The Low Code Revolution

The low code revolution

From all the challenges enterprises are facing today, digital transformation is the single most critical one as it disrupts industries, transforms businesses and creates new competitive challenges that will last for years.

Because of this digital challenge, the demand for application development has skyrocketed, creating a crisis within most IT organisations.  Gartner, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, predicts that market demand for application development will grow at least five times faster than IT’s capacity to deliver it through. This is a very worrying state of affair for any enterprises that are becoming more and more dependent, on both the speed of delivering robust applications and the availability of developers. So, let us look in which ways businesses are affected:

Application backlog

The first impact is associated with the production of applications.  Most IT organisations have a serious backlog of applications to implement. It is not unusual for companies to have a backlog of 10+ applications to implement. Any backlogs always result in loss of revenues as business processes are affected, sometimes very seriously. 

Lack of developers and gaps in knowledge

The challenge, that usually enterprises encounter, is multiple when working on their applications. Mostly scare development resources and developer's skills that are either not adequate for the required job or simply not up-to-date. This results in added delays, due to the length of application development, that aggravate any backlogs as these application implementation projects take too much time to deliver. In these cases, the delays keep developers off other critical application developments.

Application requirements are on the increase

The increase of enterprises’ application requirements reflects how businesses are becoming dependent on quick applications implementations. Typically, requirements will fall into these categories:

·        Integration: Secure and reliable access to any enterprise data is a top priority.

·        User experience:  User experience (UX) is more than the user interface (UI). Even if interfaces are well designed and are cosmetically very good, users will not tolerate applications that are not intuitive, that perform poorly during peak demand or which are unusable when out of coverage.

·        Speed: Business departments are pressuring IT to deliver applications quickly.

·        Security: Enterprises main security requirement is to maintain data security regardless of where the data is located – on the device, in back-end (on premise or cloud). Security is also needed at the application, device, and user levels, along with control policies, enforcement and compliance.

·        Management: IT and business users are crying out for comprehensive tools and services to maintain, manage, monitor and control the applications they need.

·        Mobility: Web applications must no longer be just created for PCs and Laptops but they must also be friendly with tablets and mobile phones. In today’s business environments, the means of accessing information have become critical in terms of flexibility of access, regardless of the nature of the tool you use to retrieve the information you need.

·        Expertise: These projects are challenging for many enterprises and many IT departments need support for various stages and phases from project definition, planning and development, to design, delivery, and implementation.

To meet these challenges, enterprises must focus on finding the right technical approach to building their applications, which has led to significant investigations and experimentations. 

Meeting the challenges

Enterprises had to think hard on new ways to quickly implement new applications without having to worry about lack of IT developers. Enterprises started to look at low code technologies to address the past shortcomings. In effect, a new kind of developers emerged from the ranks of business analysts, system analysts, team leaders, superusers and even managers. It should be said that some of them are great low code champion as they introduce this technology to their enterprise. Therefore, now the lack of developers is not an issue any longer as these users have become major players in the low code development arena.

What is low code development?

Low-code development, known as a RAD (rapid application development) uses simple or more complex visual models to define the various elements of an application, reducing the need for hand-coding and accelerating the development process.

Low-code applications make complex development tasks easy enough so that users can build applications well beyond their hand-coding capabilities. This does not just benefit the user but also developers benefit from low-code that boosts productivity, allowing them to focus on delivering the right solution, instead of worrying about technical details.

Forrester, an American market research company, defines low code platforms as those that “enable rapid delivery of business applications with a minimum of hand-coding and minimal up-front investment in setup, training and deployment.”

Many companies are now either using or considering using low-code or no-code platforms to support their IT strategy. By the same token, organisations are either calling on SaaS solution providers to assist them or are even enabling employees, sometimes known as superusers, to take advantage of this technology.

This is, therefore, where the low code revolution starts….

The business case for low code development is undeniable: low code developments significantly reduces both time-to-market and implementation costs of launching new products and services. Less developers’ coding means fewer experienced coders needed to get a project off the ground. Also, a low code development process means each project can be done with fewer staff.

Low code selection points

As an emerging market, the low code industry has many offerings. The following points reflects the features that are generally required with low code platforms:

·        Declarative UX tooling: WYSIWYG tooling; definition of application logic.

·        Data access: Declarative support for multiple relational and non-relational databases.

·        Content and collaboration support: Ease of embedding content and social collaboration.

·        Report creation capabilities: Declarative tools for creating reports; out-of-the-box (OOTB) business reports; interactive reports.

·        Workflow: Declarative support to PCs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones, enables existing business process workflows (e.g. approvals, alerts).

·        Simple deployment options: Hosted or cloud-based deployment; on premise deployment options; low adoption on-ramp.

·        Offline support: Support for local and remote data sources and data synchronization between them.

·        Notifications: Support for notifications.

·        Deployment and lifecycle management: Rapid delivery of applications and updates.

·        Security: Integrated audit logs.

The future for low code

We now have a clear future in sight where potentially key users build low code applications and by doing so, pick and choose the bits and pieces of data they must use and that their enterprises need to manage.  

The next challenge is what low code application enterprises should select. Each vendor has its own product characteristics and pricing model.  Depending on requirements and budgets, a low code system may be a better fir that another one. Hence the importance for performing a gap analysis for deciding which product to go for.

The following picture, from Forrester Q2 2016, illustrates their strength and weaknesses in current offering and strategy: 

   

 

IT Central Station offers online evaluation of some of the main low code vendors:

https://www.itcentralstation.com/categories/rapid-application-development-software

Further assistance

White Wolf Rising is committed at providing low code bespoke or multi-tenants cloud applications (SaaS) to its customers. Please contact us using the following links for further details:

Contact us: https://www.whitewolfrising.com/contact-us

Visitors’ Space: https://www.whitewolfrising.com/visitors-space

Bespoke cloud applications: https://www.whitewolfrising.com/bespoke-1