Contica har pratat med Kent Weare

Introduktion

Hello, Kent, and really glad to have you here today. Can you please tell us more about yourself and what a principal product manager at Microsoft actually does?

Thanks for having me — great to catch up again. My name is Kent Weare. I’m a principal PM manager on the Azure Logic Apps team.

A little about my background: I started as a .NET developer, ASP.NET, web applications, and was working for the federal government of Canada in Quebec. There was an opportunity to do some BizTalk on a project called Medical Certificates Online — this was the mid-2000s. It was a social program called Compassionate Care, where if a loved one was at significant risk of dying, you could take compassionate leave and receive employment insurance benefits. The program required a doctor to assert that care was needed. That was my entry point into BizTalk. I didn’t know what BizTalk was, but I thought the use case was impactful and I was open to learning new technology.

From there the opportunities in integration kept coming. I moved west to Calgary, worked on healthcare projects in British Columbia, then moved into energy — a big industry in Calgary — building integrations predominantly in BizTalk and later Logic Apps. A lot of the use cases I talk about are energy-related because that’s where I built most of my experience.

About five or six years ago I joined Microsoft, starting on what was then the Microsoft Flow team — now Power Automate. I spent a couple of years on the CAT team for Power Platform, focused heavily on RPA and conversational AI with Power Virtual Agents. For the last two and a half years I’ve been on the Logic Apps team, and about nine months ago I took on a leadership role overseeing product management investments and working with the other PMs on strategy and delivery.

Balansen mellan management och teknik

How much has changed since you moved into management — how much time is management versus technical?

I think this could be an hour-long conversation on its own. Historically when I was at energy companies, there was always that line — you get pulled into management roles but you still want to stay technical. At Microsoft, no one will ever tell you to stop touching the technology. The people side always comes first, but being able to grab the latest build of a feature keeps me sharp. I genuinely believe that to be relevant, you have to be hands-on to some extent.

My YouTube channel is also an outlet for that. Even when I’m not directly involved in a specific feature, I’ll go explore it because I’m talking to customers and presenting — I need to be able to speak intelligently about these things.

Wagner’s fråga — tid och balans

Wagner asked to pass this question to you: how do you find time to balance everything — career, running, golf, family?

I haven’t always been great at this. Seven or ten years ago my answer might have been different. About ten years ago I did my Master’s Degree and that forced me to be really productive and focused with my time. I’m definitely a quick-start person — let’s get in, get it started, get it done, then adjust on the fly.

I’m very protective of my time. Since having kids I get up earlier in the morning. That quiet, focused time before the day starts is really important. I try to prioritize sleep consistently — I don’t subscribe to the hero mentality of sleeping less.

Health is just something you have to prioritize, especially as you get older. My wife is incredibly supportive and that makes everything else possible.

Logic Apps hybrid deployment

At Integrate 2024 in London you announced the hybrid deployment model for Logic Apps. Can you tell us more?

We announced what we call the Logic Apps hybrid deployment model — think of it as Logic Apps standard, but customer-managed infrastructure rather than Microsoft-managed infrastructure.

The idea is that where you host your workloads becomes a configuration choice, not a product difference. This is important for customers with specific hosting requirements: on-premises workloads, multi-cloud environments where specific regions run in different clouds, proximity requirements near factories or manufacturing systems, and scenarios involving sensitive or confidential computing.

We are in the tail end of the Early Access preview right now. Customers are onboarded, doing POCs, giving us feedback, and we’re fixing bugs along the way. This fall I’d expect a public preview announcement — I’m hopeful we’ll have something to share at the Nordic Integration Summit in October. Then GA will follow, largely driven by customer readiness and feedback. I’m quite confident this will reach GA — there’s strong interest and the previous offering that never reached GA is not the model we’re following here.

For Swedish and Nordic customers specifically, where there’s a lot of BizTalk still running in healthcare and public sector because of local data requirements, this is a meaningful path forward.

Business Process Tracking — som BAM men för Logic Apps

Your other session at Integrate covered business process tracking. Can you walk us through that?

For people familiar with BizTalk — think BAM, Business Activity Monitoring. The idea is similar: you have key business data you want to extract and build experiences on, without having to instrument every workflow with custom logging code.

A lot of integration teams today have to modify their workflows to emit logs or use track properties or build custom connectors just to capture business-level data. What we wanted was something that sits on top of the workflow, not injected into it.

