Business across all industries and of all sizes are increasingly needing simplified ways to develop unique and innovative business applications. Digital innovation has become a necessity to maintain a competitive edge. Gartner has validated the Low-Code value proposition and its capabilities to support new remote working functions with for example the use of digital forms and workflow automation.
"Every company is becoming a software company." - Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft
This also holds true for small and medium enterprises. Whilst traditional software development is a time consuming and costly process with enormous backlogs, application development through Low-Code enables organisations to build and create feature rich apps rapidly and cost-effectively.
So, what is Low-Code? Let's start with explaining the core principles of Low-Code: abstraction and automation. Abstraction is effectively achieved through drag-and-drop visual modelling using building blocks. Automation is an essential part of a Low-Code platform, automating workflows, allowing automated processes to debug, test, and deploy software applications in the cloud or on-premises. Instead of coding every line, integrating with databases and programming network integrations, Low-Code platforms visually construct application models with default containers that initiate the logical processes and data storage abilities they require. Once deployed, the application runs and is managed by the platform itself.
The benefits of Low-Code for small and medium enterprises can be categorised in Cost Benefits, Operational Benefits and Scalability.
Cost Benefits
Low-Code is cost-efficient. Instead of needing to hand-code everything by experienced and expensive developers, (citizen) developers can use low code’s visual models and drag-and-drop interfaces to save time and costs. According to Forrester, Low-Code platforms can make software development as much as 10x faster than traditional methods. The speed to create apps on a Low-Code platforms aids cost reduction.
Operational Benefits
A genuine agile process accelerates the entire lifecycle and brings innovation quickly to market.
In particular, the Mendix Low-Code platform maximises agility through speed, built-in functions of collaboration and control. The latter two functions leverage a shared visual language to support the interchange of knowledge and ideas between business domain experts and developers. It provides a common language to enhance collaboration between teams and automates multiple operations that are crucial to improving the overall customer experience. It empowers small teams to deploy swiftly and frequently. On a Low-Code platform, when there is a new patch or security upgrade, it will be automatically installed in the Low-Code/No-Code platforms instead of the developer going back into the code to implement the security fix.
Scalability
On a Low-Code platform testing and deployment are automated across platforms, i.e. mobile, tablet and desktop. In addition, it allows developers to integrate with third party APIs by simply configuring APIs via user interfaces without writing any code. Developers can build modules that can easily be shared and plugged-in to Low-Code platforms to extend functionality of existing software. Software maintenance becomes easy too as maintenance is built-in and automated on a Low-Code platform, like Mendix.
Contact us to learn more
Has this blog triggered your interest in how your organisation can benefit from Low-Code or are you interested in a customized demo of a Low-Code platform for your organisation? Contact us today and we are happy to have further discussions with you.