Elevating Power Apps: Closing Gaps with PCF Components and AI-Driven Development

Mark Smith: 0:14
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode we're going to be focusing on low-code and pro-code and the app experience of our guest. Our guest is from London in the United Kingdom. He's the CEO and founder of Lowcodera. We'll get him to tell us about that story and the setup in a moment. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show,R ahan.

Rahan Arif: 0:58
Hey there, Mark. Thanks for having me. How are you doing Good to?

Mark Smith: 1:01
have you on Good mate. Good, I always love to start with a getting to know you segment here, and that's food, family and fun. What do they mean for you when you're not doing your day job?

Rahan Arif: 1:13
Nice. Well, I think it's really interesting. I think on the family front, I think it's something that's shaped some of my decision making probably wish I was still a consultant. But yeah, I think family has been a real inspiration and I think, as the family's come along over the last 10 years, I would say I think, the importance of that, especially with any downtime, I think for me it becomes all the more worthwhile and motivation for doing things absolutely becomes clearer. And I think you value especially that time off. We've had summer holidays here in the UK and just spending a bit of quality time with the kids. It's priceless. And so, yeah, away from all the hustle and bustle of the grind, I think it's great just to be able to switch off and, to be fair, the only time I do switch off is when I'm fully away with the family somewhere, um, that's not home.

Rahan Arif: 2:32
I think that's yeah that's what I've learned over the recent years. So holidays is the other sort of great hobby, if you want to call it that for me, because it's the only time where I absolutely can switch off and I make a thing off absolutely switching off, and when I'm on holiday, nice, where do you go mainly?

Rahan Arif: 2:48
uh well, that's become more challenging with three little ones. Um, I think we were quite ambitious. I think we traveled to Europe mainly. We seem to like Spain. We went to Disneyland in Paris a few months ago. That was nice. The kids seem to take a liking to Dubai. It's this great kind of playground for them, full of water parks and theme parks, and it's pretty easy for us. We just go rock up and the entertainment takes care of itself. So it's one we seem to go on quite a few times.

Mark Smith: 3:26
Interesting, is it reasonably priced in Dubai?

Rahan Arif: 3:28
Mate, it's crazy, I think. Just like every part of the world we're seeing inflation. Some things you'll find are like great value. Like you go over there, things like water, you find like, wow, that's, that's cheap getting around in an uber or whatever they call it there locally amazing value. You wouldn't dream of using so many ubers here, um, but then it's like packet of biscuits that you might buy for a quid here in in the uk. It's like five times the price over there and that's um crazy. And I think that's just got to do with with the way certain imports um work. But yeah, every time we seem to go we do notice prices going up and there seems to be a bit of a bubble there around property, hotel prices, everything going up. But yeah, unfortunately the only way you have a bit of fun is by spending.

Rahan Arif: 4:24
So yeah it's the way of the world.

Mark Smith: 4:27
So true, so true. Tell us about your tech story and how you've set up your company, moving from consultant to entrepreneur, as you say, and I really want to understand that journey for you.

Rahan Arif: 4:41
Yeah so where do I start? So you know, coming out of uni, even prior to uni, what feels like many years ago, probably around 25 years ago I already at the time, even before uni, in my early days, was I had this website business on the side from the 90s I was coding websites and that's how I was kind of earning a living, if you like to. While I, while I studied, I was building websites for companies, and this is before that whole market of website development became saturated. I think back those days it was a really valuable skill, a new skill, and a lot of businesses were taking their first steps to the internet and I think from there I already had this kind of experience of solving problems for businesses using technology. And then when I did start my first job after uni, again it was in that sort of website development track. But it wasn't long before I first got introduced to Microsoft as a technology stack and I started dabbling for a very short amount of time with ProCode NET development and, if I'm honest, I didn't really enjoy it too much. It was fascinating for me at the start, but after a year I realized this isn't really for me Just the kind of level of dedication it required to kind of go away and really harness these skills. It left me with no time to go and interact with the business and understand what their problems were and what the challenges were. And that wasn't me. I always felt like I was more comfortable at that sort of intersection between technology and business and I moved into senior management in my career pretty early.

