Low Code Buyer's Guide

Low Code Development A GUIDE FOR BUYERS

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March 2021

SD Times

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Buyers Guide

Think high

for low code Businesses turning to new platforms to drive innovation

BY JAKUB LEWKOWICZ

T

he use of low-code tooling is rapidly growing and provides tremendous opportunities for organizations to speed up their development process while saving on cost to build those applications — and the reason that the editors of SD Times declared 2021 “The Year of Low Code.”

A February report from Gartner found that the market for low-code development tools is expected to total $13.8 billion in 2021, an increase of 22.6% from 2020. Gartner added that the surge in remote development during the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to boost low-code adoption even despite the ongoing cost optimization efforts at organizations.

Currently, many different types of tools are growing in demand under the umbrella of low code.

Specifically, low-code application platforms (LCAP) are expected to remain the largest component of the low-code development technology market through 2022, increasing nearly 30% from 2020 to reach $5.8 billion in 2021, the report stated.

This is followed by the growth of other low-code technologies such as

intelligent business process management suites, multi-experience development platforms and robotic process automation (RPA).

Recognizing this tremendous opportunity for growth, all of the major SaaS vendors currently provide capabilities that incorporate low-code development technologies, Gartner found.

It enhances the capabilities of developers to be more agile and enables them to try out new technology.

“It’s really the idea about a composable enterprise, which is taking your business and creating it as a set of Lego blocks so they can be built in new and interesting ways often using services across any of their digital touchpoints,” said Andrew Manby, the vice president of product management for HCL Software’s low-code platform, Volt MX. Low-code solutions are primarily made of three main parts, according to OutSystems in a blog post: l a visual IDE that enables users to define the UIs, workflows, and data models of your application; and the ability to add hand-written code where necessary; l connectors to various back ends or services;

l and automated tools for building, debugging, deploying, and maintaining the application in test, staging, and production.

However, there is variety among the low-code tools out there.

While some serve as a visual database front end, others focus on niche business needs such as case management. Some are outside the realm of actual application development such as RPA and then there are no-code tools that cater more to business users and citizen developers.

The no-code side of it is really components, widgets, modules, templates, and all of these things that provide the guardrails for the business to construct whatever output it is. It’s usually preintegrated with something. So if it’s a standalone solution, then the data is inside the database and it’s typically kind of just a simple relational table, explained Jason Wong, a VP and analyst on the design and development team at Gartner. “ ‘No code’ as a term seems like it’s trying to now exceed or supersede low code as if to say we’re somehow newer and better than low code just as much as low code in the past five to 10 years has

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taken off as a way to replace rapid application development and RAD tools, so it’s a huge phenomenon,” Wong said.

will have professional developers and the business users, in some cases, citizen developers that might be responsible for one specific form or specific automation of parts of a workflow.”

Low code for all One of the key benefits of low code is it reduces the barrier to entry for building applications for certain use cases.

“If you need something constructed for a government agency, now you can have a business analyst understand all of the process mapping and can learn these tools and start building applications,” Wong added.

Also, the pandemic has created a huge need for rapid digital transformation as organizations had to change how most of their businesses operated within days, and many organizations started looking to low code for that quick switch and to offer additional capabilities to their customers.

“We see the catalyst of the pandemic created a surge in activity and adoption of low-code platforms and the reason for that was companies and government organizations were dealing with highly dynamic and acute changes to core processes that they had to adapt to,” said Jay Jamison, the chief product and technology officer at Quickbase. “And the promise and value of low code is the ability to quickly build, deliver, and iterate on business critical applications.”

The desire for extended capabilities resulted in a surge in demand of developers which could not be met.

“Never have we had a greater shortage of developers who can actually build the systems that are needed. And when you have that huge gap in terms of the demand for digitization and the lack of supply of engineering talent, low-code platforms are sort of filling the breach with quick ways,” Jamison said.

This will allow for more collaborative cross-functional activities between developers, IT, and users, according to Gartner’s Wong.

