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lowcode Archives - BAYPM | Low Code| Mendix | OutSystems

Oct 21
1

Rise of Low Code and Our Choice for Mendix

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The rise of low-code development platforms represents a paradigm shift in the way software is built and maintained. These platforms empower individuals with varying levels of technical expertise to create applications, reducing the traditional barriers to entry in the world of software development. One such noteworthy player in this arena is Mendix.

Low-code development refers to the use of visual interfaces and declarative techniques to enable the creation of applications with minimal hand-coding and manual programming. This approach significantly accelerates the development process, allowing organizations to respond rapidly to changing business requirements and market dynamics.

Mendix, as a leading low-code platform, has gained prominence for several reasons. First and foremost, its intuitive visual development environment caters to both seasoned developers and business users with limited coding experience. This democratization of application development fosters collaboration between IT and business units, promoting a more agile and responsive development cycle.

The platform’s drag-and-drop interface and pre-built templates simplify the development process, enabling users to create functional prototypes and full-fledged applications without delving into intricate lines of code. This abstraction of complexity streamlines development, reduces errors, and allows for quicker iterations.

Moreover, Mendix embraces a model-driven architecture, where the application logic is defined graphically rather than through traditional coding. This not only enhances the speed of development but also facilitates easier maintenance and updates. Changes can be made visually, making it more accessible for non-developers to contribute to ongoing projects.

The extensibility of Mendix is another noteworthy feature. While low-code platforms are designed to cater to a broad spectrum of applications, Mendix acknowledges the need for customization. Developers can seamlessly integrate custom code when necessary, striking a balance between speed and flexibility.

Security is a paramount concern in application development, and Mendix addresses this by providing robust security features. The platform incorporates built-in security best practices, making it suitable for developing applications that adhere to strict security standards. This is particularly crucial in today’s digital landscape, where data breaches and cyber threats are ever-present challenges.

In conclusion, the rise of low-code development platforms, exemplified by Mendix, represents a transformative force in the software development landscape. The platform’s user-friendly interface, model-driven architecture, extensibility, and robust security features make it a compelling choice for organizations seeking agility and efficiency in their application development processes. As businesses continue to adapt to rapidly changing environments, the low-code revolution, with Mendix at its forefront, offers a promising avenue for innovation and accelerated growth.

Nov 10
0

What Should You Expect from a Modern Application Platform?

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According to Gartner, “70% of new applications will leverage a modern application platform using low-code or no-code technologies by 2025, up from less than 25% in 2020.”

These numbers foretell a dramatic shift in how enterprises will approach app development moving forward. Namely, your future success hinges on the ability to continuously respond fast to change and based on a new approach to constantly deliver applications and enterprise systems, modernize enterprise software development, and keep up with the competition.

Of course, not all modern application platforms offer the same capabilities. Not every platform is suitable for every use case. So how should you compare your options?

To help companies understand the modern application platform market, Gartner recently released their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms. In this report, they divided platforms into challengers, visionaries, niche players, and leaders based on product capabilities, vendor operational health, market track record, and product vision.

Not only did Gartner name OutSystems as a Leader among vendors, but OutSystems is also the only company to receive a Customer’s Choice distinction as voted by hundreds of customers.

What Is a Modern Application Platform?

A modern application platform lets you quickly but securely develop and deploy new applications by automating the software development lifecycle and elevating the abstraction for the coding process. Not only does this augment your developer team to produce more significant results, but it opens up new opportunities to augment your internal staff beyond developers.

With more and more businesses relying on custom applications to accelerate operations, your ability to create complex applications quickly, interfaces, business logic, workflows, and manage data is a must.

When comparing platforms, Gartner analyzed their capabilities for three primary use cases:

  • Building custom business applications. You must be able to easily create and maintain complex enterprise applications capable of providing an intuitive user experience, managing complex integrations with your other business data sources and applications, and handling massive transaction volumes.
  • Automating business workflows. Your platform should help you automate as many workflows involving multiple application systems and users as possible so that your developers can work smarter and more productively.
  • Empowering collaborative app development. With development teams spread far and wide across locations, continents, and between the office and working at home, you need a platform that can ensure everyone is working efficiently on the same application. In addition, you need a platform that can scale its capabilities and usability to meet the needs of employees ranging from citizen developers to your most experienced, hard-core coders.