Rahan Arif: 6:29
I think I was about 22 and I was heading up technology for a market research firm here in London and I stumbled across a technology called SharePoint, which we're all familiar with, of course, and I kind of fell in love with it very quickly because what I realized was that instead of coding away and building hours and hours and weeks and weeks of code which just got me to a very basic point with SharePoint a lot of the nuts and bolts were already there and it was a case of layering on solutions to solve problems very quickly. And I faced a very interesting decision quite early on in my career there where I realized actually maybe there wasn't too much of an opportunity for me to develop those SharePoint skills which I was falling in love with, and so what I ended up doing was I quit my full-time job as a technology manager which is a fair bit of Bob back then for me, not too far off to my university career, and I decided to go on my own and then, for the first time, become a contractor and in the UK I went up and down the country for the next probably 18 months, two years, just taking on as many SharePoint projects as I could, just to expand my experience with the technology and just get as much exposure as I could. And that was great. It gave me a lot of confidence, a lot of exposure to projects, and I realized after a little while you know what I wasn't really getting any of the big projects, the enterprise, great stuff, just doing it on my own. And so there was a company here in the UK called Agilisys and it was an opportunity which emerged to go in and effectively found a SharePoint practice from scratch, and that's what I did.

Rahan Arif: 8:17
For a good few years I established this whole SharePoint practice and center of excellence for this organization and I mean that grew to something quite substantial where we were doing digital transformation using SharePoint for a number of different organizations and at one point the team that I had grew to about 30 or 40 resources and actually it was at that interesting point where Microsoft were beginning to transition the whole world onto 365 from the whole on-prem and perpetual licensing model, and so I kind of rode that whole wave into what started off as SharePoint. My role became full stack M365. And so I was doing M365 led transformation, which was more than SharePoint for all these organizations and managing these resources from project managers to architects to developers. It was very exciting. Around 2016, we started seeing the first comings of Power Platform, even though, of course, it wasn't called Power Platform, but we started to see the individual technologies emerging, the first signs of Power Apps and power automate, and I always had this ambition to with the family coming along now as well.

Rahan Arif: 9:45
At this point, my life as a sort of consultant traveling all over the place, I think it was getting quite exhausting for me and what I realized was that there was a lot of commonality between the problems that I was solving for different organizations and I always felt like there was an opportunity to productize.

Rahan Arif: 10:05
But unfortunately, one of the things that I found is, in that whole consultancy setup, the odds of sort of succeeding in terms of setting up a product team or a product led practice in one of these organizations is quite challenging because the dynamics of those organizations are kind of all about time and materials and they don't really have the structures in place to support you with that.

Rahan Arif: 10:31
So it was only then, around 2016, that I decided to go it on my own again, and that's where I set up my own consultancy practice and I made a decision because I could see the opportunity at that point to start only specializing in power platform or low code related stuff, because I could see this thing was going to take off and it was very much aligned to my ambitions.

Rahan Arif: 10:56
And so ever since that point you could argue I have been a power platform consultant, first and foremost, solving all kinds of business problems using the core power platform stack of you know, power apps, power bi, power automate, and and that's been doing it on a global scale.

Rahan Arif: 11:18
And for me, it was only a question of when do I go and span beyond that consultancy world and start focusing on product? It was only about two and a half years ago where I established and started up Low Code Era, and that was after a stint that I did for a global product technology firm where I managed to do the end-to-end of getting a brand new product to market, and that was the thing that gave me the confidence to finally go and do it on my own. And so low-code era was born about two and a half years ago, and, as I'm sure I'll tell you more about it in the course of your subsequent discussion, it's all about raising the standard of low code and getting a higher quality of outcome for everyone that's involved in this space, particularly in this power platform arena, which we all love have come to love.

Mark Smith: 12:12
So, when you say, raising so as a company, what do you sell? What is the product, what is the service that you deliver?

Rahan Arif: 12:19
Yes. So, having done all these years of Power Apps and different solutions right, one of the things that led me towards founding Low Code Era was some of the challenges and obstacles that I came up against in delivering these solutions for, particularly around Power Apps. One thing you'll find with low code, compared to pro code, is that there's a relatively low ceiling in terms of what can be achieved. Traditionally, organizations would hire pro code developers to solve their digital transformation challenges and, as we know, they're in kind of short supply and it's like finding a good builder they're really hard to get hold of, but when you do find them, you want to keep them and retaining them and they just move from job to job. Um, now, with low code when, when these platforms started coming along like power platform, it's the equivalent for me of like 90s websites. When they came along, they have this kind of very distinctive like look to them and that's how I see kind of low-code, especially where we've started in recent years Compared to what you see, a professionally developed app which we might be using in our personal lives over the internet.