“It’s not going to be the business handing over requirements to IT or to a professional development team,” Wong said. “It’s going to be these collaborative cross-functional activities.” “This is what Gartner calls a fusion team where you

New users and new use cases for low code Citizen developers who are business users with little to no coding experience building applications with IT-approved technology are now on the rise as well.

These business technologists are now a huge addressable market for vendors to sell to, particularly the no-code providers, Gartner’s Wong said.

And these employees are also getting more comfortable with bringing some of these low-code solutions into their organizations to solve very specific targeted problems, according to HCL’s Manby.

“So it’s the aspect of enabling the developer to work with the designer and the business stakeholders to develop something which is compelling and elegant and this type of platform allows you to do that,” Manby said. “Frequently, it’s someone in sales who wants to get something done, maybe they’re creating a top customer list and they’re interacting with their CRM of choice whether that’s Dynamics or Salesforce.”

Just as low-code tools are used more commonly by different parts of an organization, the use cases for the tools have expanded as well as companies try to apply low code to their specific industry’s problems.

Some common applications of low code are for processes that are currently spreadsheet-driven. Before, organizations would have to email out a spreadsheet, have everyone fill it out and send it back, and then the business side would have to cut, paste, and merge the data together. Now, everyone can just input their data, and the low-code application does the job of merging that data to a central location.

Manby added that some common sectors where low code shines are those where people are innovating around the business and the safety and compliance realm so something like making sure an oil rig is going through a maintenance cycle and everything is okay.

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In addition, Quickbase’s Jamison said low code can be used effectively around the supply chain and the “last mile” areas that connect to and around ERP systems.

“ERP systems are traditionally pretty challenging to extend and they aren’t super flexible. And so what we find is customers appreciate the opportunity to be able to connect a low-code platform into different ERP systems so that they can get that last mile customization and flexibility that they need to drive the impact that they need in their business,” Jamison said.

Low-code tools can also spin up ways to organize supply in the healthcare system, an especially important use case, as of the pandemic, Jamison explained.

This can help tackle problems like how do I get the right nurses, the right ICU equipment, the right doctors that are certified for the right parts of my network, so that I can balance my supply with the demand and low-code tools can quickly help users create those applications during a pandemic.

Other areas include total quality manufacturing auditing where organizations want to track the state of total quality manufacturing across a number of plants in a company’s purview.

“It’s very difficult to do that in Excel, very difficult to do that tracking in real time and measurement benchmarking in something that’s a single flat Excel file that’s being shared across many sites because the data is often out of date and so on,” Jamison said. “You need the ability to have a scalable set of data that you can sort of look at and view with many different visioning techniques so that the HR system and the procurement system and the people that are trying to drive different outcomes, whether it’s a resource thing or managing finances or checking quality, they can all have what they need.”

Overcoming limitations While low-code solutions improve agility and cost-savings among their many benefits, they aren’t the silver lining to all of an organization’s problems on its own.

More modern full-stack developers might hit a ceiling more quickly as to continued on page 9 >

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How do you help customers with their low-code initiatives?

Andrew Manby, the vice president of product management for HCL Software’s low-code platform, Volt MX Businesses everywhere need to deliver exceptional ways to engage customers, partners, and employees — and transform systems and automate business-critical processes — into easy-to-use mobile apps and multi-channel experiences. Low code offers the opportunity to be more responsive and innovate and scale rapidly. When selecting a vendor to help create multichannel experiences and enable digital transformation, forwardthinking CTOs and CIOs need to consider a few key things.

Whether a company has one developer or teams of developers, it shouldn’t waste time and resources creating and tailoring specific code for specific platforms. You should be able to build once with a single code base, and deploy everywhere — from native mobile to PWAs, wearables, or even kiosks.

Many organizations embark on digital transformation and app dev journeys to find that they hit a wall of complexity. You need to be able to unlock existing data and bring together back-end systems, apps, and processes — and do this securely and with high fidelity. You need integration without limits.

You need serious tools with serious capabilities.

