Today we again take a short break from our regularly scheduled programming to share another nugget of exciting news: HCL’s Microsoft Business Applications Practice (MBAP) has been recognized by Microsoft as winner of the MSUS Partner Award for Power Apps!

Microsoft US (MSUS) created the MSUS Award Program to recognize outstanding achievement by US partners, as well as supplement the highly competitive global Microsoft Partner of the Year program. As you may recall from our blogpost a few weeks ago, HCL was thrice honored this year in the Partner of the Year program: Healthcare & Life Sciences (winner), United Kingdom (winner), and Internet of Things (finalist). Adding the MSUS Partner Award for Power Apps is icing on the cake of MBAP’s successful year!

This award recognizes a partner that excels at providing innovative and unique IP built on top of the Microsoft Business Applications platform. The winner demonstrates success on a global scale by providing industry-specific solutions that help clients achieve true digital transformation. Microsoft describes winners of the MSUS Partner Awards as having shown leadership in customer impact, solution innovation, deployment, and exceptional use of advanced features in Microsoft technologies over the past year.

Microsoft evaluated more than 800 nominations for this award, so competition was fierce. The work that won it for MBAP exemplifies the dedication we have to our clients’ success and stands out as a model to other US Partners. Let’s take a quick peek at a few of the highlights from the last year:

• We developed a Power Platform CoE program that includes a full governance structure. Based on the complex needs of enterprise clients, we enhanced Microsoft’s CoE starter kit by building numerous automations. We set up CoEs for dozens of clients on four continents.
• Our MBAP-developed Power Apps CoE Accelerator empowers us to continually expand our capabilities and execute nimbly for our clients. Driving citizen development activities in large enterprise settings only happens when strong governance and guardrails are in place – exactly the problem MBAP addressed in the accelerator tool.
• Our 300+ dedicated Power Platform engineers built 220 apps and developed/migrated thousands of flows for our clients.
• In a market starved for developers, our D/CIT (Developer/Consultant in Training) program added 180+ Power Apps consultants to the Microsoft ecosystem.
• Many of our Power Apps solutions have led to widely available accelerators and other tools now readily available on Microsoft Marketplace, including PowerConvert (workflow migration), PowerHRHub (employee onboarding), PowerALM (enterprise ALM tooling), Timesheet App, Sales Toolbelt, Return to Work (office desk booking), and H&S Checklist (for office visits).

Our innovation with Power Apps is on display all around the globe. We’ve been at the forefront of this technology since its inception and we consistently and effectively help businesses streamline and simplify internal processes in innovative ways using Power Platform.

What sets MBAP apart is our ability to identify the full scope of digital transformation opportunity for each of our clients. Many partners focus on solving only the specific need identified by the client – they can build an effective solution to that singular issue but stop short of understanding the complete picture of potential. In this way, many clients and partners alike sometimes miss the forest for the trees: so focused are they on addressing a single issue that the forest of opportunities for groundbreaking transformation goes unnoticed. And when clients do look beyond the initial issue, they’re often most intrigued by the prospect of low/no-code development, leading them to focus on curating a team of citizen developers that may not blossom into the creative force capable of effecting real organizational change that they envisioned.

But MBAP operates differently by taking a holistic view of the client’s entire system, identifying myriad opportunities for automation, streamlining, and other forms of process efficiency. While others build a single solution to solve one problem, MBAP literally transforms each client’s entire digital landscape – for today AND long into the future. And as evidenced by recognizing our practice as best in class in the US, it’s a philosophical approach Microsoft embraces and encourages. We’re happy and humbled to oblige and proud to lead by example.

OK, we promise our next post won’t be self-congratulatory. We’ll instead return to offering Business Applications-related best practices, hints, tips’n’tricks, and coding workarounds.