How low code helps software developers embrace rapid change

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Low-code software development has proven instrumental in facilitating innovation at scale in today’s constantly evolving and unpredictable business environment.

Until the widespread adoption of modern software systems, most routine business processes remained largely unchanged and, indeed, unchangeable over short timespans. In those times, innovations often took many years to enter the mainstream, and organizations could afford to rely largely on traditional processes and monolithic technology architectures.

Today, however, change is the only constant in the business world, which faces unprecedented disruption as it tries to tackle rising instability and unpredictability across global supply chains and constantly evolving customer demands.

In light of these growing uncertainties, business leaders face enormous pressure to adapt with the times in order to stay relevant. Continuous improvement is essential for keeping customers happy, employees motivated, and for satisfying the need for operational resilience. Thus, the ability to accommodate rapid change has become a universal business imperative.

More than ever, these factors rely on software. A few years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed that every company is a software company. Technology is increasingly embedded in everything we do, both at home and in the workplace. Back-office teams have become reliant on tailor-made customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to handle increasingly vast amounts of digital information at scale. Customers expect a responsive service and a persistent presence from the companies they do business with. Furthermore, these demands change and evolve all the time, thus necessitating an agile approach to software development and maintenance.

It is for these reasons that low-code software development has been gaining more and more ground over the years. Read more

7 ways low-code solutions accelerate digital transformation

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By making software development less burdensome on resources, low-code contributes to the acceleration of digital transformation and business-wide innovation.

It is often said that every company is a software company. Computers play a key role in almost everything we do. They are becoming embedded in everything from the cars we drive to the homes and cities we live in.

For organizations, computers and software have become critical for handling everything from customer relationship management to supply chain management. At virtually every customer touchpoint, there are digital interactions that leave a trail of data, from which they can unlock valuable insights, provided they have the right software solutions.

Digital transformation is the driving force behind these innovations. It is the process we use to create new business processes and customer and employee experiences or improve existing ones. It is the reimagining of business in the digital age, and software naturally plays a central role in that process. This is why the pressure is constantly growing on organizations to ease the burden of software development and, in turn, accelerate digital transformation.

Organizations that fail to embrace digital transformation face a very real and growing risk of losing their competitive positions and becoming irrelevant in today’s fast-changing world. One of the main causes of such failure is the difficulty in overcoming the inherent complexities of software development and the lengthy project lifecycles that come with it.

To overcome the challenges, organizations must be able to develop and integrate new tools and capabilities quickly, scale their applications in the cloud, automate routine workflows, and continuously modernize customer experiences.

To accomplish these tasks, software teams need a way to quickly deliver applications and iteratively improve them based on user feedback. Traditional software development is wholly unable to keep up with the need for speed and scale, which is why organizations need low-code software development to accelerate digital transformation.

Here are some reasons why low-code matters in digital transformation:

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Low code versus no code, and what it means to enterprise software developers

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Low code and no code are frequently lumped together, despite taking significantly different approaches. Here is what the debate means to enterprise developers.

The software industry is currently facing a massive wave of transformation driven by growing demand, evolving customer expectations, and fierce global competition. This has left enterprise software teams struggling to keep up with the constant pressure to innovate rapidly and keep widening skills gaps in check.

Every enterprise needs software, and off-the-shelf solutions can only go so far when it comes to meeting their unique requirements. However, while there is often a clear need to develop bespoke solutions, doing so often comes at a significant expense, especially when factoring in the ongoing costs of software maintenance.

Many of these challenges come down to the fact that traditional software development is costly and time-consuming and requires specialized skills that are in short supply and huge demand. This is why the case for no-code and low-code application development is growing all the time. According to Gartner, two-thirds of application development activity will be low code by 2024.

In this article, we will look at what that means for enterprise software teams.

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How enterprise software teams are unlocking the value of low code to adapt and scale

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Internal low-code development platforms empower collaboration at scale, accelerate software delivery, and establish an enterprise-wide culture of innovation.

