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Tag: Low Code

Low-Code Application Development: A Catalyst to Digital Transformation

Low-code and no-code software development platforms have emerged as a focal point for CIOs, and it’s easy to see why. With an increasing emphasis on market disruption and continuous innovation across industries, tools such as these fit the bill in simplifying application development. Capabilities such as drag-and-drop integrations, out-of-the-box user interface (UI) templates and easy process flows allow anyone—including those with no coding background—to build and change applications. As a result, organizations can quickly deliver new applications and functionalities to keep up with, or disrupt, their markets. Traditional software development cannot match the enhanced collaboration, speed and productivity gains that come with low-code development.

Laggards need to pay attention: Low-code is establishing itself as a key enabler for digital transformation and differentiator for organizations. Below are five reasons why every organization should embrace low-code adoption.

Enterprises will struggle to find developers to keep up with global app development demands: Enterprise IT departments cannot keep up with market demand for application development. In fact, Gartner predicts that market demand for app development will grow at least five times faster than IT’s capacity to deliver through 2021. Low-code application development platforms help bridge an organization’s skilled developer shortage gap. Instead of relying only on short-staffed professional programmers, these platforms enable non-programmers to participate in and contribute to application development. Non-programmer citizen or business developers, such as business analysts, process specialists and departmental specialists, can use their experience with visual drag-and-drop tools to work collaboratively with IT to design and modify business applications.

Low-code increases productivity: Organizational leaders today preach agile processes and methodology to build apps iteratively with constant feedback and collaboration. Bringing the business or citizen developers into application development enables organizations to deliver on the promise of agile. Low-code platforms make it much easier for business users to enter their requirements directly into the application development environment than the old way of creating huge requirements documents. This ensures business requirements are not lost in translation by IT. And just as importantly, the company’s skilled developers have more time to focus on higher-value work, rather than constantly chasing down business users for business requirements.

Low-code development allows disparate teams to build apps collaboratively: How do IT, operations, business, marketing and sales collaborate to build apps that improve customer engagement and drive operational efficiencies? Instead of code, they need a common language that everyone understands, in the form of visual models. Adopting a low-code platform can empower every part of the organization to contribute to application development. CIOs and IT leaders can tap into the knowledge of their front-line workers to create apps that provide next-level customer experiences. And on the back end, organizations can leverage their internal subject matter experts from various departments to create better internal apps that drive operational excellence.

Low-code empowers continuous innovation and scaling: Low-code platforms help organizations start small, evolve and then scale to drive digital transformation. Organizations can quickly build out minimum viable products (MVPs), deploy these apps on the fly, learn and optimize and scale these innovations to foster continuous innovation. Without writing complex code, businesses can easily extend their apps to more channels—mobile chatbots, self-service portals, etc. And cloud-based low-code platforms allow organizations to move between cloud platforms or use a hybrid cloud, enabling even more flexibility.

Competitors are already using a low-code approach: Organizations are looking for ways to innovate, break down silos and reduce costs—and low-code helps them do all of those. A recent Pega-commissioned survey from Frost & Sullivan found that it’s not just hype; 81 percent of respondents already use a visual or low-code approach.

The question isn’t whether to embrace low-code; it’s what to look for when implementing the technology. Some low-code platforms enable organizations to create only simple lightweight applications that fail to scale and offer limited reusability. Other low-code platforms provide disconnected app authoring environments that perpetuate a siloed approach to development for business and IT. With these types of platforms, organizations end up spending too much time stitching together pieces of apps created in these disparate environments.

On the other end of the spectrum, next-generation, role-based authoring environments provide the right tools to anyone who touches enterprise applications. These include visual and intuitive authoring experiences for citizen developers, professional developers, system administrators and data scientists—where users can seamlessly toggle between different studios to quickly access what they need, where and when they need it, all in one unified platform. Users can quickly build and deliver MVP—or better yet, minimum lovable product (MLP)— while evolving and scaling the app to deliver enterprise-grade performance.

The time has come to abandon slow and expensive code-heavy app development. True organizational collaboration and digital transformation depend on it.

— Sid Misra

October 30, 2018
Siemens Acquires Mendix to Advance Low-Code Platform Adoption

Siemens this week moved to substantially accelerate its transition into becoming a software company by acquiring Mendix, a provider of low-code application development tools, for $730 million in cash.