Rahan Arif: 13:26
What a power app looks like in relative terms is quite primitive, and what I found was working with clients. After a little while of delivering all kinds of functional power apps, they would turn around to me and say, look, this is great. I didn't realize we could do these things so quickly. But you know what? Can we make it look a bit less like a power app? I mean, this looks a bit clunky. We were using things like Xero or accountancy software, and it looks like this. Can you make it look more like this? And it's a bit of a challenge. And the other observation that I made was, um, that, working in some of these other organizations who began adopting these low-code tools and were trying to roll it out, it was still quite challenging for for the wider businesses beyond IT units to start taking on these power apps. They weren't quite comfortable enough to move away from their Excel spreadsheets to adopting low-code. And today, it's still true, 70% of power apps are still being built by IT pros in most organizations. And so for me, with everything that I learned, how could I begin to start solving some of these challenges? And I think it was about 2018.

Rahan Arif: 14:45
Microsoft announced something called the power apps component framework, where they were opening up this platform to professional developers to go and basically say you can now create your own Lego building blocks that you can bring into Power Apps, that you can construct your Power Apps with. And that was an immediate cue for me to get going with Locodera, because I saw that immediately as a route to hang on a second, because I saw that immediately as a route to hang on a second If we can make power apps more powerful and hide away all of the complexity in what can make it more powerful, we can suddenly solve two core challenges around power apps, the two challenges being quality and functional deficiencies. Quality in when we talk about user experiences where Power Apps today, especially if you're building a Canvas app without putting in a ton and a ton of effort and advanced front-end skills, you're going to end up with something really basic. We constructed, over a very short period of time, probably the most advanced portfolio of pcf components with a view of really, when coupled together, you wouldn't even know this is a power app at the end of it, and so we created these Lego building blocks. When you use them in the process of building a PowerApp, you end up with results which are on par with what you see in these professionally developed web apps around the world. And the way we did it, and some of the patterns which we put into it through all the R&D and iterations that we went through, was to build them in such a way where these were super easy to drag and drop on and configure for end users or people with low-code development skills.

Rahan Arif: 16:44
And the second aspect was to layer in advanced functionality to plug gaps. Like often I would get asked when I'm building power apps for clients you know what? We just want to be able to drag and drop something into our app, for whatever reason. Well, do you know what? This grid experience is a bit clunky, and so all of these little gaps or user experience deficiencies, another one being hang on.

Rahan Arif: 17:11
A second why is it that every time I'm building a Power App and I want to do anything related to analytics, you're sending me a link to go through to Power BI or a third-party dashboard software? That's creating a break in the user experience where I'm getting confused. And so we built some of the most advanced data visualization components and some of the most advanced UI components a portfolio for about 25 to 30 of these where suddenly we were unlocking use cases for Power Apps which you just wouldn't imagine Power Apps could do. And that's where low-code era has kind of really caught the attention of the people that know about it, because they're able to unlock some of these use cases that they otherwise wouldn't be able to and, moreover, accomplish things in a lot easier way than otherwise possible. And that's where low-code error started from. We've now gone on a lot further with our AI story, which we'll get into maybe in a bit.

Mark Smith: 18:15
So okay, this is interesting. So, from what I take from that, would you say that you're a PCF company and that you produce those for specific use case scenarios as well, as I assume you're creating a library of them?

Rahan Arif: 18:59
Yeah. So this is where we started. We created a whole library of these PCFs and where we've got to now, mark, is that we've recently launched our new generative AI app building platform for Power Platform on top of this PCF library, and so for us, it's all about expediting time to value for our customers, because what we found along the way was that we had many a person that spoke to me that said rahan, do you know what these pcf components? We didn't even know what they are. Yeah, they're amazing, but you know what? We're still struggling with basic power apps and we've got skill shortages in terms of low-code developers. Do you know what? Can you just build these apps for us?

Rahan Arif: 19:42
And it got me thinking. You know what my vision here is to be product-led. I don't really always want to be relying on consultants to deliver those outcomes. How do we get to those outcomes faster? And that led to Genera, which is our latest product. Now we're using all of these PCS components and, on top of that, we've built our own proprietary AI engine now where, within five minutes, you can go in and articulate the use case that you want to do, and this AI app builder generates application requirements and you kind of select your requirements and you're taken through a wizard-like process powered by AI and within five minutes you're able to get a beautiful, highly polished app on the other side, using all of that advanced PCF goodness baked into Power Apps. And so it's this real accelerator now where we're able to see and expedite that value, and that's really the exciting thing for us now combining generative AI with everything that we've done so far, and so we're now very much a platform in our own right as well.