Change is the only constant in the fast-paced world of enterprise technology. Businesses face growing pressure to innovate and adapt as customer expectations evolve and disruptive new solutions enter the market. Thus, agility has become a necessity in everything from software development to digital transformation.

Most IT and business stakeholders are well aware of this fact. 95% of business leaders believe that technological innovation in strategic business initiatives add value. They realize that IT is no longer a mere cost center, but a key driver of revenue and growth. They understand that being able to respond quickly to change is vital for staying relevant in today’s market.

Unfortunately, there remains a serious misalignment between perception and reality. Almost two-thirds of business stakeholders claim that their IT departments implement fewer than half of their proposed solutions. Solutions that are implemented tend to go over budget and over time which, in turn, has led to a significant rise in uncontrolled shadow IT.

This begs the question of how many potentially value-adding innovations never saw the light of day because software teams lacked the technical skills and budgets to develop them. After all, traditional software development is costly and time-consuming and requires technical expertise across a broad range of domains from coding to user experience design.

Business processes need to be regularly modified and customized to best respond to change, which means that software teams need to be flexible and agile. They must be able to work quickly to keep up. But rather than face the constant risk of burnout and rising technical debt, they must be empowered by agile leadership, the right tools, and a collaborative company culture.

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Low-code versus traditional development: A primer for independent software vendors

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Independent software vendors take pride in having talented developers, but that doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from the low-code revolution.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) face constantly increasing pressure to deliver innovative software solutions to their customers in as little time as possible while maintaining the level of quality they expect.

Unfortunately, this also means that even though their solutions may be functionally complete, the speed at which they need to be rolled out usually means making some sacrifices. Often, issues with the underlying code present themselves soon after delivery, necessitating rework. Thus, technical debt remains a serious and growing problem for ISVs faced with ever-growing demand.

Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) offer an increasingly viable alternative to traditional software development thanks to their ease of use and faster delivery times. That said, software vendors often still view low-code with a degree of skepticism, assuming it to be only suitable for small projects and citizen developers.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Low-code is already transforming the world of software development and delivery, with the low-code market size increasing by 22.6% in 2021 alone. Indeed, low-code is fast becoming the new standard in software development to the point it is outpacing traditional software development in many sectors. Already, 84% of enterprises are using low-code to reduce the strain on their IT departments and involve the wider business in the development of mission-critical digital assets.

ISVs need to keep up if they are to remain relevant in the years to come, and the adoption of low-code will undoubtedly prove essential in that endeavor. However, that is not to suggest that traditional software development will become obsolete – after all, low-code is not quite the same as no code. Rather, it presents a compromise between the two, whereby applications can be developed quickly and, in the rare cases where an LCDP cannot accommodate certain advanced use cases, skilled developers can still rely on coding.

In this blog, we will explore the differences, as well as the commonalities, of both low-code and traditional software development and how they concern ISVs wanting to increase their speed to market while continuing to uphold rigid quality control standards.

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The 8 best low-code development platforms for software vendors

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Here are some of the best low-code development platforms for software developers wanting to fuel rapid application modernization and economies of scale.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) face constantly growing technical debt as they struggle to meet the demands of clients seeking to accelerate their own digital transformations. Among the reasons for these challenges is the fact that many ISVs are heavily reliant on underlying technology that is outdated and lacks the agility for developing software applications quickly.

Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) were originally created primarily to meet the needs of citizen developers in enterprises that lacked the in-house expertise needed to build bespoke applications from scratch. However, LCDPs have now evolved to the point where they not only assist with software development, but also transform the entire software delivery process.

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How open-source solutions and low-code development empower digital sovereignty

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By making software development accessible to a broader range of users, low code and open-source solutions can enhance digital sovereignty and interoperability.

As businesses and society at large become more dependent on data, they are also becoming more dependent on foreign countries. This is perfectly demonstrated by the fact that 92% of the data generated in the western world is stored on servers in the US. Moreover, as the sheer volume of data continues to grow, it is becoming less feasible to move it to other platforms in other countries. Herein lies the growing emphasis on digital sovereignty – the idea that people and organizations should have control and ownership of their own data.