Mendix CEO Derek Roos said Mendix will operate as a business unit of Siemens, which has poured more than $10 billion over the last decade to software development as part of an ongoing digital transformation to a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.

Siemens over the last year determined that Mendix was now a strategic component of that initiative, Roos said, as more applications are shifted to and developed in the cloud. Many Siemens employees already use Mendix tools to develop custom applications with limited to no programming skills. That capability is especially critical in line of business (LOB) organizations that are starting to deploy their internet of things (IoT) applications, he noted. Mendix also recently revealed it is starting to infuse its low-code application development platform with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

Roos said the $730 million investment Siemens is making to acquire Mendix is larger than all the venture capital investments made in rival companies delivering low-code platforms combined. As low-code tools have gained mainstream adoption, however, Mendix increasingly finds itself competing directly with larger rivals such as Microsoft and Salesforce, he noted.

The Siemens decision to acquire Mendix comes at a time when archrival GE is throttling back on digital process transformation efforts. Roos said GE’s decision is unique to structural issues within GE versus being a decision that reflects loss of faith in digital process transformation driven by custom application development. Software is now the fastest growing segment of the Siemens conglomerate, he said.

A recent survey conducted by Mendix in collaboration with ASUG, an end user association for organizations that have deployed software from SAP, finds 64 percent of respondents are experiencing increased demand for custom applications within their organizations. The primary problem is that same survey finds the average custom application development backlog is 24 months. Primary issues cited by survey respondents include high development costs (50 percent), difficulty integrating with existing systems (47 percent) and lack of skilled development resources (45 percent).

Of course, as Siemens becomes a larger software force, some organizations will start will take into consideration how much they may compete with the company before selecting an application development platform. Mendix is betting that as application development expands well beyond internal IT organizations, its status as an independent business unit of Siemens will provide enough distance between Mendix and Siemens business units that a Mendix customer might compete against.

In the meantime, organizations that are embracing low-code platforms are simultaneously increasing their investments in DevOps processes. As the number of applications being developed using low-code tools increases, there is a corresponding increase in application release management that requires them to modernize those processes. As Mendix plays the role in enabling applications that can be deployed from the cloud to the network edge, it’s now only a matter of time before the Mendix low-code platform becomes a more significant element of a larger set of DevOps processes driving digital process transformation projects as unprecedented levels of scale.

— Mike Vizard

August 2, 2018
Appian World Recap: Low Code, BPI, Hackathon & The Woz

I had a chance to attend my first Appian World a few weeks ago. It was right in my backyard, at the iconic Fountainbleau in Miami Beach. I brought a video crew with me and had a chance to do some deep dive interviews with customers, partners and Appian execs. I will highlight those further down. The real story of Appian World, though, was about low code, business process management, hackathons and the Woz. I wrote a recap of the CEO’s keynote from the show, but wanted to follow up with more details.

Appian had announced a hackathon with the winners to be announced at Appian World after the judges—John Rymer, Steve Wozniak and myself—selected the winner from five or six finalists. The winner received a $5,000 cash prize. Contestants came from all over the world; some were teams from Appian partners and customers, while others were individuals.

(Before I tell you more about the winner, let me say that judging this hackathon alongside Steve Wozniak was a personal bucket list moment for me. I did get a little giddy standing next to the Woz and talking with him about the hackathon contestants. But enough about me.)

Back to the hackathon. After evaluating the finalists, we (the judges) decided that the winner best exemplified the spirit of a hackathon. Brad Cauzza created FRED, a facilities record database. Basically, using Appian low code app building and integrations, Brad built a system that allowed visitors to sign in when visiting a facility. It also tracked incoming packages and more. It was a really nice use of the Appian platform.

There were some finalists who had grander applications, but we thought FRED was a great example of what you do at a hackathon. Below is my interview of Brad and Malcom Ross of Appian.

While we are looking at interviews, I also had a chance to sit down for a deep dive with Appian founder and CEO Matt Calkins. Matt has guided Appian from a small group of he and his three co-founders all the way through to public entity. Appian is not an overnight wonder; it has been a 19-year trip for Matt and his team. He shared a lot of his views on this journey, as well as where he sees Appian going in the future.

