Embracing Change and Technology in the UAE with Sunil Kumar

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. Today's guest is from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. He works at Delphi as a low-code and lead and architect. He has experience as an architect, technical lead, lead, consultant and developer. He's creative, resourceful and flexible Professional. His ability to adapt to change that is presented well on projects, maintaining a positive attitude and strong work ethic. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Sunil.

Sunil Kumar: 1:05
Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm really excited.

Mark Smith: 1:11
It's good to have you on. Always like to start with getting to know you a little bit, so tell us about food, family and fun. What do you do when you're not deep in technical work?

Sunil Kumar: 1:21
Okay, Good thing is that I have a new addition to my family, a recent addition, so I try spending most of my time with the kid and that has taken up a lot of my time which I used to spend on the extracurricular activities on the community side. But yes, from last couple of months it's gone a little bit down because my time has gone completely on the family side.

Mark Smith: 1:52
That makes sense. That makes sense. And tell me about where did you originally come from before you went to the UAE?

Sunil Kumar: 1:59
Yeah, I am from India basically. Yeah, my whole life has been in India. It's from past two and a half years I am in the UAE. I come from an army background. My father, my grandfather, my whole family members the men were mostly, or are, in the Indian Army and fortunately or unfortunately, I'm not part of Indian Army. Yeah, so I went into the IT sector, tech sector, and from last over a decade, I am part of the IT sector now.

Mark Smith: 2:34
So which part of India did you come from?

Sunil Kumar: 2:36
I come from the land of desert, which is Rajasthan.

Mark Smith: 2:41
Ah, excellent, okay, okay, very interesting. So a couple of things I find interesting. A lot of people seem to go and work in the UAE. What's it like working there?

Sunil Kumar: 2:51
It's really nice to work in the UAE. Right, and yes, you said it very rightly there are a lot of expats from India in the UAE. Let me give you a brief fact about it UAE is almost fifth of the size of Rajasthan itself Wow. So I'm just talking about the state I belong to and then the country I'm living in right now. It is the fifth of the state itself. So this research, I did it like a year ago, so I was even amused by it, oh my God. And I'm talking about the comparison between the state and then the country. Yeah, yeah, and that's also obvious because Rajasthan is one of the biggest states in India as well land-wise, land area-wise, one of the biggest states there. So that's natural to compare it.

Sunil Kumar: 3:53
And on top of it, the question was how is it like to be here? In most days it is good, and I don't want to talk about the heat and the summer here, because that's crazy. That's so crazy that even at the night, 12 am night, it's still blowing hot winds like that. I have seen that, I have observed it. So hot winds like that, I have seen that, I have observed it, so I can say that that's particularly about the summers and winters are very short here because of the obvious reasons Very short about half months around, and winters are celebrated in a good way here. Yeah, because it's a short one, and then it also tourism opens up in this winter time.

Mark Smith: 4:44
Mm-hmm. So you know, when I've worked in hotter countries and the ones that come to mind for me is Singapore, where you know if you go outside and you've got a suit on and you just think you're going to walk to the end of the block, you'll come back and you'll just be dripping wet, you know, because of the humidity and the heat is so, so hot and so everybody of course uses the underground to get anywhere, because all air conditioning is it a similar thing there and that if you're working in the air condition environment, you're pretty much in the air conditioned environment the whole time and there's not much reason to go outside and into that heat.

Sunil Kumar: 5:25
It's not actually similar because UAE is like a collection of the sea beaches out there, the deserted land is there, then the heat is also there, so it's in most of the days, most of the summer. Also, it's on a drier side rather than on the humid side, but we do get to see that humid side of things, humid side of weather as well, and obviously, as you mentioned, it's same everywhere. Yeah, it's like the dripping sweats and the drenched thing. It's almost same.

