AIS recently held an internal hackathon for Microsoft Power Platform to expose our team to the platform, concepts, approaches through hands-on experience and to demonstrate the role Power Platform plays in modernizing legacy applications in the cloud.
As a premier Microsoft partner, Power Platform has quickly become a core part of our holistic enterprise cloud transformation strategy. Our teams have helped enterprises across Financial Services, Insurance, Health and Life Sciences, and the Government leverage Power Platform for enterprise-grade application modernization in the last three years.
We’re integrating Power Platform with Azure and Microsoft 365 for powerful legacy modernization capabilities, and throughout the project, we uncovered new lessons learned to share across project teams.
The Power Platform Market
There’s been a surge in demand for Low Code Modernization solutions in the last few years. Many organizations are looking to enable Line of Business (LOB) owners and teams to build productivity and collaboration solutions, offsetting the continued strain on IT teams.
Microsoft answered the call with Power Platform. Since its release, we’ve been working with product teams and industry leaders to develop adoption frameworks, accelerators, and solutions to help organizations get the most out of their Power Platform investments. The demand has grown such that we’re continuing to introduce new ways to build our Power Platform skills. Enter Our hackathon team.
“Power platform is really a ‘work less do more,’ as it would even get the integrations done with legacy systems without writing a single line of code. This I have never experienced in my 13 years of experience, just amazing. The perspective of low-code-no-code is completely changed with this experience, it is an enterprise development tool that can connect your teams’ apps to outlook app to data verse to SQL. You name the technology; it has a connector to fit in.”
– Technology Lead at AIS, Kranthi Kiran Gullapalli
Meet the Hackathon Team
There was a lot of initial interest in learning the platform from our India-based team out of the AIS Hyderabad HQ. Over a dozen people committed weeks of their time inside and outside of regular working hours in the pursuit of the Power Platform experience.
Some of the participants included employees from our HUB team. The HUB is a group of employees fully dedicated to helping AIS project teams deliver successful cloud modernization projects. This team consolidates knowledge and experience to provide rapid research and guidance for cloud migration and modernization projects. As app modernization using Power Platform work grows, we wanted to allow individuals to skill up on the platform.
But the HUB team members weren’t the only participants. These groups comprised learners and teachers across account teams. Teams were broken down into several pods with a leader to guide that team’s focus area for the project, including Dataverse data migration and integration, authentication, Power Apps Portals development, and more.
“MPP Hackathon” is where the idea of converting a monolithic application to a Power Apps Portal became a reality. Initially, some ideas flowed on reimagining a typical legacy app to Power Apps Portal, but the hackathon allowed us to experiment & try it. Hackathon helped me & my team to have hands-on exposure to the MPP environment. We worked with data modeling and got to know better on Dataverse (In-house storage in MPP). We took our first of many steps towards App Modernization with this hackathon as we are new to MPP. Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of business services that unifies our data. It provides a powerful way to analyze data, act on newly generated insights, deliver personalization, and automate business processes.”
– Jagrati Modi, Software Developer
A Mission to Innovate, Passion for Learning
AIS strives to provide ongoing learning opportunities for our employees. And we’re lucky to have a team that is so passionate about learning, innovation, and the continual pursuit of new skills.
We’ve developed programs like aisU to nurture a growing community of continued education, knowledge sharing, and technical excellence. We offer various opportunities to gain exposure to new technology and concepts, such as training boot camps, technology deep dives, and level-up sessions presented by consultants based on project experience.
Access to the methodologies, approaches, and lessons learned from these project teams helps employees gain the know-how and resources to consult on and deliver similar projects within their accounts successfully.
These opportunities aim to help AIS improve overall project delivery, presales support, and envisioning capabilities for better customer outcomes.
Up Next: Our Approach
Stay tuned for part two of this series as we dive deeper into the approach and execution of an end-to-end application modernization project leveraging Power Platform, API Integration, Dataverse, Azure DevOps, and more.
Until then, check out some of our open job opportunities. We’re always looking to add passionate technologists to our growing team. Introduce yourself and let’s talk about a future career at AIS.
