Why Low Code Development is Integral for Modern Enterprises

For the last few years, application development remains an expensive and time-intensive process. With traditional development, many large-scale IT enterprises failed to accomplish projects and meet expected requirements on pre-defined time and budget.

Fortunately, the arrival of low-code platforms into the development industry has become a boon for modern enterprises. With low-code platforms, startups and leading enterprises can build apps rapidly without hiring and maintaining expensive professional development teams. Enterprises across verticals are increasingly adopting low-code platforms to accelerate digital transformation initiatives and gain a competitive edge. As per a recent survey, around 64% of enterprises stated that developing and deploying scalable and fully-functional applications is easily possible with low-code platforms.

Understanding Low Code Development

In general, low-code development is an approach of creating software applications or workflows with minimal coding efforts.  Development of little-to-no code solutions is possible with low-code platforms. Low-code platforms offer developers the ability to construct simple to complex applications by dragging and dropping pre-built blocks and templates from a graphical interface. These intuitive components alleviate the coding efforts required for app development. Overall, low-code platforms allow enterprises to design and deploy apps with faster turnaround time, enabling them to remain more cost-effective, and obtain better ROI.

Benefits of Using Low-Code Platforms

• Create Integrated IT Ecosystem - Business users can easily integrate newly built low-code apps with other systems in the organization’s IT ecosystem. This is one of the key purposes of low-code platforms that can benefit organizations. Any number of IT systems that are actively used by enterprises can be integrated through a low-code platform’s built-in APIs, thereby forming a centralized IT environment. This further enhances the application performance and business continuity.
• Accelerate Digitization - As said before, low-code platforms eliminate hand-coding practices. The visually interactive drag-and-drop interface facilitates one-click deployment and a collaborative development environment for enterprises. Hence, the release of new applications is enhanced, and this plays a key role in accelerating digital transformation.
• Reduces Shadow IT - Overlooking security and compliance during app development results in the Shadow IT scenario. Advanced low-code platforms offer a digital sandbox environment, where developers can robustly test their application and ensure that it adheres to compliance standards. This helps enterprises to overcome shadow situations and technical debt risks.
• Meet End-User Requirements - In contrast to the conventional approach, the low-code platform allows app creators to easily make alterations to an application and upgrade the processes even after deployment. This helps organizations to rapidly adapt to the ever-changing customer requirements and meet market variations.

Types of App Development With Low-Code Platforms

Business-to-Customer (B2C) Applications

B2C or user-centric applications allow customers to deal with or communicate with enterprises. Customer experience apps enhance business retention and revenue. Customer-centered applications often encounter evolving expectations from demanding customers in terms of both multi-channel support and functionality. Hence, core operational improvements needed to be done frequently within B2C apps to enhance customer-facing processes. Besides, organizations need to integrate B2C apps with vital Systems of Record (SOR) for reliable storage and maintenance of user data.

By understanding these needs, low-code platforms offer a native UI framework with easy-to-use widgets and visual blocks. This makes it easy for organizations or developers that lack sufficient UX knowledge to construct functional, multi-channel apps for end-users. In addition, many low-code platforms boast Cloud-native architecture, which is beneficial for organizations to scale B2C applications easily irrespective of increasing user base. This architecture also supports reflex failover and ensures the constant working of B2C portals or apps. By teaming up with a recognized low code mobile application development team, enterprises can build Business-to-Customer applications like customer portals, broker-agent apps, self-service portals for university students, and others.

Business-to-Business (B2B) Applications

B2B or enterprise apps are intended for the workforce or clients. This app is designed by enterprises to automate several manual (paper) processes pursued by employees and client interactions, thereby reducing time and costs. Enterprise apps need to support cross-organizational or departmental processes and are often required to maintain compliance to avoid costly consequences. In addition, B2B apps should integrate seamlessly with existing core systems. The more effectively the app is connected to a business’s core system, the operational efficiency gets increased.

Low-code platforms allow organizations to leverage domain experts’ knowledge throughout the whole development lifecycle. Meaning that, business users with zero coding experience can iteratively design and develop enterprise apps. Besides, platforms intrinsically offer pre-designed connectors, which helps in easy integration and synchronization with core systems. Developers can also build connectors from the scratch and deploy them in a Private App Store, aiding other enterprises to integrate specific core systems. Types of Business-to-Business app development with low-code platforms include inventory management apps, claims processing apps, ticket request, and invoice processing apps.

Microservices-Based Apps

Most of the legacy systems like IBM’s AS400 and Lotus Notes have monolith-based architecture. This architecture makes application processing slower and more complex. Hence, developing Microservices architecture-based apps can act as a replacement for monolithic systems. By using low-code platforms, developers can create Microservices apps to complement or replace outdated legacy applications. These apps can also integrate efficiently with legacy systems without impacting their underlying functionality. This way, organizations can support new processes and enhance the user experience. Microservices architecture-based apps overcome most of the problems associated with legacy ecosystems and offer integrated capabilities for better resiliency and productivity.

Summing Up

Enterprises are quickly leveraging innovative technologies in order to adapt to fast-varying markets and evolving needs around user experience. Similarly, enterprises are insisting CTOs create and organize digital transformation initiatives that focus on modernizing user-based processes. To meet these objectives, enterprises need to be able to rapidly form, coordinate, and iterate applications and processes, and low-code is the one-stop solution for fulfilling these goals.