We deliberately chose Azure Data Explorer as the store. The reason: solutions like Application Insights or Log Analytics were built for performance monitoring — web request volumes, latency percentiles. They weren’t built for integration. They rate-sample under load, which means they can drop trace events. For integration, losing a message event is unacceptable. A purchase order, a lab requisition, a billing event — if you lose the trace of that, it’s a real problem. ADX gives us reliable, guaranteed ingestion.

The experience we’ve built lets you define a conceptual business process in the Azure portal — stages like “order received,” “inventory check,” “order fulfilled” — and for each stage you specify which data to capture. Then you get an overlay that shows you a green/red status per instance, whether it went through successfully or hit an exception. Exceptions can be technical failures or business exceptions, like being out of stock.

Critically, it’s the customer’s own ADX instance — bring your own. We’re not locking the data. That means you can take that data, connect Power BI, and build dashboards that business users can access without ever touching the Azure portal.

This is also about business value. I think as an integration community we don’t spend enough time talking about business value. RPA teams are very focused on it. This is our way of starting to say: what is the actual value of these transactions running? What outcomes are we driving? That shift — from back-room protocol connectors to business outcome thinking — is where I’d love to see the community go.

Accelerating Generative AI with Logic Apps

Your second session at Integrate was about accelerating generative AI development with Logic Apps. What was the core message?

As integrators we’re already in the middleware — in iPaaS. We have access to valuable data and the connections to bring it together. There’s a saying: there is no AI without APIs. You need to get the data into your model before you can reason over it. And that’s integration.

My session used a pub/sub pattern to subscribe to a key business event — in this case, a work order completion at a utility company. When the work order was complete, the workflow would subscribe to that event and ingest the data into a language model. The work order contained customer information, technician details, work order specifics, materials used, and safety data.

Then I had an experience where I could query that data — where are we seeing the most frequent outages? What are the safety incidents? How many tickets has this technician had? This was essentially free-form querying over ingested business data. No additional model training. I had something working in about an hour using samples that are now in our template gallery.

The exciting next step is moving from chat-with-data to actually automating on that data. Chatting with data still creates homework for humans. The real value comes when the AI can take action — like automatically processing a return request, sending a shipping label, resolving a service ticket, granting permissions. That’s the agentic direction. Human-in-the-loop patterns using the Teams connector can still give humans the override button, so you don’t have runaway automation. But the maturity curve is: start simple, maintain oversight, find value, then push further.

And Divia showed me something recently — she recreated the “hot dog not hot dog” demo from Silicon Valley but with three actions in Logic Apps, no custom training, using the GPT-4o model. What used to require extensive model training is now general knowledge baked into these models. That’s what makes this moment so powerful for integrators.

Integration Love Story

Do you have a moment where you fell in love with integration?

This one wasn’t mine per se — a colleague implemented it — but it’s stuck with me ever since.

It was turning someone’s power on and off using integration. This was at a utility with a lot of rural properties, including seasonal properties like lake cabins. When customers wanted their power disconnected at the end of the season, it would require sending a power line technician 30 to 40 kilometers to spend two minutes doing a job.

We had introduced Automated Metering Infrastructure — this was about 16 to 18 years ago. When someone submitted a disconnect request in SAP, and they had the right type of meter, BizTalk was listening to that event and would orchestrate the calls to the metering system. The request would travel down the power lines to the meter and the meter would turn off remotely.

The impact was significant: environmental — no truck rolled. Productivity — the technician could go to a job that actually required their presence. Safety — fewer risk exposures on the road and at properties in questionable weather.

My colleague Luciano later presented this at a BizTalk Summit in Redmond around 2013. He brought a light bulb on stage, got everything registered, and hit the button in SAP live — and the light went off in front of everyone.

SAP was never built with that in mind. The metering system was built for this purpose but didn’t know who would be on the other end of the pipe. That’s integration — making things work together that were never designed to connect — and finding business value so clear that the ROI paid for itself thousands of times over.

Fråga till näste gäst — Mike Stevenson

The next guest is Mike Stevenson. What questions would you challenge him with?

Two questions. First — Mike is big into golf — what’s his favorite shot to hit on the golf course? Off the tee, or maybe 80 yards out with a wedge?

Second, and this is the more important one: what could integration teams do to better position the value of integration? Not from a nuts-and-bolts perspective, but from a positioning and communication standpoint. What do customers get wrong, and what should integration teams be doing differently?

Thank you so much, Kent. This has been a wonderful conversation and we’re really looking forward to seeing you at the Nordic Integration Summit.

Looking forward to being in Sweden. Thanks for having me — this has been a lot of fun.