How to leverage Azure and Power Apps together for App Modernization?

As organizations embrace a new digital world after the pandemic, the enterprise app gap is expected to widen further. 86% of organizations face challenges to meet the increasing app demand, says Microsoft. The demand for apps is 5x the volume that IT teams can normally deliver. Hence organizations are looking at low-code development approaches for their app modernization landscape. This new trend has increased the adoption of Microsoft Power Platform, a holistic low-code development platform.

How to deliver apps rapidly?

The pandemic has got a major change in application development. Businesses had to address customer needs within days to stay competitive. The demand for professional developers also increased rapidly because of these changes. How does low-code development help professional developers? Professional developers can blend the code-first tools with simple platforms like Power Apps to deliver business apps rapidly. And fusion teams with citizen developers can address simple and complex apps simultaneously. Power Apps and Power Platform are unique, and they integrate with Azure, Visual Studio, Azure data services, and Azure services.

Professional developers can leverage Power Platform with tools like Azure Kubernetes or Azure API management effortlessly to resolve business challenges in no time.

The adoption of Azure and Power Apps

Schlumberger, a leading energy services provider, built 650+ applications in 18 months leveraging fusion teams. They set up a center of excellence to unleash to power of Microsoft Power Apps and Azure for app modernization. Moreover, Schlumberger was able to manage the Covid crisis by building apps in just three hours. What more?

Toyota, the leading automobile manufacturer, has developed more than 400 apps in a few months leveraging Power Apps, Azure cognitive services, and Azure ML. And they could streamline communications between 1500+ Lexus and Toyota dealers with the production facilities. The fusion team has grown from a few hundred to thousands in a few months.

Why Azure and Power Apps for App Modernization?

Build apps faster – Power Apps is enabled with a drag-and-drop interface and pre-built UX components. You can deploy apps across mobile and the web in just a click.

Reduce app development costs – Azure offers new capabilities like IoT and streaming analytics that can integrate with Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. By leveraging ERP extensions and these Azure services along with Power Apps, you can save up to 74% on development costs.

Application lifecycle management – You can simplify governance with GitHub, and the CoE starter kit and streamline the application lifecycle management with the evolving Azure tools.

Extend functionalities – Business users no longer need to worry about the customization of their apps, you can leverage Visual Studio. Professional developers can create reusable components and extend functionality to other similar processes with Azure API management.

Exploring options for App Modernization

UI/UX Components

The model-driven apps take the data-driven approach, but canvas apps are easier to develop with the pre-built UI/UX components. Many users reported loading issues with Canvas apps initially, and Microsoft is developing new features that are evolving continuously. You can leverage browser developer tools, Power Apps monitoring tools, and Power Apps code review tools to boost performance.

AI Builder

Are you looking at embedding AI into your apps to enhance customer experience? AI Builder is built over Azure AI abilities and leverages data from Microsoft teams, Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Dataverse. You can leverage the low-code models to enhance intelligence through the processes. How AI Builder enables your workforce to work with AI?

With pre-built models like business card reader, entity extraction, language detection, sentiment analysis, category classification, object detection, invoice processing, and a few more, you can quickly simplify processes. The intuitive interface enables users to easily deploy the model and train the data. You can easily publish the AI models without writing code with the guided process or leveraging the pre-built components. Moreover, you can extract information from the document and images as well to empower AI-powered automation.

Application Lifecycle Management

Is ALM possible with low-code development platforms? The power of Azure comes in handy here. With Github’s built-in CI/CD support, you can easily track code changes and shorten the application development times. The GitHub Azure connector simplifies CI/CD furthermore for citizen developers and enables self-service.

Governance and Security

Governance for Power Apps seems to be a challenge as citizen developers grow exponentially. The CoE starter kit provides guidelines to set up governance for Power Apps. But it may be expensive and tough to set up. You can leverage Azure Active Directory for access control and role specifications. Also, you can encrypt, configure, and provision the business apps with the Azure Key vault.

Customization

Businesses can leverage fusion teams to create complex apps with the Command Line Interface (CLI) available through Visual Studio. Other capabilities like mixed reality to digitize the workflows, portals customization, and modeling the data available in Dataverse eases the app customization efforts of the fusion teams. In case you need to add any emerging functions or scale the app, you can leverage components in Azure such as Azure functions, Cognitive services, Synapse analytics, and a few more.

Seamless Connectivity

Organizations of any size can enable their stakeholders to build low-code apps powered by data integration through 500+ connectors. You can leverage either canvas or model-driven apps into your business processes for tasks or role-specific scenarios. Moreover, businesses can leverage Azure API Management and Azure Functions for custom connectors and productizing internal processes.

The impact of Azure and Power Apps

As per Forrester’s total economic impact study, organizations can reduce their costs on professional development and improve efficiencies by leveraging Azure and Power Apps together.

• 24% reduction in DevOps and professional developer costs
• 94% RoI over 3 years
• Streamlined application lifecycle management with secure governance
• Caters to all the enterprise app modernization needs
• Cognitive services, AI, IoT, computer vision, and automation capabilities

Our Capabilities

Azure and Power Platform offer enhanced capabilities for fusion teams. We at Saxon can consider any of your use cases to augment your vision for fusion teams. Additionally, we offer unique solution accelerators to improve your app landscape. Are you curious? We are a click away.