What Does Gartner Say About OutSystems?

While some platforms may be more suited for specific tasks, OutSystems is designed to provide a modern application platform suitable for the broadest range of industries and use cases. Unlike other vendors like Salesforce and Oracle, our current application platform is all we do, which has allowed us to focus on continuously innovating our product to meet the needs of almost every customer.

According to the Gartner report,

“OutSystems is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant(…) Its market differentiation is based on its capability to enhance developer productivity for building modern enterprise applications. OutSystems provides robust security, multi-experience development and AI-augmented development capabilities to enable faster application development.”

In the report, Gartner notes three key strengths that elevate the OutSystems solution to the top of the leaderboard.

  • Product: “OutSystems offers advanced low-code capabilities such as AI-augmented development, native but proprietary continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), application testing, agile enterprise planning, and governance capabilities to support the rapid development of enterprise-grade applications.”
  • Innovation: “OutSystems plans to introduce capabilities for automated unit testing using AI, native API management, enhanced observability experience (tied to infrastructure and application metrics) and an intelligent data mesh to facilitate seamless data ingestion and cataloguing.”
  • User experience: “In addition to providing robust capabilities for designing user journeys, OutSystems provides its UI design framework for designing standardized, accessibility-ready UIs. It also enables utilization of popular design systems and provides native support for chatbots and voice UIs.”

In its supplementary Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms report, Gartner writes,

“OutSystems received the highest score of all vendors for the custom business application use case. It received good scores for the collaborative app development and business workflow automation use cases.”

In addition, customers also recognized OutSystems as a 2021 Gartner Customers’ Choice Vendor. Unlike the Magic Quadrant, whose leadership was determined by Gartner’s analysts, this award is based solely on feedback and ratings from hundreds of enterprise software users who have experience purchasing, implementing, and working with the OutSystems platform.

At the time of the report, OutSystems had 577 reviews for an average rating of 4.5 out of 5. Only three vendors were named a Customer’s Choice, with OutSystems being the only vendor recognized as both a Customer’s Choice and a Magic Quadrant’s Leader.

For all the details, check out the following reports:

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In light of the research results, as BAYPM, we would love to help you with your Digital Transformation journey, give us a shout and we’ll be sure to assist you as best as we can. Currently, we are working on a project to digitize manual processes within different locations. The client opted for an incremental implementation approach based on geographical locations and the needs of their different factories.

Aug 25
0

Building a Digital Transformation Strategy: Low-Code for The Touchdown

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If you’ve encountered low code when evaluating different technologies to support your digital transformation strategy, in this blog post, you’ll learn how low code addresses the most common pain points encountered when developing a digital transformation strategy.

The demand for more business applications, the growth in connected devices, and higher expectations put huge pressure on IT leaders. That’s why a McKinsey study recently found that 70 per cent of digital transformations have failed. Of course, there are many criminals. But one of the most common mistakes IT leaders make is to think about technology first and rush to get it. 

A successful digital transformation strategy should start by identifying strategic business challenges. Then you can find the right technology to create digital processes and solutions to solve them. 

The value proposition of disruptive technology like low code is that it gives companies the flexibility and agility to adapt to the ever-changing industry reality, while accelerating the time to market new applications and functions to keep up with or change markets. Let’s see how low code can empower your team and gain speed, agility, competitiveness and differentiation. 

3 tips for creating a successful digital transformation strategy with low code: 

To participate in digital transformation, IT managers and managers must lead “visionary leadership.” In other words, you need to have a full understanding of where your business stands and what might be, along with well-defined goals, and then take steps to get there. 

What you choose to do or not do will affect your ability to win, the trajectory and speed of your success or failure, and the value of the legacy you left behind. Your team has to play to win every game from the start to the last second, and it’s up to you to lead them. 

So, here are three tips for a successful digital transformation with low code. 

1. Play to win instead of play to avoid losing 

Why are so many IT leaders deciding to disrupt software development by using low code in the hands of development teams? Building and maintaining a strong development team and developers is essential. Winning the big game requires increasing their performance, increasing their productivity, and expanding your bench power by optimizing the team’s talent pool. Your team needs to respond to business needs with greater speed and agility, closing all gaps in processes and gaps in your abilities against your competitors’ abilities. 

