business Archives - BAYPM | Low Code| Mendix

Apr 19

How Low-Code Can Recession-Proof Your Business?

The economic downturns that come with a recession can be tough on businesses. In such times, companies need to find ways to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and maintain productivity to stay afloat. One way to achieve these goals is by implementing low-code development. Low-code development can recession-proof your business by enabling rapid application development, faster time to market, and more efficient use of resources.

Low-code development is a method of software development that relies on visual modeling and configuration rather than traditional coding. With low-code platforms, businesses can develop and deploy applications faster and more efficiently than traditional software development methods. This approach can help companies cut down on costs, reduce the time required to develop applications, and improve the productivity of their development teams.

During a recession, businesses need to be agile and responsive to changing market conditions. Low-code development provides companies with the ability to quickly create and deploy new applications to meet evolving business needs. With low-code platforms, companies can develop applications in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional development methods, allowing them to respond quickly to market changes and maintain a competitive edge.

Furthermore, low-code platforms allow businesses to optimize their resources. Low-code development requires fewer development resources than traditional software development, allowing businesses to allocate their developers more efficiently. Additionally, low-code platforms enable citizen developers, or non-technical users, to build applications, freeing up IT teams to focus on more complex tasks. This allows businesses to get more done with fewer resources, reducing costs and improving overall efficiency.

In times of recession, many businesses are forced to cut back on their technology budgets. With low-code development, companies can continue to innovate while staying within their budgets. Low-code platforms have a lower total cost of ownership than traditional software development methods. The platforms require fewer developers and less time to develop and deploy applications, reducing costs and increasing ROI.

Low-code development is also beneficial for businesses that need to maintain legacy systems. As companies look to modernize their applications, low-code platforms offer a cost-effective and efficient solution. With low-code development, businesses can build new applications that integrate with existing systems, providing a modern user experience while maintaining the functionality of legacy systems.

In conclusion, low-code development can recession-proof your business by enabling rapid application development, faster time to market, and more efficient use of resources. During a recession, businesses need to be agile and responsive to changing market conditions. Low-code platforms provide companies with the ability to quickly create and deploy new applications to meet evolving business needs. With low-code development, businesses can optimize their resources and continue to innovate while staying within their budgets. By adopting low-code development, businesses can emerge from a recession stronger, more efficient, and more competitive.

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If you want to learn more about how low code can help you adopt a successful digital conversion strategy, you can contact BAYPM. However, if you are more interested in learning about the pros and cons of leading low code platforms, check out Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise low code implementation platforms.

Feb 03

7 Software Development Trends for 2022 and Why You Should Adopt Them

Posted by admin | General | No Comments

By now, we’re all too familiar with the saying “every company is a software company” but scaling and delivering quality software is — to put it simply — hard: software development complexity keeps growing, with tech stacks constantly changing and new cloud services popping up. Yet, there simply aren’t enough software engineers available in the market: IDC quantified that the shortage of full-time developers is currently 1.4 million people (2021) and that will rise to 4 million people in just 4 years.

At the same time, the revolution of hybrid work and the pandemic acceleration of digital has exploded the backlogs of software dev teams in every industry. These last two disruptions may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back on the old approach for conventional development.

This new reality demands that software engineering leaders must review their 2022 assumptions and make plans to modernize their teams, practices, and tools to address the 4 core pillars of their software engineering:

Developer experience: aiming to reduce technical complexity so that teams can innovate rapidly.
Development workflow automation: removing friction and handovers among all platforms and tools from the different stages of the development lifecycle are integrated holistically.
Security and compliance: developers shift left everything that can be tested during development, and right everything that’s better tested later, making it easier for developers to write secure code.
Deployment and operations: focusing on user adoption to enhance service reliability and performance.

Based on these pillars, we predict 7 software development trends that will be key in 2022 and that software engineering leaders should consider to modernize their dev teams, practices, and tools and achieve their business goals:

DevSecOps
API-led Integrations
Low-code for Pros
Cloud-Native Platforms
DesignOps
Universal Observability
PWA-First

#1: DevSecOps

Security, unfortunately, will continue to be the #1 concern for IT executives and software engineering teams. Between an uptick in ransomware attacks, lack of clear boundaries for organizational data, and increased risk with collaborative citizen developments, the data privacy, and regulatory requirements are threatened more than ever before. This led to an increased demand for DevSecOps, where security and compliance requirements are validated at every step of the development lifecycle.

With this increasing pressure to protect development environments from supply chain security threats and harden software delivery pipelines, we’re seeing CISOs and CIOs gradually preferring to create new web&mobile apps on platforms that manage all stages of app development and delivery for each new app — instead of depending on the non-systematic nature of different people with different practices in secure development.

The ultimate goal is for dev platforms to promote and make it easy for dev teams to create secure code, assuming a Zero Trust security model, instead of relying mostly on security testing methodologies.

