>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host to minimun. We are doing 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. Tai cube land. 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, you have been on this mission where we say everyone in the world can benefit from learning to code, right? Uh, whether you're a farmer and 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 boot camp. 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 they're, I would say six independent pillars of it. Um, the first one, the one that most people know is power BI, which is a dashboard to visualize data and you know, um, 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, you know, 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 of course one of the new announcements this week, power automate is the RPA piece. Yes. Come out there. So I guess it's a suite and this is a new offering as RPA. >>The robotic process automation is how we can, um, do UI automation, which is a huge pain in the neck. Like it's terrible because you say, Oh click box, wait three seconds, wait for this thing to happen. Sleep 10 sec. It is terrible. I've done UI automation, I hate it. UI automation. So much. So RPA, what it does for you is you perform the act 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 PowerApps, which I think everyone hears a lot about today, which is um, 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 it all tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, right? >>Donna's coming now, Christina is 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 1130 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 PowerApps 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, um, a new announcement called power virtual assist, which is, um, think about it as simplified chatbots, right? Chatbots are everywhere. Uh, the way people think about making them is, Oh, I have to go get Azure cognitive services and learn it deeply and become a AI expert and learn to like speak natural language processing stuff. But in fact, you can build a chat bot in five minutes using power virtual assist, which was 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 and makes you feel it 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 than what they can do. But I first want to ask you a personal question because 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 plus plus code comm code, how do we, what product code do we changes, do we make to windows the. 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 underserved 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 impostor thing. 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? It, the opera 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, um, 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 thought. I would love your viewpoint as someone that's been with Microsoft for 14 years, cause 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, I'm not sure. Sure. So you know, moving from windows to there. Tell us a little bit about culturally what's different about Microsoft today and you know, much more obviously than just windows. Yeah. Um, I would say that there's three things that are dramatically different. There's a lot of like 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 nodal 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, 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, why do you think that? Have you checked it? Have you done the experiment? The second thing is, um, 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 by, 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's you're trying to do? Are your customer 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 cocreate 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 shipped 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. Um, it used to all be timed to code, product, time to fix bugs. >>That's it. Now it's code product, listen to customer feedback, fixed bugs from customers. That's it. So it dramatically shorten 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 and 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, you know, race in the city, but work styles, the kinds of businesses we do work with. Like we're a, we do Linux now, right? We do eggs. Um, 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've sequel, we support you and everyone else go the heck away. No, we're, 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 a work mindset that I think has permeated just across the company and a chosen our products. So you were talking about this feedback loop and I'm interested because these, these, the power platform was rolled out into 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've just announced here at ignite and what were customers demanding, wanting, needing from these platforms, these, these, these tools? >>Well, there's been a few things. One, um, the uptake in power platform, especially power apps is the fastest growth of any business app in Microsoft history. Um, in the last like just two years we've reached 84% of the fortune 500 are running power. 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 dove or a PRODA, they're actually building power apps to supplement their business needs, right? So it's been just astronomical growth, which is fantastic. Um, 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 realtime has done on teams, but power platform is not with teams. >>What's, what's the deal with that? Right? So the par platform dev team engineering team actually went and figured out how can you have a teams channel, how can you build a power plant, 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're talking about, I can share it within the teams itself and we can just see it from within the team's window. So it'll run within the teams window. Um, we can just deploy it to our phones as well. And with the same team's 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're, we want an on the latest and greatest. And that means teams. That's one means SharePoint online. That means our platform. That means all the things now. >>Yeah. 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, with the power platform family. >>I would say that um, 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 start, a starter tutorial called canvas apps for power platform. Um, 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 dot. Ms power up, super straight forward, 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're finished with me and Christina, I challenge you to do the tutorial. All right? Okay. Challenge accepted. One, one final thing. So you are known for this Ted talk that you gave Unimpossible syndrome earlier in this, in our conversation you said you fell into this like, Oh absolutely, you've gotten lucky, but yet you're a smart woman. >>Talk about imposter syndrome. And then and then give your best advice for the young people out there and an old people to 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 woman'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. You know the thoughts are usually I got here by accident. It was dumb luck. There's 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? Right? People are convinced this is going to happen. Like, almost everyone is convinced and it's wild. And I've realized the reason that 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 abs, you may say, ah, 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. Um, 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 ride 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? What am I feeling and posturing about? Is it leading advocacy? No, I did it for windows. I did it for hollow lens. 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 the, 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 sequeled or PowerApps, I would just freeze. Like I do not know. I think it's in the Azure portal somewhere, somewhere. So I would feel that sense of imposter and 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. Thank you is a really terrific conversation. Wonderful. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite.

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018, brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Salesforce Dreamforce, they're saying it's 170,000 people. Take public transit, do not bring your car, do not take Uber, grab a line, grab a BART, whatever you need. So we're excited to have a practitioner. We love to get customers on, we love to talk to people that are out here actually using all these tools, and our next guest, we're excited to have Becky Bastien. She's a senior force.com developer for BD, which is Becton Dicksinson-- >> Dickinson. >> Becky, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, what type of products do you work on? >> So, I mean primarily we're a Salesforce.com platform, right? And we have a lot of add-ons with Conga, DocuSign, you name it, we're doing it. Apttus CLM, and we also use Oracle CPQ. Anything that connects to the Salesforce.com platform, you can imagine we probably use it. >> And you've been developing on Salesforce for a number of years, looking at your LinkedIn history, so you've got a lot of experience with the platform. Just a little bit of perspective, how this conference has changed, how Salesforce is a platform from just a pure play kind of Salesforce management system, which is what it started at CRM, to what kind of it is today? >> Yeah, I mean the conference has changed astronomically obviously over the years. What you said, it was 170 thousand, right? It's crazy. >> That's crazy. >> Logistically, it's a little tough to get around but it's so much fun and there's so much that you can learn here. It's just increased over the years. The content has gotten better, there's more focused areas, which I really like. I'm a developer at heart so I really focus on that. But as far as the platform itself, it's really grown. You can do anything with it. At BD, we even have done things that are completely custom, like our entire implementation team for one of our business units runs out of Salesforce.com as a project management application. We don't just use it for sales, right? >> Right. >> Or marketing, even. We use it across the board for implementation and now we're getting into the service aspect as well. >> Right, we're here at the Conga event and we talked before we turned the cameras on, you're using the Conga tool set in kind of a unique and slightly different way than some of the applications we've heard. I wonder if you could share some of the applications that you use and how you use them? >> Sure, so one of our primary uses of Conga is actually generating documents that are customer facing, that really educate our clients, our end clients and then also helps us with some of the data that we're gathering for our product development. But what we do is we go out to the client's site and we're actually sometimes in an operating room, or at a catheter injection or a blood draw, multiple things that we actually gather data on via another application called Fulcrum. We pull all that data back into Salesforce and then we use Conga to generate the documents that are customer facing. With that, it really empowers our business as well because they have full control over that Conga document, so they can make the changes that they need to, without involving IT, and we just kind of hook it all up in the back end for them. >> Right, right. It's really a new kind of world in terms of the opportunity to go gather data on your products, whether it's connected via an application or different things, as opposed to back in the old day, you made it, you shipped it, you sent it out through your distributor and you had no idea how end users are using it, how the doctors are using it in this case. >> Yeah. >> But now, you've got this opportunity to do more of a closed loop feedback, back into the product development. >> Yeah and it's not only a product development, but we're actually educating the hospitals on, are you using the product to what we actually manufactured it for? Are you using it for something entirely different? Are you using it the wrong way? It's actually an education tool back to our end customer and saying, "Hey, this is where you can improve "operating procedures," basically. >> Another hot topic that we hear about all the time, we go to all these conferences, is bots. You talked about, you guys are doing something interesting with bots, again, leveraging the Conga application probably not necessarily the way that's it's, I didn't see Bots on their product sheet. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about that application? >> Yeah, We have a bot where our sales reps can basically enter some information into an Excel spreadsheet. It's for a quick quote for a customer, and the bot will crawl that spreadsheet and feed it back into SAP. What we've found is that our sales reps are having a hard time getting the right customer number, getting the right contact information and things like that, where the Bot would fail if they didn't have the right information. What we've done with Conga is we generate that Excel spreadsheet from Salesforce.com so the sales rep is on an opportunity, and they generate the bot, they generate the spreadsheet, they fill out the rest of the information and then it gets sent along its way and it creates the order and SAP eventually. It's really cutting out some human error. >> Right, so does the Bot fill in the missing data? Or it just flags that you've got some incomplete stuff you have to fill in? >> Yeah so, we're passing it as much as we can for the rep. They're having to manually enter some things like what product, what quantity, and things like that, and then the bot crawls it and throws it into SAP. It's just an easier way for a rep when they're sitting out on-site with a client. They can actually put it in an Excel spreadsheet, which they love. >> Right. Of course we're trying to get 'em away from Excel spreadsheets anyway, but let's go ahead and automate some of it for them so it cuts out that error. >> It's a really interesting story because it's often a battle to get the sales people to work in Salesforce. >> Yeah. >> As opposed to report in Salesforce. >> Right. >> You're really kind of bridging that gap, letting 'em work in Excel, which isn't necessarily their preferred solution but if that's what they're doing and then integrating that back into the automated system. >> It's hard to change that behavior, for sure. >> Yes it is. >> But yeah, by giving them the bot, we're actually making them go into Salesforce. It gets them more comfortable with it and a way to drive user adoption. >> Right and I'm sure you can see a future where AI is going to enable more and more automation of all the little bits and pieces of that process going forward. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, too, what we talked about with gathering all that data, that's one of the things with Einstein that we're really interested in, especially at Dreamforce this year, is learning more about Einstein and what we can do on the platform with all the data that we have gathered. >> Right, right. The other thing you mentioned before we turn on the cameras, it's again, kind of a new technology, is voice. Obviously with the proliferation of Alexa and Google Home and OK Siri, and all these things, voice is going to be an increasingly important way that people interact with applications. As you look forward, down the road, what are some of the opportunities you see there, where you can start to integrate more potential voice control into the applications? >> I think it kind of goes back to our sales reps, again. Where they're on on-site. If they can talk into their phone really quickly and say, "Update this opportunity amount." I mean, that's great. It gets them, again, into Salesforce, it's going to drive that user adoption. I saw a session on it earlier today and I thought it was pretty cool. I think they'll be excited about that. We're also implementing field service for Lightning. We have our actual texts that get dispatched out on-site, so I can really see them using that on the mobile experience as well. >> The dispatch is going out through Lightning and then the management of the service call is also happening inside of Lightning? >> Yeah, we're implementing Service Cloud right now. The next phase will be implementing field service for Lightning. We're now dispatching out of SAP, but we're looking to move it entirely to Salesforce. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> Okay, if Marc Benioff came in and sat down, there was a guy that looked just like his brother here earlier, what would you ask him? What kind of magic wand you've been developing in this thing for a number of years, would you say, Marc, love it, love it, but could you just give me a little of this and and a little of that? >> I'd say, show me the road map and no safe harbor, tell me it's actually going to happen. No, I think mobile is where we're always really trying to figure out where Salesforce is going, and I think they've really improved. But I offline capability is something that has struggled with Salesforce. We have to rely on other apps that write back into Salesforce. >> Right. >> It'd be nice to eliminate those other offline applications and just use Salesforce.com for that offline power train. Because a lot of times we're at the hospital, and there's no wifi, there's no connection. >> Right, right. >> So we have to have that offline capability. >> Still kind of the soft underbelly of cloud-based things but 5G is coming, we were just at the AT&T show and we'll have 5G 10x the speed, 100x the speed. >> Bring it on, yeah. >> So good stuff. Alright, Becky, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Absolutely. >> And keep coding away. >> Thank you. >> Alright. >> She's Becky, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, downtown San Francisco, come on by. (upbeat techno music)