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How to Use Low-code Development to Advance Business Process Management

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How low-code development platforms advance business process management and eliminate the costs associated with custom coding.

Adaptability and continuous improvement are two of the defining characteristics of any modern business. More than ever, success is determined by the ability to scale and adapt a business’s workflow potential in line with constantly changing demands. Business process management, or BPM, is a proven discipline intended to tackle these challenges.

BPM is the technical evolution of concepts that long predate it, such as task management, the division of labor, and production. Over the past decade, organizations have started using BPM to analyze processes, measure performance, and discover opportunities for improvement – all with the goal of improving efficiency.

Today, intelligence and automation are integral to BPM, hence the rise of the term intelligent business process management, or iBPM. Intelligence and automation come in various forms, such as the digitization of business rules and intelligent process mining. Repeatable tasks are automated, with little or no human intervention required.

The main value proposition of iBPM is the intelligent collaboration and orchestration of people, connected devices, and applications in pursuit of business goals. However, to make informed decisions and better serve customers, businesses need the right tools for accessing mission-critical information in the right context.

In many organizations, that information is scattered across a disparate array of off-the-shelf and custom-built applications. Applying iBPM to such a fragmented environment ranges from difficult to outright impossible. As a result, workers are less efficient, and customer experience suffers.

Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) offer a better solution by bridging the gap between the inherent limitations of off-the-shelf software and the high costs of developing custom apps from scratch. LCDPs enable the rapid delivery of custom business applications and empower those on the operations side to become citizen developers.

In this article, we will explore how low-code is a valuable asset to BPM.

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Salesforce vs. Corteza
Which Is Better?

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Salesforce Sales CRM and the Salesforce Lightning Platform that underpins it are powerful tools for any business. But are they truly the best tools for what businesses and organizations need – or are they simply coasting on their market share and gargantuan marketing budget? And more importantly, is the high cost of Salesforce justified?

Salesforce vs. Corteza

Today we’re going to take an in-depth look at Salesforce CRM and compare it to Corteza CRM by Planet Crust.

Planet crust is the creator and driving force behind Corteza – a 100% fully open-source, UX-driven, standards-based low-code platform that comes with pre-built CRM and Case Management solutions. Other solutions are also possible, such as Integration Hub, Smart Cities, Supply Chain Management, Patient Management, Disaster Relief Management. Basically, any data-based solution you can think of, you can build on Corteza, which is one of its strongest selling points.

By contrast, Salesforce comes with a large library of existing solutions, including Analytics, Commerce, CRM, Marketing, Healthcare, Service and more. If anything, it’s this suite of products that is one of Salesforce’s selling points, though you do have to pay separately for each solution.

But in this article, we’re going to focus on Salesforce’s and Corteza’s respective CRMs and the low-code platforms they’re built on so you can decide which platform is better for you and your organization. Read more

Four Challenges Low-Code Platforms Face

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How to counter the challenges of customizability, data standardization, vendor lock-in and shadow IT.

By now, most technology leaders have come to recognize the value of low-code development in the rapid deployment of business-critical applications and the alleviation of technical debt. In fact, Gartner predicts that two-thirds of software development will be low-code by 2024. The market is also expected to grow by 23% by the end of the year.

Yet despite this rapid growth, several significant challenges remain. These difficulties continue to discourage some businesses from fully realizing the benefits of using low code development platforms (LCDP). Some of the most oft-cited challenges include a lack of customizability, the risk of vendor lock-in, and the rise of shadow IT.

While it is easy to think of these challenges as inherent limitations of the low-code approach, it is important to remember that, just like any platform, not all LCDPs are made equal. Hybrid low-code development environments and fully open-source platforms are just a couple of the alternatives to the relatively inflexible closed-source industry standards.

In this article, we will look at how these alternatives can help businesses overcome the common limitations of low-code. Read more