Mark Smith: 20:54
Wow, this is interesting and I quickly just brought up your website and looked at the components that you have, which, as you say, they're visually stunning. How have? Because it's quite unique in the way that you're not a traditional Microsoft partner business and that you're not focusing on the consulting piece. How do you get customers?

Rahan Arif: 21:16
Great question. So we've been quite fortunate in that, we would say, as an organization, we've been quite product and development led up until now. You know, 80% of our resources are still, if not more, our development resources and we've hardly had any massive exposure or spend on marketing. But what little we have done, whether it's through socials or LinkedIn or through the website, has actually resulted in quite a lot of inbound leads from all parts of the world, which is quite interesting and that shows, and that's given us quite a lot of confidence, that there is this demand and need out there.

Rahan Arif: 21:59
People recognize this challenge of yes, we've got power apps. It's amazing we can do all this kind of stuff. We want it to do more, we want it to look more shiny, we want to it to be more functional, we want to unlock outcomes quicker. So we do get a lot of inbound leads. Um, we're on app source. That's helped where we're a part of various microsoft um programs which also bring us in leads, and away from all of that, we are kind of on this growth trajectory. We're bringing in more people into the business to help drive some of that growth, and especially off the back of this new product, junero, which is very new, I would say. As that becomes more mature and people realize the potential of it, we're starting to see some really unique opportunities open up, and for us it's not just about quantity anymore, it's about quality. We're working with some amazing people all around the world now who are coming to us with problems in specific domains, and working with some of these guys, we're now creating some amazing IP together.

Mark Smith: 23:08
You know, when Microsoft first introduced PCF, my thoughts straight away went to Telerik and you know, with your web background, you'll remember back in the day Telerik had a set of components and tools that could create just slick interfaces, you know, and you could drop them in, you could stitch them into the data at the back end, configure them per se and you'd have these stunning visual controls. And just looking at your lookbook that you call it, you can see these amazing components and you've met that kind of expectation and I always thought that someone would spin up a business that just was around creating these components that could be used in interfaces. Do you see anybody else in the space, I suppose, because I haven't come across anybody else that's doing this as a business.

Rahan Arif: 24:04
I saw the gap right, and so the original idea was to be the teller, if you like, for Power Apps right, and there's a few other providers out there and part of the motivation came from. Actually, I'd seen this being done with other Microsoft products, for example, power BI. We see a healthy ecosystem of third-party custom visual developers right, and that's become an established business. In my career with SharePoint, we've seen all these companies building web parts and components because, you know, we see things like the amazing PCF gallery. But of course that's community driven and there's a level at which you know you can't necessarily rely on that if you're using it in a project, because it's just someone doing it on the side as a bit of a hobby or whatever right to enhance their skills. So that was the immediate gap that I saw. I wanted to be the first entrant into the marketplace to do this properly, and around that park came a load of challenges, because we were working at the bleeding edge of pcf, you know, and that involved working with product engineering team at microsoft. There was points at which the engineering team at microsoft were like, wow, how are you doing some of this stuff? And they were looking at some of our patterns of development and we were on calls with them and that was amazing, that experience. But you know what one thing I've learned is you know, like any business, you're finding product market fit. Like any business, you're finding product market fit and you know, I realized after a little while just being a component company wasn't going to be enough, because, ultimately, what customers really care about when you're talking about, they just want outcomes, they want solutions being delivered right. And there's a point at which, yes, if your target audience is just developers, then great, but I think there was so much more to be done in this space of low-code in terms of really democratizing app development further.

Rahan Arif: 26:23
I'm a firm believer in there's so much more to be done here. This is these huge backlogs which exist in these organizations, and just having this confined to it pros isn't enough. So I talk to a lot of kind of senior leadership teams, it leaders and people on the co-face, the business, and for me it's always been a struggle to kind of get them over to to to power apps and away from things like excel, and I've been highly motivated to kind of bring those guys along. And so where we've got to now, mark is, you don't have to be scared anymore of power apps, power platform, because it can still be quite daunting.

