservative but they've got people whether it's an IT it's a citizen dev or a pro dev they're actually building power apps to supplement their business needs, right? So it's been just astronomical growth which is fantastic. And the feedback from this group is actually what dictates all of the changes we've been making. So one of the key things a lot of people said was we just adopted teams like last year, right? Our company adopted teams, we're all in on teams all of our communication like real time is done on teams but power platform is not with teams. What's the deal with that, right? So the power platform dev team, engineering team actually went and figured out how can you have a teams channel? How can you build a power app and then share that power app within your teams specifically? So say the three of us are working on a teams channel and I make a, oh, track your attendees app the one we were talking about I can share it within the teams itself and we can just see it from within the teams window. So it'll run within the teams window we can just deploy it to our phones as well and with the same teams credentials as we're working that applies to the app as well. So that's something that just rolled out this week as direct feedback from people who say we want in on the latest and greatest and that means teams, that means SharePoint online that means power platform, that means all the things now. So Donna, one of the things I love that you talked about is it doesn't take months to get started on this. So many announcements that you talked through all the six pillars and everything for those people out there seeing what's new give them some final tips as to how they should get started with the power platform family. I would say that one of the best things you can do is just get your hands on it, right? Stop reading about it, stop looking at the announcements just get your hands on it. Because I was at first reading all these blog posts trying to understand CDS, power platform, AI builder all this stuff, stop, just don't do it. The best thing to do is to go get on Microsoft learn there's a starter tutorial called Canvas apps for power platform and go do the tutorial. All it does is it deploys an Excel spreadsheet to your personal machine or your personal one drive whatever it is and using that it's just carpet, right? It's like black carpet, white carpet and shows pictures of carpet and then you generate a power app and it shows it in a gallery view on an app that you just see on your computer and then you deploy it to your phone. All it does is show you the power of an Excel spreadsheet converted into an app. So I've created a short URL for it just to make life easier for everyone. So it's aka.ms power up super straightforward, super simple and I talk about this tutorial all the time not because I think it's the best tutorial that's ever existed, but for someone who has absolutely no idea and they're feeling intimidated to start this is exactly the right thing to do because this tutorial I am not kidding you both of you can do it in five minutes. Like on the next break once you finish with me and Christina I challenge you to do the tutorial. Right, okay, challenge accepted. One final thing, so you are known for this TED talk that you gave on imposter syndrome earlier in our conversation you said you fell into this life you feel like you've gotten lucky but yet you're a smart woman. Talk about imposter syndrome and then give your best advice for the young people out there and old people too frankly who are suffering. Imposter syndrome is a killer because it is a disease that is a global epidemic. It's not, some people think it's a women's problem it's a people of color problem. No it's not, it's an everyone problem. Every time I give this talk the TED audience was thousands of people I would say about 70% men. And when I asked how many of you feel these symptoms hands are up, 70% of people and this was men too who feel like I got here, the thoughts are usually I got here by accident it was dumb luck there was a mistake in the process I slipped in under the radar any minute now someone's going to show up here and say you don't belong here get out or someone's going to check my credentials or ask me like how do you think you're as good as the people around you or why are you qualified to speak on this topic? People are convinced this is going to happen like almost everyone is convinced and it's wild. And I've realized the reason it happens is because we are not used to doing that thing yet that's it we don't imposter about the things we do every day you don't imposter about being in camera on front of the camera in front of everyone because you do it all the time and you've gotten good reviews and obviously people come to talk to you but if tomorrow I was to be like you and I are going to write office apps you may say I don't think I'm qualified to do that I don't know if you are or not I'm just making stuff up at this point and you may say I am not qualified to do that and the reason you say that is because you've never done it before why would you be qualified to do that? It's like me trying to be qualified to write a unicycle right? Which I can't so my advice to people who feels this well I don't feel like I belong here is break it down right into steps debug this process and say all right there are parts of this process that I feel qualified to do and there's parts I do not feel qualified to do what are they? So from my own example I absolutely do not feel qualified to lead an advocacy team for Power Platform right? I said I joined this team two weeks ago I just learned about this product last year how am I qualified to lead advocacy for this? So I had to break it down and I said what am I feeling impostering about? Is it leading advocacy? No I did it for Windows I did it for HoloLens I do know how to do that is it speaking in front of lots of people? Not really I do that all the time is it writing content so others can learn? Not really I do that all the time is it the product? Yes it's the product it's that I don't feel like I know the ins and outs of the product that well so if you were to ask me where exactly is the connector for you know Azure SQL to Power Apps? I would just freeze like I do not know I think it's in the Azure portal somewhere so I would feel that sense of impostering like oh I don't know so I don't belong here it's no I just don't know the product that well that's okay I know advocacy well so what I need to do now is identify things I'm good at advocacy things I'm not good at product learn the product that's it it just becomes a really easy to do list or to learn list right? Learn it all mindset not know it all mindset I love it thank you so much Donna this was a really terrific conversation wonderful thanks for having me I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman stay tuned for more of the Cube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite