Empower your Customers with
Power Platform
What is Power Platform?
Power Platform is a line of low-code no-code business intelligence, app development and app connectivity software solutions. Currently consisting of four product suites: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. Power Platform has been developed by Microsoft to help your customers improve their day-to-day operations.
Power BI
Analytics are mission-critical for all ambitious businesses because data drives business decision making, after all.
It’s all but impossible to consistently implement improvements without suitably assessing and understanding prior performance. Repeat what works and change what doesn’t: that’s how to get better and Power BI works as a powerful and versatile foundation for the entire process.
With Power BI, your customers can quickly and easily create custom dashboards providing them a holistic and real-time view of their business. Connecting to various sources of analytics data (enabled by many integrations), it allows users to sort, select and format the useful data so they can see at any point the performance within each department of their organisation.
These dashboards can then be shared with the appropriate people, whether they’re internal managers or high-value clients.
Power Apps
Every business can benefit from the development of purpose-built apps. However, with the process of app development typically being long and expensive, it isn’t often economical to attempt the creation of apps (other than conventional customer-facing mobile apps).
Power Apps was created to change how businesses viewed apps. It serves as an intuitive tool for quickly and logically assembling apps, providing a drag-and-drop interface that allows users to combine pre-built functions drawn from a massive range of templates.
By attaching those functions to data drawn from integrations with other Microsoft services and empowering them with Azure processing, it makes it possible for beginners to rapidly design, iterate and roll out practical apps to solve numerous procedural issues.
Power Automate
Planned and executed well, automation can be a business game-changer, massively driving up operational efficiency and freeing up valuable human resources to be put towards more challenging projects. The difficulty lies in the design and implementation: before it can assist you, the manual effort must be built into suitable processes to be carried out.
Power Automate is a platform that codifies business automation, breaking it down into a broad set of templates, data connectors, and expected prompts and actions. The user doesn’t need any understanding of automation languages. They need only choose a type of ‘flow’ (for ‘workflow’) and follow the system from there.
For example, your customer could create a workflow for the Sales team when requesting approval for a bespoke price on a deal. This sort of process can typically involve a number of staff members and can often be time-consuming. This could be automated within Power Automate, creating a workflow whereby ‘approvers’ are automatically notified when a document is generated within a SharePoint File that requires approval and then the submitter receives an automated notification once the approval is completed.
Power Virtual Agents
Whether used to field customer queries or internally by large businesses with multiple departments, chatbots can be supremely efficient and cost-effective. But building a good chatbot isn’t easy. While there are generic chatbot frameworks that can be found and used for free, those are largely hollow shells to be filled with the required calls and responses — and figuring out how everything is going to fit in sequence can be a real challenge.
Power Virtual Agents follows the same no-code design principle of the other Power Platform tools, guiding users through the process of chatbot content design, and the key element is the level of integration: chatbot functionality demands integration, and being able to easily hook into actions and data from the entire Microsoft ecosystem is a huge bonus.
Key features/benefits
Low-code no-code
No development expertise is required.
Simplify your customer’s day-to-day operations
It’s now much easier to generate valuable data insights, deploy applications, leverage AI, and create powerful workflows and automations.
Less reliant on expensive outsourced developers
By learning to develop and deploy custom applications, dashboards, and workflows inhouse means you can take away your reliance on 3rd parties and become more self-sufficient and profitable.
Why should I be selling Power Platform?
Become a Business Applications Solutions Designation Partner to earn extra Microsoft Incentives
Earning a Microsoft Solutions Partner Designations for Business Applications is a great way to showcase your expertise in delivering Power Platform Solutions to your customers, enabling you to differentiate yourself from competitors, enhance your capabilities and unlock new benefits such as Marketing resources, IURs and incentives.
Microsoft Business Applications Incentives FY24*
| Existing Competencies | New Solutions Partner designation |
|---|---|
|
- Cloud Platform
- Datacentre |
Solutions Partner for Infrastructure (Azure).
Solutions Partners for Infrastructure are able to demonstrate broad capability to help customers accelerate migration of key infrastructure workloads to Microsoft Azure. |
|
- App Integration
- Data Analytics
- Data Platform |
Solutions Partner for Data & AI (Azure).
Solutions Partners for Data and AI are able to demonstrate broad capability to help customers manage their data across multiple systems to build analytics and AI solutions. |
|
- Application Development
- App Integration
- DevOps |
Solutions Partner for Digital & App Innovation (Azure).
Solutions Partners for Digital and App Innovation are able to demonstrate broad capability to help customers build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of their customer’s choice.
|
|
- Cloud Productivity
- Collaboration and Content
- Communications
- Messaging
- Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions
- Windows and Devices |
Solutions Partner for Modern Work.
Solutions Partners for Modern Work demonstrate broad capability to boost their customer’s productivity and make the shift to hybrid work using Microsoft 365. |
|
- Enterprise Mobility Management
- Security |
Solutions Partner for Security.
Solutions Partners for Security demonstrate broad capability to provide customers with the holistic, industry-leading security solutions they need to keep their business safe. |
|
- Cloud Business Applications
- Enterprise Resource Planning
- Project Portfolio Management |
Solutions Partner for Business Applications.
Solutions Partners for Business Applications demonstrate broad capability to deliver solutions with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. |
*Incentives correct at time of publishing August 2023
1 For product eligibility see the Product Addendum
2 Partners must hit $25K USD 12-month revenue threshold to qualify
3 Customer add definitions can be found on page 111 of the FY24 Microsoft Commercial Partner Incentives Guide