2.Create and share a winning vision 

For successful digital transformation, you need to optimize the output of your development team; no questions there. But how do you keep your team in the game when the domain breaks down? Put yourself in the shoes of your development team: you’ve invested more than 4 years in college, plus several years of experience in coding, and you’re suddenly asked to replace everything you’ve worked hard to master with something that reduces complexity and simplifies the job. The challenge is that by increasing your number of developer staff, you cannot scale efficiently and keep up with the demands of your market. You will reach your salary limit quickly, so you have to give something. How do you fix it? It has to create a win-win vision. It would be best if you showed your team that a low-code platform would not replace their work and skills but instead will allow them to use their skills and experience in projects that bring more value to the business. 

3.Increase your score skill 

How many apps do you currently have and use less than 10% of their capabilities? How much does it cost to protect them? How many of these will limit your capabilities because you can’t get data from them or show it in other apps? If you are like most companies, you have an application base that needs improvement. In fact, most companies find that backlog creates a day-to-day squeeze when it comes to building a high-performing, innovation-focused mindset in your company. You need to eliminate lag, encourage innovation, reduce the number of third-party apps and make big games. 

And that’s where the low code shines. Take Schneider Electric, for example. Schneider discovered that the IT landscape was fragmented by duplicated applications using non-standard architecture and weak security practices. Therefore, the company used low code and created 60 applications in just 20 months while replacing a group of legacy applications running on Lotus Notes technology. In the words of Schneider Digital’s Director, Amarpreet Kaur, 

“We saw a low-code platform as a catalyst to bridge the gap between business demands and available IT resources. We chose Outsystems, and now we have an engine at Schneider Electric that fuels digital transformation.” 

Are you ready for the big game? 

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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.

Apr 26
0

The Low-Code Market in 2021

Posted by | OutSystems | No Comments

Based on the latest data, the low code market is estimated to reach a value of $ 187 billion by 2030 (increased to $ 10.3 billion in 2019).
The reason for this growth lies in the increasing pressure of IT to add value to the business – accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and deadlocks – and the limitations of traditional development that hinder developer productivity and increase backlog jobs. Low code development with its visual approach to coding can enable your existing development teams to build high-quality multi-experience applications faster (if you’re looking for the benefits of low code, we have a full article on this topic).
Unfortunately, hot technology attracts a wide variety of vendors and posers. While it may seem tempting to have lower-code platform options, a closer look reveals that many of these products offer solutions that don’t really meet the needs of corporate businesses or developers, just like Visual Basic did not exist a few decades ago.

Clarifying the Low-Code Market Size

In the latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low Code Application Platforms (LCAP), Gartner defines LCAP as:

“An application platform that supports rapid application development, deployment, execution, and management using declarative, high-level programming abstractions such as model-driven and metadata-driven programming languages ​​and single-step deployments.”

Based on this definition, the low code market includes platforms that support the development of enterprise applications that run on multiple platforms and devices, connect to data sources, and meet business needs. To be included in Gartner’s view of the low code market, providers must also meet a variety of technical requirements, including:

Demonstrating a go-to-market strategy for its LCAP for cross-sectoral application development,

Providing a minimum set of application platform capabilities,

Ensuring fast application development,

To provide an enterprise-level LCAP for enterprise-class projects.

As the market continues to grow and new providers join the race, Gartner adjusts these criteria every year, and some vendors even move into different categories such as case management. We fully expect to see additional changes in 2021 as Gartner continues to focus on the feature and functionality packs customers can expect from a low-code app platform and whether this suite can truly address all use cases for the organization.

An Alternative Perspective on the Low-Code Market

If you are considering a low-code platform to digitize internal business processes, replace legacy applications, or create new customer experiences that include mobile, chat, and bots, it can help to understand the low-code environment based on its legacy.

This may seem like a strange way of thinking about development platform vendors, but it turns out, it’s very important. Let’s take a look at the three categories of low code and why they exist.

Niche Tools

Niche tools focus on a specific application development problem. For example:

A better way to capture and store data

A simpler way to describe business processes

An easier way to create a mobile frontend

These tools are used almost exclusively to meet a single business need. It includes business process management (BPM), case management, and no-code technology. As long as scalability is not a requirement, you can use them to build simple applications really fast.