HCL Volt MX is an industry-leading low-code app-dev platform that empowers professional developers, enterprise architects and digital designers to rapidly deliver consumer-grade apps. HCL Volt MX lets you build, deploy, and deliver beautiful, powerful applications that take full advantage of advanced mobile device features to enable conversational apps, touchless payments and the use of augmented and virtual reality to improve the consumer experience of your product or service.

Charles Kendrick, CTO, Reify and Isomorphic Software Reify of course offers all the usual services: consulting, support, training, etc.

But what’s different about Reify is its hybrid development model. You can use Reify to build any part of an application, and in multiple places within a single larger application, and you can even extend an existing application with Reify-created screens.

This is possible because Reify projects represent a self-contained set of screens and data access points that can be used anywhere. We never assume that a Reify project owns the whole screen. A complex application might consist of a hand-coded start screen that leads to a mix of Reify-created screens and hand-coded screens. Or, a Reify project might be used for a popup wizard, or for the contents of certain tabs but not others. This gives our users much more flexibility, and the ability to leverage low code in many more scenarios.

We have seen many of our ‘competitors’ focus on hosting the web applications their customers build. We do this, but don’t see that as a differentiator. We are focused on accelerating the design,

development and maintenance process. We want our customers to be successful, and support that by offering unlimited end-users, as opposed to penalizing them by charging per-end-user fees.

Typical low-code platforms allow you to build most of your application visually, then offer a limited set of “extension points’ that may or may not meet your remaining needs. Often that results in you getting stuck. Your developers basically have to start again from scratch — outside of the low code tool — to develop the capabilities you need.

Reify is different. At any time, you can simply continue development using the full SmartClient/SmartGWT platform as opposed to being limited by a small set of extension points.

Jay Jamison, chief product and technology officer at Quickbase Businesses today need to change and adapt faster than their technology can support. As market conditions and job functions continue to change, organizations must create a culture that supports a more inclusive and cross-functional way of working. Being operationally agile — flexing and adapting to constantly evolving market dynamics and needs — is no longer a nice-to-have, but a requirement to survive and thrive.

Quickbase provides a no-code operational agility platform that brings business and IT teams to work together to safely, securely and sustainably create an ecosystem of applications. By enabling problem solvers of any technical background to develop solutions, Quickbase helps businesses quickly develop tools for their unique needs and accelerate the continuous innovation of processes.

Leveraging citizen automation and development at scale across one common platform, leading organizations unlock potential, get more out of their tech stacks while reducing burdens on IT, increase employee engagement and capture new opportunities with customers and business partners.

Quickbase supports low- and no-code initiatives in three key ways: l Extending data and processes from core business systems. It can be difficult to get business data into the hands of those who need it most. Legacy systems can be too fragile to work with, hard to get data out of and too costly to customize. With Quickbase, you can enable your teams to continuously improve their most complex business applications. l Delivering real-time, actionable insights. Maximize the effectiveness of every employee and provide real-time, personalized visibility across your operations so everyone has the insights they need to improve the business every day. l Providing enterprise-grade security and governance. Quickbase empowers continuous innovation while at the same time managing risk, standardizing governance of low-code applications on one platform rather than across many point solutions.

Learn more about how Quickbase supports low/no-code initiatives at quickbase.com. z

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A guide to low-code platforms n

FEATURED PROVIDERS n

n HCL Volt MX: HCL Volt MX is an industry-leading low-code app-dev platform that powers developer productivity, agility, and speed to build apps that transform the business. HCL Volt MX makes it easy to deliver amazing apps across all digital touchpoints, integrate diverse and complex systems, and add innovative experiences such as VR and AR to meet ever-evolving customer expectations. n Quickbase: Quickbase provides a no-code operational agility platform that enables organizations to improve operations through real-time insights and automation across complex processes and disparate systems. Our goal is to help companies achieve operational agility—to be more responsive to customers, more engaging to employees and as adaptable as possible to what’s next. Quickbase helps nearly 6,000 customers, including over 80% of the Fortune 50. Visit quickbase.com to learn more. n Isomorphic: Isomorphic Software is the global leader in high-end, web-based business applications. They develop, market, and support the Reify low-code platform, as well as the SmartClient & Smart GWT HTML5/Ajax platform Reify is based on. Their technology gives you all the productivity of a low-code approach, combined with all the power of an enterprise-grade web application platform.

n AgilePoint NX is a low-code development platform that allows both developers and “citizen programmers” to easily implement and deploy cross-functional/ cross-organizational business apps into digital processes across multiple environments and cloud platforms.

