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Platform enabled ecosystem

Low-code Development Platforms

Definition of Low-code Development Platforms

For a half century, the IT industry has been looking for ways to create solutions that are more efficient than writing programs line by line. When GUIs came up, GUI builders allowed building GUIs by dragging elements on a canvas. In the 1980s, Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools emerged in the market. Business Process and Rule Management Systems (BPMS/BRMS) are a business-friendly way to turn business requirements into running software. Many more examples can be found.

The objectives were and are still similar:

  • Be more efficient
  • Be more agile: Efficiency is a prerequisite for being able to embrace change.
  • Allow ‘citizen development’/improve business interaction: Good developers are scarce resources. The objectives are to use resources with less IT skills and/or to empower business analysts to create a new breed called ‘citizen developers’.

More recent drivers for ‘low-code’ include:

  • Creating a functionally correct solution is one challenge; creating and operating an industry-strength solution that is robust, scalable, and secure etc. is quite another. Many low-code solutions were dismissed because they lacked ‘industry strength’. Cloud and container technologies substantially simplify meeting required nonfunctional requirements.
  • Mobile technologies allow software support for employees/customers at their place of work (‘frontline workers’), often replacing still manual processes. This generates strong incentives to rapidly create multi-endpoint solutions (Mobile, tablet, PC, …) for often rather simple tasks, which is a perfect match for low-code development.
  • Memory is so inexpensive that storage cost is typically not a significant factor. Equally mature and inexpensive are storage systems like data lakes or RDBMSs. Not just memory, but information persistence is a commodity today. Even citizen developers can handle data on a professional scale with ease.

200+ low-code platform vendors see the opportunity to leverage these advances. Therefore, despite the long history, ‘low-code’ has many characteristics of an emerging technology.

Technology Evaluation

The offerings are very diverse. One way to categorize them is (some platforms covering more than one category):

  • Data-driven platforms put data at the beginning of the development process. They generate a default UI just from a data source. They excel in data display, slicing/dicing, reporting, filtering, and CRUD operations on data.
  • Process-driven platforms put business processes and/or human workflows in front. Visual process modeling, data mapping, consumption of available APIs etc. are important.
  • Declaration/rules-driven platforms focus on an easy way for businesses to describe their rules and requirements in a declarative way.
  • Service and legacy enablement-driven platforms focus on building solutions on top of existing applications, interfacing with them by either APIs or via UI (screen scraping). What's central are usability improvements, availability improvements, automation etc.
  • UI driven platforms allow the very simple generation of (multi-experience) UIs. Instead of being fully featured, they focus on building UIs in a very simple manner that appeals to business stakeholders, and automate decisions that would normally be made by qualified UI designers.

The list of categories shows: the term ‘low-code development platform’ is almost too broad to be useful. ‘Low-code’ is more an attribute of a platform than a separate type of platform. This neither questions the value of the platforms nor denies it the current momentum. It just says that two products with the ‘low-code’ label are not necessarily comparable. For example, Software AG’s webMethods.io Integration has all attributes of a process-driven low-code platform but is not comparable with the UI-driven AgileApps since they address different requirements. While industry Analyst Forrester Research has played a central role in coining the term and defining the market, their ‘vendor inclusion criteria’ are not fully convincing.

Market - Current Adoption and Outlook

Due to the diversity, giving a general outlook makes little sense. Software is going to be easier to produce and understand for business. This is a mega-trend, spanning decades. The slowness with which this happens is an indicator of the inherent difficulty.

Offering low-code capabilities will be essential for most software offerings. In addition to dedicated low-code platforms, there is also a growing adoption of low-code principles by Cloud Applications. For example, the issue tracker “JIRA” provides extensive low-code configuration features including extending the data model and defining business processes. Software AG has ‘low-code’ in its genes; examples include wm.IO integration, AgileApps, and Cumulocity IoT's cockpit application and analytics builder.

How to adopt

  • Do not try to find and standardize on the ‘perfect tool’. Pick the right tool for the task at hand. Be aware that you are (still/again!) in a young, emerging market.
  • Don’t just think in the extremes ‘IT developed’ versus ‘business-developed no-code’. That is silo thinking in itself. IT will not vanish, but low-code apps will change its role and will improve the interaction between business and IT. Define agile development processes, roles etc. around that.
  • Focus on data governance. The ease with which many tools can define and maintain data is a chance, but also a risk. In the end, IT is about managing data, and keeping that data correct, consistent, redundancy-free etc. is a core IT duty that will only grow with these platforms. Corollary: of course, this includes dealing with data security.