Ecosystem Tools

Players of this category are often large software application vendors whose motivation to call themselves low-code is to provide a way to create more value in cloud ecosystems. These solutions are basically niche platforms as they are developed to solve a specific business need as well as general application development (e.g. database applications, web tools, GUI front ends to CLI backend systems).

Purpose-Oriented Application Platforms

These are platforms designed from the very beginning to handle custom application development using a low-code approach. Vendors in this category tend to keep up with market needs and trends and include new features for future-proof customer journeys such as progressive web apps and chatbots. Purpose application platforms focus on delivering fit-for-purpose applications with a consistent user experience.

These platforms are not purely pure low-code tools such as niche or ecosystem. They include a low-code framework and tools for multi-experience development, but they also have some capabilities for automation, integration, impact reporting, and one-click deployment.

Why Is Purposeful Creation Not Enough?

The problem with purpose-built application platforms is that inevitably there comes a time when solutions created with them must evolve in a direction that the platform does not support. It’s as if you need your content management system to start offering point-of-sale functionality with order menus and payments. Maybe you can add some plugins and get something that works, if not elegant. However, what happens the next time you need something out of the box? Or the time after that?

At this point, organizations using application platforms for this purpose are forced to layer over another tool to bridge the gap, resort to manual coding, or seek other ways to integrate newly coded systems with existing systems. The benefits of low code are lost very quickly.

We see this often. Many of our clients came to OutSystems after hitting this wall with another platform, and this can happen very quickly. The reasons are varied, but we hear things like:

“Yes, our current platform supports online mobile app development… but we also need it to create apps that work offline. It doesn’t.”

And…

“We are not able to integrate with our identity management system.”

Question: Why can’t more solutions get organizations over this wall effectively?

Answer: Because it’s hard to build a development platform that meets the actual needs of customers. Customers don’t just need better, more efficient development tools; they need an entire platform that improves the full application lifecycle in the same way that low-code improves the development experience. A modern application platform, not flash-in-the-pan tactics, can make sure that IT teams never hit a wall.

Solving Purpose-Built Problems with a Modern Application Platform

Almost every day we hear from organizations that are victims of digital disruption – cite retail (Sears, Toys ”R” Us), Mobile Device (Blackberry), and taxi industry references. To avoid this, not only do business and IT strategies need to be in lockdown, but IT needs to be able to deliver solutions that accelerate business demands. Imagine that the business minds behind Uber will be told a two-year wait for their mobile apps.

Development speed is the biggest opportunity for low code platforms. Instead, most of the time, even low-code, IT is constrained by:

  • Big backlogs
  • Not enough budget or skilled resources
  • Development complexity
  • Systems that are often outdated by the time they’re released.

Addressing these issues requires a modern application platform that offers low-code for the visual development of all layers of an application, including user interfaces, integration, data models, business logic, and workflow for any device, and proprietary code of an application. This looks like a purpose-built app platform, right? The difference is that with a modern application platform it is possible to:

  • Package mobile apps for the app stores in one click.
  • Manage the full application lifecycle with automated dependency impact analysis, application portfolio governance and refactoring, and debugging to ensure deployments don’t break.
  • Handle complex mobile requirements like ultra-responsive user experience, offline data, on-device business logic, and sensor integration.
  • Scale to support high volumes of users and transactions.
  • Deliver superior user experience through continuous delivery and deployment.
  • Meet demanding security requirements.
  • Adopt a multi-persona app dev strategy, taking full advantage of the governed business and IT collaboration.

Take the credit rating company FICO, for example. They had a two-year development project that failed. In just six months with half the team, they rewrote and delivered a brand new origination system and got to market three times faster using the OutSystems modern application platform.

To learn more about the variety of low-code platforms, I invite you to download a complementary copy of Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, 2020. 

-END-

In light of the research results, as BAYPM, we would love to help you with your Digital Transformation journey, give us a shout and we’ll be sure to assist you as best as we can. Currently, we are working on a project to digitize manual processes within different locations. The client opted for an incremental implementation approach based on geographical locations and the needs of their different factories.