#2: Hybrid Integrations

According to The State of SaaS Sprawl in 2021, the average company has 254 SaaS applications but, on average, only 45% of a company’s SaaS apps are being used on a regular basis. Moreover, 56% of all these apps are shadow IT, or owned and managed outside of IT. And the crazy part is to think that goes on top of all the software packages and systems of records they already have to run the core of their business.

The recent furore by business users to deploy RPA over old tools lacking APIs was a shortcut for old systems but not ideal for the fluid nature of digital business making changes all the time. For that agile businesses are using rapid app changes with low-code dev platforms, and the leading ones include these capabilities inside.

Above all, we’re now at a stage where organizations need more than ever to connect in real-time their data management, governance, and auditability across these multiple data sources which begs for more tools in hybrid integrations. The right software dev platforms or dedicated tools allow integrating data from different SaaS and legacy systems for a data fabric used by multiple systems and apps, which is key to supporting business leaders to make data-driven decisions.

#3: Low-Code for Pros

A proven alternative in 2021 has been the broad adoption of low-code platforms, where a leading vendor already addresses challenging enterprise use cases. In fact, according to Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms,

“By 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies”.

Low-code doesn’t mean that developers will be replaced by business users (to understand the difference between low-code and no-code take a look at this blog post). Low-code platforms provide abstraction to remove some of that complexity that developers typically face when creating an app or system. And the best ones provide full-stack control for software engineers to have fine-grain control.

The goal is that those repetitive and boring tasks like dependency management, code validation, and automatic builds are done by the platform so that developers can focus on the extra mile that makes the difference, instead of just keeping the lights on.

#4: Cloud-Native Platforms

Still on the SaaS topic, the explosion of niche cloud applications is changing the “build vs buy” economics and timings. That’s because SaaS sprawl is not only exploding the original budgets but also becoming another form of technical debt: jumping among a dozen systems is a poor experience, with business consequences.

To recover business agility in enterprise systems used by customers, partners and employees, it demands a new type of cloud-native app development — one that is highly distributed, scalable, and enables the creation of resilient, fit-to-purpose enterprise apps that increases the agility of the organization.

The explosive growth of the mega vendors’ web services from ~30 five years ago, up to 250 by a single IaaS provider today, is becoming a massive distraction for business developers creating cloud-native applications.

To overcome these challenges, it is key that cloud-native development platforms allow dev teams to remain focused on the value stream management for their digital products, instead of exhausting their engineering talent on infrastructure management alone.

And with tech giants winning the race for scarce specialized engineers, organizations outside that tech elite need to embrace new ways to stay innovative and competitive with their own teams. This means finding technology that allows them to abstract or remove technical complexity and allow their development teams to focus on business outcomes and innovation — like a new crop of Cloud Native Low-Code Platforms.

#5: DesignOps

DesignOps is a tight team sport with close collaboration between design teams and front-end developers (including shared repositories, tools, asset exchange) promoting collaboration across the different product teams within an organization, and ensuring consistency of the product’s experience from the first delivery.

Now, the year 2022 is the first time when IT and app development budgets already reflect the hybrid work reality since both employee and partner experience has become just as critical as the customer experience — for hyperadoption: the broad and frequent use of the applications created to gain business agility.

As organizations are pressured to launch more digital products while meeting user adoption goals, they need to manage design at scale, while minimizing technical and UX debt, bringing DesignOps practices to the center of the stage.

#6: Observability

Going hand-in-hand with DesignOps, engineering leaders should invest in observability for hyperadoption. Combined with new end-user behavior observability and supported on open standards like Open Telemetry for tracing with plans to expand their use for logs and metrics, more digital product teams will aim for user adoption levels that were historically hard to achieve.

#7: PWA-First

Progressive Web AppsPWAs combine the functions of native apps and website accessibility without involving the app stores. Like native apps, PWAs can work offline, send push notifications, and access device hardware, such as cameras or GPS. The user experiences are similar to native apps on mobile and desktop devices without downloading or updating hassles, with great benefit — they run well on top of poor connectivity.

PWAs will regain momentum in 2022 due to their connectivity resilient design and user resistance (to keep piling native apps in their devices). There were already great technical arguments to adopt a PWA-first mindset by developers and software leaders, but the great acceleration to digital experiences is accelerating this change too, because:

From an end user perspective, PWA are easy to use their mobile devices (no app store) and are lightweight.
From a dev perspective, PWAs are way faster to change than native apps, and they are easier to maintain.
For dev teams, unlike native apps, they use one codebase for all devices, they’re searchable by search engines, and they are light.

Get Ready for 2022

So overall, the top software engineering trends we see for 2022 confirm the core of our mission as a company:

“To enable every business to innovate throught software”.