Sunil Kumar: 6:03
But, yes, almost 23 hours of a day we are in air condition, whether we are in office, whether we are at home, whether we are at the bus stations, whether we are in the taxis or the cars. Completely most of the time it is air conditioning. I'm not sure right now it is okay, it doesn't have much of the health effect, but in the longer term how it is going to affect the health, because, coming from India as a country, we have never been in the air conditioning for more than six, seven hours, like in the long run, right, and that too when we were in the at least the IT sector. I'm talking about Other than the IT sector. I don't think most of the population is in the air conditioning ever Interesting.

Mark Smith: 7:03
Interesting because you look at the buildings like the Burj Khalifa and stuff like that. People had to be outside to build that right. All that construction work is outside so they're bearing the full heat. You know, brunt of that heat. Tell me about the tech sector in the uae. Is there a lot? And like, how big is the power platform community and or the dynamics community in the uae is it? Is it only a hundred people? Is it a thousand? Is it ten thousand? How big is that sector?

Sunil Kumar: 7:34
I. I don't think it is very big. I haven't observed it. It is not that big. I don't even think it's more than 500 or let's say, 1000. I might be wrong, because at the same time I see a lot of expats, especially from India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, which are here in the UAE, who are working in the IT sector and are associated with Microsoft, like not only the power platform I'm talking about, I'm talking about the whole Microsoft, especially talking about the power platform. I don't see it's more than 500 people out there. I don't see that Okay.

Mark Smith: 8:17
So that's interesting. That's interesting. Tell me about the community. You know, one of the things that Power Platform has is a big global community. Recently in Vegas, 6,000-odd people at the Power Platform Community Conference. What's the community like, specifically inside the UAE? Do you meet together? Do you have like a forum together? How does that work?

Sunil Kumar: 9:09
in the uae. Uh, we have community here. We have community here and we are not physically meeting all the time, and most of the community is also driven by Microsoft members in the UAE. That's a good thing as well, but at the same time, I don't think that it should be driven from Microsoft. They are doing it. It's a good thing, but at the same time, it should be in a reciprocative manner as well. So it should be from our side as well, but at the same time, I wish I could be part of it a little bit more, spending my time there. But yeah, unfortunately I don't have like 25th hour in my day.

Mark Smith: 9:59
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's so true. There's a lot in the media recently around the UAE and really establishing itself as an AI hub, and are you seeing a lot of that at the local, the real shift to become kind of a global hub for artificial intelligence? Because at the moment, right, it pretty much sits in Silicon valley in the us and we see some of it coming out of france, we see some of it coming out of the uk, but is it really starting to grow inside the uae?

Sunil Kumar: 10:36
it is. It is growing. You, you picked up a very hot topic. It is actually growing and uae I'm not just talking about the UAE, I'm talking about from the Middle East perspective. Middle East government, as well as the organizations, are heavily investing in the artificial intelligence, the actual production level changes, production level adaptation and adoption, as well as some really cool use cases in the near future. So already being invested there and teams are working on the artificial intelligence. I'm not just talking from the Microsoft side, I'm talking from the holistic be it OpenAI, be it any other different models, different organizations, even in-house AI related stuff. Teams are completing it. Teams are working on our like heavily. Yeah, yeah, our organization has also investing, have invested and being invested at the moment when I'm speaking, on the AI side heavily.

Mark Smith: 11:53
So why did you get into Power Platform and what's your view on Power Platform? What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What's your thoughts on the Power Platform?

Sunil Kumar: 12:02
For me. I started my career as a SharePoint engineer right and by the time it was 2018, 2019, microsoft was moving out of InfoPath forms, infopath workflows and the next option which was available was the HTML-based forms, and soon after the thing which came was Power Apps. That was the first thing which came. Power BI was already existing, so never worked on that until that point Started off with Power Apps and Power Automate in 2019, around 2018 and 2019 starting around. It was very raw at that point in time and it was a kind of a struggle as well, because I call myself as an earlier doctor to Power Platform. There were not much resources available online. The Microsoft documentation also was kind of flawed at that point. It was there. It was there, but it was also like on a very starting stage at that point in time. Yeah, so it took some time around six months of self-learning journey, self-hidden trial and errors, and that's how it started. I was actually a SharePoint engineer at that point also, but I had a really good manager whom I was able to convince that there is something new coming in. It's free of cost, we don't have to pay anything. It's under the Office 365 apps itself. It's called Power Apps and Power Automate. I want to build something around that. Give me some use cases, if you have. So he gave me some use cases like onboarding, skill metrics and signature applications. So he gave me some of the in-house use cases.

