Overview:
Low-code application development has been gaining traction from enterprises across industries. Forrester defines low-code as “products and/or cloud services for application development that employ visual, declarative techniques instead of programming.”
In this fortnightly, we discuss about low-code application development and factors driving its growth as well as its industry landscape.
Low-code and factors driving its growth:
Low-code development essentially involves the development of software applications with minimal programming efforts. Thus, it enables software development teams to implement business solutions much more quickly.
There is an increasing need of customization of off-the-shelf software to fit specific organizational processes. Moreover, ever-changing dynamics of the business environment demand such changes to be implemented in a short turnaround time, for companies to remain competitive. For instance, COVID-19 changed consumer behavior overnight and enterprises were left with no choice but to adapt to the changed behavior of their customers, in order to survive. In such a scenario, companies which are slow to respond to the changes in customer behavior will end up losing competitive advantage and market share. Low-code application development capabilities can prove to be game-changing here.
Low-code allows business teams to undertake parts of the application development process, thereby reducing the back-and-forth communication between the business and software development teams and further reducing the overall time required to develop applications.
According to Gartner, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have adopted a low-code application platform by 2023. The BFSI and telecom industries are two of the major consumers of low-code application development platforms as companies in these industries try and improve automation across their customer service functions, which play a key role in customer acquisition and retention.
Industry landscape:
The low-code application development platform space is led by Mendix, OutSystems, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Microsoft and Appian, closely followed by other enterprise software giants like Oracle, Pega and Zoho.
Much like popular ERP and CRM solutions, enterprise low-code application development platforms have their respective partner ecosystems to help them gain adoption by enterprises.
From a strategic standpoint, the IT industry sees low-code application development as a complementary capability to robotic process automation (RPA). IT services companies that have RPA capabilities are also developing their low-code application development capabilities. This is driven by an increasing demand for end-to-end solutions from enterprises.