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But while the consumer app market
"Where is the explosion of business apps?" asked Microsoft Corporate VP of App Platform Bill Staples during a press event.
The big problem, Staples says, is
that the need for business apps is outstripping the availability of
developers by as much as five to to one, citing stats from the research
firm Gartner. Moreover, a lot of enterprise data is stuck in legacy
servers, in addition to a new breed of cloud services.
Enter Microsoft PowerApps, which starts to take names for its waitlist today.Microsoft PowerApps can take data from cloud services like Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox, and Salesforce
Design your app on a PC, and use it anywhere. In a demo, Staples used it to make a dynamic price list of goods and services for a mobile salesperson, with prices that change on the fly on the smartphone.
(Robert Galbraith/Reuters) Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
The actual experience of
making a PowerApp is a lot like making a PowerPoint slide, with a lot of
drag-and-drop. Just slide the elements into place, and you have
yourself an app. There are even templates and sample apps for
inspiration.
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It's designed to be simple, not
requiring any technical expertise — if you have a business problem, just
build an app to solve it. PowerApps even handles hosting and running
the app.
"It runs on any device and allows anyone to create a business application," Staples says.
Actually accessing the apps is
supposed to be easy, too. Just launch the PowerApps app on your phone,
choose the custom app you want from a list, and go. If you make an app
and want to share it, you can just invite collaborators
, like you would with a Google Drive document or Dropbox file.
And on the IT side, Staples says
that PowerApps follows the same data and security rules as the rest of
the corporate network, since it's all accessed from that one central
PowerApps portal. Plus, the IT department can take PowerApps and connect
it to any other system, with a little bit of elbow grease.
With this announcement, Microsoft is riding a wave right along cloud titan Salesforce of
opening app development to the masses. If developers aren't making
enough business apps themselves, these tech giants say, it's time for
the actual users to start plugging some gaps.
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