As I mentioned, there were actually four founders of Appian and they are all still with the company 19 years later. That is quite unusual, to say the least. I also had a chance to sit and chat at length with another Appian founder, Michael Beckley, who is CTO-founder of Appian, like Matt from day 1 all of those years ago. Here is my discussion with Michael:

Over the course of the event I spoke with several Appian folks, as well as partners and customers. You can see the whole YouTube playlist of Appian World 2018 interviews on our DevOps TV YouTube channel.

— Alan Shimel

May 29, 2018
Oracle Adds Low-Code Tool to Autonomous Platform

Oracle this week extended the scope of the cloud services it manages on behalf of customers to include a low-code application development platform based on the company’s Visual Builder development tools.

Jeff Price, vice president of product Management at Oracle, said Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder (VB) Cloud makes it possible to employ a tool based on JavaScript to build applications that might be written, for example, in Java or, going forward, Jakarta EE. Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud is available via a managed service that can easily integrated with a variety of back-end services managed by Oracle or running on-premises.

To complement that effort, Oracle also announced the availability of Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud. Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder comes with tools for accessing back-end services, while Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud provides a raft of additional connectors for accessing a wide variety of other Oracle and third-party services, Price said.

Oracle also committed to delivering additional autonomous services later this year to address mobile and chatbots, data integration, blockchain, security and management and additional database workloads such as online transaction processing (OLTP). Those services will complement existing Oracle autonomous database and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments.

Price said interest in low-code development tools is accelerating as organizations look to extend business processes that have been automated using either packaged applications running on-premises or in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. Rather than trying to achieve that goal using low-level application programming interfaces (APIs) that are fragile, Price said low-code tools such as Oracle VB make it simpler for even citizen developers to construct applications leveraging code developed by professional developers.

Organizations need to decide for themselves when to customize those application environments versus taking advantage of them in a turnkey manner, Price said. Organizations tend to heavily customize customer experience and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, while relying on best practices that have been coded into enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Oracle is changing the way it supports those applications—base-level support for these applications is now free, but Oracle will continue to charge for premium services.

The need to customize applications at scale is driving many more traditional enterprise IT organizations to adopt DevOps processes that now need to span multiple IT environments, Price said. He added Oracle now provides integration with multiple continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms to facilitate that transition.

As Oracle assumes more responsibility for managing the underlying platforms, organizations in theory should be able to devote more resources to developing applications. To achieve that goal, however, many of them will need to figure out how to extend their DevOps processes to include Oracle as a managed service provider.

Oracle also provides access to unmanaged infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and (PaaS) services in much the same way Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft do. Oracle has been late to the cloud game, but this week announced a slew of new cloud customers, including Atomitech Inc., Edith Cowan University, Future Robot, Barrick Gold Corporation, C’s NEXT, Colegio de Bachilleres, Contribute NV, DP World Ltd., Dubai Airport Freezone Authority, Emirates Flight Catering, Hytera Communications Ltd., Ildong Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Konyang University, Land O’Lakes Inc., Leshan City Commercial Bank, McDermott, MCore Group, New Hope Liuhe Co. Ltd., Promata, Stallion Oilfield, Ornua Co-Operative, RecVue, Saga d.o.o Beograd, TCI, TaskUs, University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Authority, and Zeneral Heatpump Industry Co. Ltd. All told, Oracle claims to be processing 55 billion transactions a day on its cloud.

It may take a while for Oracle to catch up to AWS. But if it doesn’t achieve that goal it won’t be for a lack of development tools.

— Mike Vizard

May 9, 2018
Appian World CEO Keynote: Low Code for Sophisticated Applications

Here I am at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach for Appian World 2018, where the theme is “Transform.” The event, which is the biggest one yet with 1,500 registered attendees, is all about low code, and in his keynote address, CEO Matt Calkins emphasized that low code app-building isn’t for unsophisticated, simple apps—we don’t need powerful tools such as Appian for those. Rather, low code is for sophisticated apps to set free the renaissance that will happen with easier app-building.

This is the first Appian World since the company went public last year, and the event has a public-company feel. I didn’t see a lot of people in jeans and t-shirts—most attendees were fairly well-dressed in business-casual, the mark of enterprises.