Sunil Kumar: 14:01
I was working in a product-based organization back then, so we were internally only creating projects. We were internally only creating projects and so he gave me some use cases. The pain areas right at that one in time, which were the onboarding and skill metrics, are still a pain area at this point. Also, we have found a solution as well. Cut short, from 2019 onwards, I started working on power platform self-learning for around one and a half two years. It was complete self-learning. Then actually went into some of the projects which moved towards, like till director level and by the time COVID hit in 2020, that time I was assigned a task on creating an application to track the COVID affected people, and this was a project which I directly worked with my three level three skip levels director. So myself and him we were the only two people working on it. He was constantly giving me some inputs from his head as a business owner and I was the developer, come architect, come VA, come PM, everything.

Sunil Kumar: 15:23
I was a single man there on the other end. So what we did? For three days, continuously, more than 17-18 hours a day, we worked on that application and in three days we were able to create the application, the Power BI dashboard, and we were able to roll it out to the whole organization in India, which is around more than 5,000 members.

Mark Smith: 15:51
Wow.

Sunil Kumar: 15:52
So we rolled out that application to the organization users and we handed it over to the HR team, basically. So let them take the data and take their decisions based on that. So that was something interesting and that was set of a production level, which we did, and did it in three days of time.

Sunil Kumar: 16:16
It was like yeah it was like a high time for me at that point in time and that was the first thing which started me on Power Platform.

Sunil Kumar: 16:25
It just gave me a thought of you know, Power Platform can be a kind of a new route from SharePoint, not moving out of SharePoint, but in parallel to SharePoint development, which I was doing for the last six years, last five and a half years at that point in time.

Sunil Kumar: 16:43
So that's how I actually came into Power Platform, went into Power Platform and started my journey from there. Then onwards I was involved in a lot of different projects on Power Platform and have seen growing Power Platform when it was in the very early stages and then now we see what it has become Mammoth, see what it has become a mammoth and it has become confusing for a lot of people from the licensing perspective. From other side as well, it feels good at some time because when we see our career in some aspect, like in some of the technology, we we think from a longer term, let's say from at least minimum 10 years, and I see my career in Power Platform at least for the next five, seven years more. I would say yeah, until it is matured or I find my new interest.

Mark Smith: 17:46
Yeah, so if you were to cast your eye across your career to date, what are kind of the big implementations that you've been involved in that come to mind and what can you tell us about them?

Sunil Kumar: 17:57
you know the sizing, the kind of industries that they were in and maybe even some of their broader use cases yeah, there are a couple of such use cases or projects which I have worked, like the group of use cases and the projects which I have worked on, and none of these use cases let me share this to the members who are listening to this podcast that the core of Power Platform is. I won't say it's not low-code, equally it is the acceptability or the integrability to the third-party applications. So what I want to say is that Power Platform is Power Platform because it easily can be integrated with other applications, other third-party applications, and I'm not just talking about the Microsoft suite itself, I'm talking outside Microsoft suite, be it API-based, be it on-prem servers, be it on-prem databases, and the solid integration. What we have with Power Platform makes it Power Platform, makes it more reliable, makes it more attractive to the organizations, to the businesses, and any of my most of implementations have been in from the integration side also. It's not that we have worked on Power Platform heavily. We have built Canvas applications, model-driven applications, power Pages, power Pages, websites and all, but at the same time, these PowerPages applications or these Canvas applications or model-driven applications could not have come to this level if the integration was not possible with third-party applications, because that makes the whole use case.

