Power Platform Now Has Over 7 Million Active Users

In an interview, Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna said that Power Platform was now a $2 billion business with over 7 million monthly active users (MAUs). It is also experiencing 72 percent growth year-over-year by revenues.

“There are over 7 million monthly active citizen professional developers, which is pretty astonishingly big if you go compare it to a programming language or something,” Lamanna told Protocol. “And the majority of those are business users, non-coders. [Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella] shared, I think a quarter or two ago, that we crossed $2 billion in revenue in the trailing 12 months, which is growing 72 percent year-over-year, one of the fastest-growing Microsoft businesses at scale. The dollar piece … shows there’s value. Because that’s the other thing, lots of people use it, and they get a lot of value. 97 percent of the Fortune 500 uses the Power Platform, 92 percent of the Fortune 500 uses Power Apps in at least one department. It’s not like air, I don’t see it literally everywhere, but you run into it all the time.

Microsoft’s Power Platform is a family of business intelligence, app development, and app connectivity solutions, many of which fall into the “low-code/no-code” category. Power BI is an interactive data visualization business intelligence (BI) solution. Power Apps, now included in Windows 11, is an end-user app for creating low-code custom business apps. Power Automate competes with IFTTT and helps users create workflow apps and services. And Power Virtual Agents is used to create interactive chatbots that can route customer requests.

Microsoft also has an interesting take on “low-code/no-code”: they expand it to “no-code, low-code, and pro-code” to address professional devs too.

“All are welcome,” he says. “No-code for business users, low-code for IT pros, and pro-code for the pro devs. And we really focus on making that possible. And that’s a hard thing from a technology and a user experience thing, that is the big challenge. How do you make it that capable but that understandable; that powerful, but that easy to get started?”

It’s an interesting interview, and worth reading. And while I have plans to revisit Power Apps and Power Automate this year, you should check out my 2020 post, Master 365: Getting Started with Power Apps (Premium), for a bit more information about that solution.