One of the touch points in Calkins’ keynote was reliance on open standards. Another was to make use of artificial intelligence (AI). I know AI and machine learning (ML) seem to be everywhere. It was interesting the company announced AI integrations with Amazon, Microsoft and Google, but no Apple or IBM Watson. I will ask Calkins about this when I interview him for DevOps TV later today.

Calkins inherently believes that low code will set off a revolution as software continues to disrupt and empower the digital transformation revolution. The logic behind it is simple: “Making applications easier to make because you don’t have to code as much.” But Calkins emphasizes that does not mean you are making unsophisticated applications. The world doesn’t need low-code tools to make unsophisticated applications. It is the higher calling for sophisticated apps that Appian is all about.

Another mantra from the keynote was, “Host anywhere, run anywhere, data anywhere.” The idea here is a true hybrid reality where data can be on-prem or apps hosted on public cloud, on containers or not. In fact, Calkins was very bullish on containers (who isn’t?). Docker integration is already available and he hinted at announcements regarding Kubernetes as well.

Appian seems to have succeeded by becoming the low-code platform. With lots of integration and focus on making application development, management and deployment easier, the company has risen to the top of its market.

Stay tuned for more updates from Appian World today and tomorrow.

— Alan Shimel

April 24, 2018
DevOps and Low-Code/No-Code Tools
Helping out a friend, I had reason to revisit low-code/no-code solutions and poke around a bit. The industry has been relatively quiet on the topic, but changes in systems and marketing made me feel the need to offer an update on the relation of current solutions to DevOps.

Low-code/no-code solutions have been a panacea in the eyes of some both in and outside the industry for decades. 4GLs were the earliest widespread attempt to make an environment that eliminated the need for developers, and while some years are quieter than others, the movement has not slackened.

There are even some things we should consider adjuncts to low-code/no-code environments that normally are not considered. Traditionally the drive for low-code/no-code solutions is to move faster than IT normally turns out solutions. This would force us to consider the spreadsheet in accounting with 50,000 lines of special functions as a companion solution—faster than waiting for IT and more agile.

The thing is that low-code/no-code environments have increasingly realized that IT is going to be their best customer, adjusting their offerings to focus more in that direction. At the same time, agile development and DevOps have made low-code/no-code solutions more palatable to an IT shop that is looking to continue the gains brought about by these technologies.

The future appears to trend toward low-code/no-code solutions being an adjunct of agile and DevOps. I don’t say this lightly, but the signs do seem to point that way. Agile shops, having become more responsive to business needs, will hit a limit on what they can deliver, while the appetite for faster and more responsive systems delivery will not abate. Low-code environments that offer the following will become a very real option to extending the gains of agile and DevOps:
- A clear and understandable way to code when needed in the language of choice for the IT environment.
- A high level of feedback on what is wrong, possibly including suggestions on how to fix it.
- Transparency in what is actually happening behind the scenes with the “no-code” part of the system.
The idea is simple. By handling tasks that we, as developers, do over and over and over, we are freed to spend more time doing the truly innovative and environment specific work. This would seem to offer the next step in the growth of agile.

Those tools that offer options such as automated deployment will step into ARA land also, making the Ops side of DevOps happy—in shops that haven’t invested a fortune in setting up ARA already, anyway. If low-code can offer the ability to say, “Here is a problem,” then the developer can submit a fix, and it is submitted to test, and if tests pass is sent to production (and some of the tools do), then the only questions are, “Does the code generated by the low-code part perform? and, Is it easy to integrate existing libraries, etc.?” If the answers are yes, then we also have an add-on for DevOps that delivers value.

We live in interesting times. It will be very cool to see this all play out, and interesting to see where it heads after this. At least one vendor is betting on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to offer increased productivity.

Of course, it isn’t a panacea. I read where a vendor said, “We automatically update your queries when a table is modified,” which spawns another dozen questions for me, starting with “Really? What do you do about code that was counting on that field much later in processing? Do you check that screens are displaying defaults, or that variables used to make decisions aren’t always the default value? Do you flag this stuff so devs can ‘fix’ what automated query changes ‘broke’?” I’ll be digging in some more, because now they’ve got my attention. So you’ll probably be hearing more from me about this topic.

Meanwhile, let the future worry about the future, and keep kicking it today. Just stay aware of what else is going on out there that might be handy in your toolbox.

— Don Macvittie
April 9, 2018