Sunil Kumar: 19:48
We do not sell power platform. What we sell is solution. It is a complete solution which has multiple items, multiple different tools and technologies. Out of those, the major tool or technology is power platform. The other second category of the tools could be service now, could be manage engine, could be zoho, could be docusign right, could be circular, could be adobe, e-sign or it could be secret, anything for that matter. But what makes it a complete solution is the integration with the third point.

Sunil Kumar: 20:24
And and when you talk about the size of the application, whichever application or the client with whom we worked, it was a bunch of more than 100 applications, processes. I would say 100 processes, processes like software request, hardware request, firewall request, and then, on top of leave request, so on and so forth. There were more than 55 or 100 processes like that which were built within one Power Platform. We called it as a collection of all these processes. It was more around that and each of these individual processes has approval workflow to follow. Rather than building different workflows for each process, what we did? We built a configurable approval engine. That configurable approval engine has a configuration at the back end corresponding to each process how many level it should go to approval, and how to take the response and how to move. One process could have five level approval, other process could have two-level approval, but how do we fix that? If we have to do it in a legacy manner, then for each individual process we have to build a process approval. That is not a sustainable solution.

Mark Smith: 21:41
So tell me about licensing implications, because I know you've had some experience in this area and the complexities and challenges around it.

Sunil Kumar: 21:49
Yeah, these are my thoughts and I'm going to bash about it from the members. I don't see licensing a complex thing. It's just that when I was not into it it was complicated for me to understand. But now when I am openly accepting it, okay, let me see what it is. I'm going to research, I'm going to read about it, I'm going to crack the use cases, at least the licensing aspect of the use cases which I want to work on, the use cases which are in front of me, the licensing of those. I'm going to crack those about that. So in that particular way, when I go, I don't find it complicated because then I know in and out, right, this is my use case, which license do I need, Whether it is Power Apps, Power Automate or Power Pages or Power BI, for that matter, which kind of licenses I would need. So if you give me a use case, I will be able to give you the exact licensing which is required to it.

Sunil Kumar: 22:49
But when we talk from the general point of view, which I always have been talking about licensing have been giving sessions around licensing as well in the past I always say licensing, you have to pick your use case first, Then you go to the licensing. If you directly jump into licensing, you are going to get confused. There is no other way. First fix your use case, understand the use case, then go into licensing. That is the better way to understand licensing and if you do this a couple of times you will find that there is a lot of commonality At the end result which you are getting. There is a lot of commonality, so with that you will be able to drive your next set of thoughts. Can you give us an example, Examples like there could be a Power Apps-based solution which you can work on right? Then, if that Power Apps-based solution is going to be, first of all, which database it is going to use?

Sunil Kumar: 23:48
I definitely don't agree that SharePoint Online is a database and I'm very vocal about that as well. But at the same time I also understand that not many of the organizations, at least the small-scale organizations, want to go ahead and have the licensing bit around. I do not entertain that. I do not entertain that. I do not support that, because then it comes with a lot of challenges when you choose SharePoint as a database. But client or customer, what they want is what they want sometimes, and for smaller use cases, we can still agree at some point. It will not go to a greater data, even in the long run, so it's okay, we can go with that. So now there are different use cases, like Power Apps with SharePoint, Power Apps with Dataverse, Power Apps with SQL. As soon as we change the database automatically, the license game changes.

Sunil Kumar: 24:46
Then when we talk about the Power Automate, obviously when we create a Power Automate based on SharePoint, creating a Power Automate based on Dataverse or SQL, licensing is different. Any of the Power Automate which is being triggered from Power Apps doesn't need a Power Automate license. I have been talking about this for so long and I still feel like there is a lot of gap and still there. Any of the Power Automate which is getting triggered from Power Apps or from Copilot Studio does not need a Power Automate license. Let's not consider it as a Power Automate. It is a helping hand to Power Apps Apps or helping hand to Copilot Studio. It's as simple as that. Then why would it need a separate license if it is not running on its own? So these are some of the examples which I talk about in my sessions also and try to make it easier for the audience and the members.

