Hello and welcome to Protocol Enterprise! Today: how Charles Lamanna, a rising star at Microsoft, thinks low-code applications will change the way businesses work; operations at DataRobot seem very messy; and how Goldman Sach is trying to reach developers.
Microsoft’s low-code vision
Forty years ago, entire professions were dedicated to the management of spreadsheets and data entry. Then Excel came along: suddenly everyone could do this work on their own, and these spreadsheet managers moved on to more mathematically complicated work.
This kind of evolution is exactly what Microsoft Vice President Charles Lamanna is considering for coding.
- Lamanna, who started with Microsoft in 2009 to help the company transition to Office 365, quickly rose through the ranks to become a key low-code evangelist.
- At a Microsoft hackathon in 2014, before low-code/no-code became a hot topic, Lamanna and a team of developers created Wolf Crow, a low-code automation and data integration product. /no-code.
- This product would later become Azure Logic Apps, then slowly morph into Microsoft Flow, Power Apps, and eventually Power Platform, a group of enterprise software tools that Lamanna now oversees with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 apps.
Power Platform is not just a nifty addition to Microsoft’s existing enterprise software suite, but a key strategic initiative.
- “I think there’s probably no more perfect manifestation of Microsoft’s mission statement to ‘enable everyone and every organization in the world to do more’ than low code,” he said. said Lamanna.
- By providing extensibility to customize everything from Microsoft’s CRM to its new digital contact center platform to SharePoint, Power Platform acts as a kind of underlying foundation for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Office 365 products.
Power Platform is now one of the fastest growing Microsoft companies at scale. The low-code platform has over 7 million monthly active users, $2 billion in revenue, and a growth rate of over 70% year-over-year.
- The platform has captured so many users by catering to everyone: from citizen developers to IT professionals to professional developers.
- For Lamanna, this is all an extension of Microsoft’s bloodline: the company’s Excel software is simple enough for an average person to do basic additions, but also powerful enough for an expert to do derivative modeling. complex, all on one platform.
What Excel did for data entry, Lamanna now wants Power Platform to do it for coding. “I want to make sure that if you can use Windows, if you can use Excel, you can be a no-code/low-code developer. That’s the dream.
Read the full story here.
— Aisha counts (E-mail | Twitter)
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WTF is in place at DataRobot?
“Does anyone want to go off-grid fishing in Wyoming for 5 days?”
DataRobot’s former head of AI, Ben Taylor, was only half kidding when he ask the question on LinkedIn as part of a candid explanation of why he recently quit (the news leaked to the media). It’s understandable that a calm lake in the middle of nowhere is preferable to the choppy waters swirling around DataRobot this week and the past few months.
The bad news came in dribs and drabs this year, until the dam burst this week:
Former DataRobot competitor intelligence manager Thomas Dinsmore (now in a similar role at Domino Data Lab) endorsed Saha’s choice, calling it “no bullshit”. He remarked: “The last thing DataRobot needs right now is an empty suit who thinks PyTorch is that thing you use to complete the Creme brulee.”
But this week’s turmoil is sure to make employees even more uncomfortable as Saha attempts to right the DataRobot ship.
-Kate Kaye (E-mail | Twitter)
Bullish on open source
Goldman Sachs’ open source strategy has been one of the keys to its technical transformation over the past two years, and courting developers is at its heart, according to co-CIO Marco Argenti.
“We really decided to collaborate more with the developer community as a whole and also use [open source] as a way to give back to that community,” Argenti, a former AWS executive, told Protocol. Having a “brand” with developers also helps the investment bank and financial services firm attract talent, he said.
Goldman Sachs has more than 300 engineers who contribute to open source projects. He launched Legend, an open-source data management and governance platform, in October 2020 with the Fintech Open Source Foundation. His other open source projects include GS Quant, a Python toolkit for quantitative finance; Goldman Sachs jDMN, a decision model and executive scoring engine implemented in Java; and Reladomo, an enterprise-grade relational objection mapping framework for Java.
“The key here is really to put developers front and center,” Argenti said. “With our clients, it’s not just the CIO — there’s another character that has emerged very powerfully as a decision-maker and facilitator, which is the developer. We are increasingly trying to create an offer for [them] which covers open source, cloud, software, etc., which really adheres to the same standards that we adhere to with other clients and at the same time really codifies all of this expertise that we have relied on over the decades here at Goldman.
— Donna Goodison (E-mail | Twitter)
Around the company
Entrust has acknowledged that a ransomware attack allowed hackers to steal data of its internal systems, but it is not clear whether or not data belonging to customers of the security company was obtained.
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Thanks for reading – see you Monday!