Rahan Arif: 27:04
There's so much functionality in these platforms and Microsoft's. When it's a platform for all kinds of people and you add on and layer on more features, it becomes more and more complicated and so it's not really easy to pick up, and that's why we're taking a slightly different approach to how we're doing things. You know, we're trying to abstract away all of that complexity now with ai still got all the power in the background, but really the future for us is really bringing the business users into the game, um, alongside all the traditional it guys, because I think we're in for a really exciting next few years and I think that it goes beyond just what we're seeing in this kind of low-code space. I think AI is just going to be having this impact.

Mark Smith: 27:51
And so I take it that's the motivation, as in when you say it's an exciting few years, it's around how you're going to combine AI with what you have been doing in the business to date.

Rahan Arif: 28:02
AI is going to be this catalyst, this unlocker for what low code should have always been. You know all the, all the metrics where low code's going to be 65, 70 percent of what is going to be doing as far as application development internally. But I think those numbers are only really going to be achieved now that we're infusing in ai yeah, not just us, microsoft, of course, and a bunch of others as well into the mix. I think this is the bit which will really finally democratize app creation, because it really does allow, if it's done well, an abstraction layer to be created which hides some of the complexity behind things away. I'll give you some practical use cases and some examples of how we're really seeing it becoming super powerful, right? So, using our new generative AI platform, I was in a workshop a couple of weeks ago with a cross-functional section of an organization. There was five people in a room, maybe some ops resources, we had a couple of C-level resources, some from HR, finance, marketing, great blend and we effectively armed them with this generative AI app building platform and within one hour they were able to envision all kinds of scenarios for their business and, in some cases, really kind of obscure apps which were particular to their domain, things we wouldn't even imagine and it was amazing how, together with the AI, in one hour they were able to churn out 15 or so apps, right. So we've heard of app in a day, right, we're calling it. App in an hour is what we call these sessions, and I mean, half of them were pants, were rubbish, right, but then there was like five in there where, wow, we didn't know we could do this. And that whole envisioning piece has been a huge gap in this power platform space and local space in general over years. Right, because one of the there's a lot of research that's been done in recent years.

Rahan Arif: 30:10
One of the blockers to adoption in in low code is that, especially in in the enterprise world, is when you've got these bas or people are responsible for going around to the business, what, how can we use power apps to solve some of these problems? That envisioning piece has always been quite difficult to do. You can kind of talk about things, but when you're able to show stuff and show it quickly, it's a lot easier. So that envisioning use case has been really powerful for us and there's a couple of other kind of personas which are really benefiting from this. So we've got bas and consultants right who are generating prototypes rapidly, working with clients almost in real time, and the way in which that speeds up decision making over. Yeah, we should do it this way versus that way. It's unheard of compared to how we've been doing things for the last, last decade.

Rahan Arif: 31:07
And when we talk about other microsoft partners, consultants, consultancies, pre-sales we're finding a huge revolution opportunity here as well, right, because just imagine kind of the level of resource currently or that it's taken to develop prototypes and demos. You go in okay, what do you want? Client. You go back a couple of weeks later oh, is this what you want? No, not quite. I'll go back another couple of weeks. What we're finding now with people, some of our early adopters of this, is this is a major business development pre-sales tool as well, being able to show the art of the possible. More than that, a prototype is this. What you want is getting deals over the line quicker and, in fact, more deals as well, and so there's many ways in which this has a transformative impact on this industry is what we're finding.

Mark Smith: 32:02
This is incredible. There's not many things that stun me these days, but just in your conversation, of course. I've looked online as we've discussed. I see on the top right corner of your website you have the ability to book a session, either as for a partnership or an overview and demo, and I highly recommend people get up there and go and book something.

Mark Smith: 32:23
I don't normally promote things on my podcast, but this has definitely excited me and what I've seen and I you know my first thing is man, I need a demo of this because it's uh, it's pretty sick and amazing and um, and that whole use case around prototyping, I think is a thing that businesses are expecting more and more, like speed to visualization. They don't want you to go away and build, you know, even a two-week, three-week demo, build and then come back and show them. They're much more wanting this tactile experience in that pre-sales. You know process, and so I think Microsoft partners should go check you out. You know if you've got a power platform, you know practice inside your business. Go check this out. This could be a way to really talk with your customers at a whole and well, your customers, your stakeholders, at a whole new level. Rohan, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Rahan Arif: 33:19
No, my pleasure and really appreciate the chat. And yeah, please do come online, mahat, and check us out. It'd be a pleasure to give you a demo. And yeah, stay in touch, my friend. Thank you.

Mark Smith: 33:33
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.