Mark Smith: 25:48
Mm-hmm. So I think that it's been very interesting, isn't it? I didn't realize that Power App to Power Automate scenario. I wasn't aware of the licensing. I like the concept of having a lens on what's use case and then go to a licensing perspective. It would be interesting if someone built a tool around licensing optimization to really look at your app estate and be able to go what type of licensing and apply the rules and either increase or reduce licensing as needed to be fully compliant.

Mark Smith: 26:26
I was at a conference session just last week and I often hear people trying to get around licensing and so what they do is they get into elaborate ways of working so they take data into various systems and they hop around to get to a kind of surface that doesn't need a pro license. You know to avoid it, and so in this one particular use case, the lady was saying that what they do is they capture it in a SharePoint list, but it's confidential information, right, and so it's only temporarily in that list before they suck it into a SQL database, and I'm like so you're saying that for a period of time it was unencrypted and it's confidential, and yet that was their workaround because they didn't want to buy licenses. How do you deal with those type of scenarios?

Sunil Kumar: 27:17
See, it's very simple. We want to understand what value is it going to bring to them. Whenever I am in these kinds of discussions, I want to understand the root cause, and in 99% of the cases, the root cause is the cost.

Sunil Kumar: 27:32
Yeah, in 99% of the cases, the root cause is the cost. Yeah, but we always give them the cost to the security comparison what is going to cost you more and longer? If there is one mess, if there is one unintended user who gets access to your data, then do you think you'll be able to recover the cost of license which you have been avoiding till now? Yes, if the answer to that is yes, then go ahead. We will support you in whatever architecture, whatever database you want to use. No doubt about that. But at the same time, our solutioning is also at the stake. Our name is also at the stake. So that's the only reason we don't recommend anything and we work very closely with Microsoft Very closely, as in like, on each and every project we do discuss with Microsoft, most of the ones right. It's not like we need the support from their side. Definitely, we always need support from microsoft in any other way. But at the same time, we also want to gain their confidence in the solutioning what we provide. Yeah, right and uh. If there is anything better which has come, which has come in the market from last one month or so, then we can adapt that and move forward with that.

Sunil Kumar: 28:55
So I have come to these discussions many times. Even I was part of one project four years ago which was eventually the integration was with SAP. Rather than using the SAP connectors, they built an interface which was pushing the data to Dataverse and then the interface was picking up the data. That interface was pushing the data to SAP and the task of the interface was to sync the data between Dataverse and SAP. I found this very challenging at times but yeah, I was part of that project like after one and a half year, so there was no say on the architecture at that point in time in my hands, so I had to go with that. I had to live with that.

Sunil Kumar: 29:41
But later on, even microsoft has invested a lot of on the on the connectors. As of today, if we see like there are 1400 plus connectors available. So that's, that's in it. In itself, it is a good thing which microsoft has been pushing around. I would say positive push, and even I have. I have a lot of people asking me like, let's say, if we get the license of power platform, we get the access to service now connector, then can we create a ticket there? You can, you can create a ticket, just make sure that you have a ServiceNow instance also.

Sunil Kumar: 30:18
Yeah yeah, the connector cost or the premium Power Automate or Power Apps is not going to give you access to ServiceNow. Correct, correct? So your business has to pay for a ServiceNow to get an instance and then go ahead with that. It is just giving you a bridge to connect to these two tools. Yes, so that's sometimes funny.

Mark Smith: 30:41
Sunil, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been great talking to you. Thank you so much.

Sunil Kumar: 30:46
Mark, I really loved it and thank you so much for having me.

Mark Smith: 30:51
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 NZ365 Guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.