Abandon the need for code with dragand-drop, declarative, visual development for all aspects of app dev — UX design, process design, rules design, and more.

n Alpha Software offers the only unified mobile and web development and deployment platform with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” modes. The platform materially accelerates digital transformation by allowing line of business professionals to work in parallel with IT developers.

n Boomi is a provider of cloud integration and workflow automation software that lets organizations connect everything and engage everywhere across any channel, device or platform using Boomi’s industry leading low-code iPaaS platform.

The Boomi unified platform includes Boomi Flow, low-code workflow automation with cloud native integration for building and deploying simple and sophisticated workflows to efficiently drive business.

n Altova’s MobileTogether provides developers with the tools needed to build complex mobile applications quickly and easily. With MobileTogether, developers can create apps without having to manually write code, without needing to sacrifice quality. It uses a combination of dragand-drop components and easy-to-understand functional programming, making it easy for developers to use it to build sophisticated mobile apps.

n Caspio: Using visual point-and-click tools, business developers can execute the entire application design, development and deployment process, allowing them to rapidly deliver a minimum viable product and continue iterating as the market requires. The platform also offers built-in security controls, governance and compliance — such as HIPAA, FERPA, FIPS 140-2, and the EU General Data Protection Regulation.

n Appian’s platform allows teams to quickly build unified views of business information from across existing systems, and lets them create optimized processes that manage and interact with their data.

n K2 offers an established platform that excels across mobile, workflow, and data.

K2’s core strength is support for building complex apps that incorporate mobile, workflow, and data. The company pro-

vides a data-modeling environment that allows developers to create virtual data views that bring multiple systems of record together into a single view. This allows developers to create an abstract view of the data. n Kintone: Teams can run, test and iterate on processes, and efficiently manage tasks with Kintone’s no-code workflow automation tool. The platform features branched workflows and trigger-based notifications with built-in collaboration at every step of the way. Teams can navigate databases quickly and easily, diving into their data with easy-to-use and quick-toconfigure views, filters and reports.

Developers can also take application customization and workflow automation to the next level with Kintone’s open APIs and JavaScript. n Mendix is a low-code, high-productivity platform that enables enterprises to transform how they innovate and compete with applications. Building apps on Mendix is easy, fast and intuitive with the use of visual models, enabling a wide continuum of people, from developers to business analysts, to build robust applications without the need for code. With model-driven development, business leaders and IT have a shared language to build applications rapidly. n Micro Focus: Service Management Automation X (SMAX) enables users to create IT and non IT workflows and process-based apps in an entirely codeless manner, helping customers escape endless implementation cycles and increase time-to-value. Additionally, the intuitive, visual, low-code/no-code interface of Micro Focus Robotic Process Automation (RPA) makes it possible for users to do all of their work on one screen, with the ability to build sophisticated end-to-end RPA workflows for any use case. n Microsoft enables users to create custom business apps with its PowerApps solution. PowerApps features a drag-anddrop, citizen developer-focused solution designed to build apps with the Microsoft Common Data Service. PowerApps can be