We believe we can’t go wrong in delivering to our customers a platform that keeps removing complexity, addressing the developer experience gap, abstracting the complexity of cloud native development, and, ultimately, enabling our customers to grow faster.

We wish you a successful 2022!

1Breaking out the top of the analysts scale, as you can find out in the first ever “Low-Code Wave” by Forrester in 2016.

Apr 06

7 Benefits of Mobile App For Your Business

Posted by admin | MobileApps | No Comments

Mobile apps are becoming increasingly popular among businesses and service providers. From e-commerce stores and payment banks to food delivery and healthcare, there is almost no industry where mobile applications have not proved their marketing value or established themselves fundamental for effective communication with target customers.

1. Availability: Be There For Your Customers Every Time

Nowadays, customer service is no longer just about face-to-face interaction. Especially with the rapid development of technology, there are now more than 2.6 billion users who own smartphones. We can call mobile apps a game-changer for industries. Do you know why?

Mobile apps are not likely to have mood swings and poor performance, unlike manpower customer service. With robust mobile software, you will provide users with the best way to choose. Users can decide whether they want to select your services.

Many businesses see mobile apps as a means of improving customer service. You are always ready for your customers. If a user finds out about your products or services in the middle of the night and wants to get information instantly, all they have to do is turn on their phone and download your mobile app.

Moreover, users do not have to wait for business hours to be able to even buy your product if they want to. Customer satisfaction should be one of your priorities, and therefore mobile apps are the answer to increasing customer satisfaction.

2. Marketing: Develop A Direct Marketing Channel

Of all the advantages of having a mobile app, one of the biggest is that it has all the information you want to give customers; booking forms, search features, user accounts, news feeds, it provides multiple functions such as.

You can also get closer to direct communication with push notifications. In this way, it is possible to remind your customers how sensible it is to choose your services and products. Now users have all the information at their fingertips.

3. Priority: Give Value To Your Customers

Business is about responding. If you want to improve the interaction of users with your organization, you must give them a certain level of value. When you start doing that, they do not think about going anywhere else. The question now is how you can value your users. You can plan a loyalty program to enable them to participate in your services and products. Some organizations use their mobile apps to offer rewards to subscribers. This motivates users to buy their services or products. If you already have such a program, it is possible to integrate it into the mobile application.

4. Visibility: Build Your Brand and Recognition

The mobile app can contribute to brand awareness. It would be better if we split this section into two different sections and the combination of both makes your mobile app a real winner.

Sign: a mobile app is similar to an empty billboard sign. Whether you want to give it a stylish look or not, you can make it shocking, informative, or functional. But what you can not ignore is improving it with many features that your customers will love. Moreover, it must be brand-based and painstakingly designed.

Recognition: the more you focus on customer engagement, the sooner they are convinced to buy your services or products. ”Effective frequency” is very important in the advertising industry. Wait, you do not know what happened? In the simplest terms, enough frequency is to see or hear your brand about 20 times. This will give you real recognition.

5. Interaction: Enhance Your Customer Engagement

Regardless of what you sell, users need a method to reach you. With a Help Desk feature, your app can change how you interact with your customers.

For example, OpenTable built its overall business model around the same principle. Instead of looking for a cafe or restaurant for a table, it is possible to book with fewer than five clicks on its platform.

You must have noticed that most customers prefer to contact you by phone or text. This is because everyone is busy nowadays and with a mobile app you can give them a chance to do it.

6. Uniqueness: Offer Something Out-of-the-Box

Technology has fascinated almost every part of our lives, and almost everyone has used mobile apps. However, despite the awareness, their development is still rare. Specifically, at the small business level.

Therefore, creating an app and presenting it to your customers can make your organization stand out. Make sure you build it correctly by following different application development strategies. Your competitors and users will certainly be surprised by your initiative and foresight.

7. Loyalty: Be True to Your Customers

Customer loyalty is the most important motivation to consider building your versatile application. With all the noise from Facebook promotions, roadside banners, announcements, flashing signs, daily paper ads, flyers, websites, site flags, coupons, and email marketing, you gradually lose your influence on customers. It is a great opportunity to come back by building a real and authentic relationship with your customers.

Also, try to make them a loyal fan of your product as well as your services. However, it can be a method of staying closer to your customers and constantly being just a “fingertip.”

To sum up; Why is it worth investing in mobile app development? In today’s competitive environment, people are using mobile devices to keep up with their favorite brands. They see it as a brand that allows potential customers to get all the information quickly. Whatever industry you’re dealing with, the advantages of having mobile apps for businesses are numerous, and investing in it is the best business deal.

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Start creating brand awareness through mobile app development and better distribute your reach. Your investment in mobile apps will benefit you for a long time. Working with BAYPM to develop mobile business applications will also ensure application security, timely updates, and effective application management.

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business Archives - BAYPM | Low Code| Mendix | OutSystems