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used with Microsoft Flow, the company’s automated workflow solution, for data integration. Build apps fast with a pointand-click approach to app design. Easily connect your app to data and use Excellike expressions to easily add logic. Publish your app to the web, iOS, Android, and Windows 10. n Nintex helps enterprises automate, orchestrate, and optimize business processes. With the company’s intelligent process automation (IPA) solutions, IT pros and line of business employees rely on the Nintex Platform to turn their manual or paper-based processes into efficient automated workflows and to create digital forms, mobile apps, and more. n Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud accelerates development and hosting of engaging web and mobile applications with an intuitive browserbased visual development on the same enterprise-grade cloud platform powering Oracle SaaS Applications. Create business objects, add process automation, integrate external systems and, when needed, leverage standard JavaScript to create amazing apps faster. n Pegasystems: The Pega low-code application development platform allows business and IT to collaborate in real-time, using visual models to capture business requirements, quickly iterate and scale apps while ensuring nothing gets lost in translation. Pega automatically generates the application and its documentation audit trail, all leading to a 75% reduction in development costs. n Salesforce: The Lightning Platform anchors this low-code customer base, and includes tools like Heroku and Salesforce DX as well as partnerships that address coders. Salesforce’s mobile low-code platform helps customers extend customer data managed by the vendor’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM apps while blending and aggregating it with data from other systems. z

what they could do with the platform. To fix this, low-code vendors are building out solutions with extensibility in mind so that developers can go in and write Java or JavaScript to create a component.

“So in that regard, the professional developer can still go outside the boundary of the local environment, but they still have to follow the prescribed way to write those components,” Gartner’s Wong said.

If developers want to go all the way up, they can also write some service in AWS or Azure, whether that’s through a function or a microservice, they could then write an API that could be consumed by the low-code platform.

“So while there are ways to go around the limitations of a low-code platform, the ceiling can vary quite a bit between tools,” Wong said.

It’s also important to put in guardrails to prevent any security compromises and to prevent shadow IT. Now, as lowcode solutions are more SaaS-based, they can be more easily managed from a security perspective. With SaaS, users have role-based access controls. They can see the apps that they built and who’s using them and if they’re effective or not. If they’re noted, then you can deprecate them or roll it back and go improve it, Wong pointed out.

“So the analogy that I like to use is the difference between a professional race car driver and your weekend warrior, your go-kart driver. So if you go go-karting you know you are operating in a safe environment. Even if you crash, you don’t have too much damage. The tool is the go-kart,” Wong said. “You can regulate the go-kart to go 20 miles an hour, or you can let it fly at 60 miles an hour.”

Establishing proper training and creating policies can prevent shadow IT and many organizations are building out training programs on how to implement low-code tools properly.

“We invest a tremendous amount of R&D effort around leadership in governance, and in controls and capabilities that can ensure that we are a solution for it in the realm of trying to sort of control shadow it,” Quickbase’s Jamison said.

Some vendors are also offering low-

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code approaches to ISVs in which companies that are delivering a vertical ERP or CRM can add a modified version of a low-code tool such as Reify so that customers can add additional screens or customize new ones, according to Charles Kendrick, the CTO of Reify and Isomorphic Software.

This can be especially useful for applications in which customers need customizability.

“A lot of low code is for ‘tactical apps’ — applications created in larger organizations where it makes sense to build your own custom applications, because it's a strategic advantage,” Kendrick said.

Low-code tools can also work with other technologies in tandem such as automated dependency impact analysis and debugging, packaged mobile apps for the app stores in one click, and automatic adjustment to allow for new technology.

Another limitation that low-code vendors are working to fix is low-code platforms buckling under a heavy workload when it’s time to scale or integrate with existing systems. Many vendors are looking to automation to solve this problem.

“A lot of RPA vendors call themselves low code or even no code, but basically, they are automating away a lot of the activity and actually eliminating the interface,” Gartner’s Wong said. “So automation is really an important trend in low code now because AI will have a lot of automation and AI will replace the code data.”

While low-code tools and tool adoption is still very early on, the events of last year have really propelled it as one of the biggest technology trends of today.

“We’re in the early innings for sure,” Quickbase’s Jamison said. “It seems as though the last year has really catalyzed the need because the requirements that the industries and governments and educational institutions all have is they’ve got to digitize their business to better serve their constituents, their stakeholders at all levels, whether it’s customers, whether it’s employees, whether it’s shareholders, whether it’s their community, they have to be more digital.” z

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