Mendix has released a comprehensive study of the low-code market within the enterprise, and it shows how important the technology has become.
Low-code development allows individuals and teams to develop and deploy applications with little or no programming knowledge. Low-code platforms have become a critical part of many organizations’ workflows, allowing multiple departments to contribute to the development of applications and services.
Mendix’s study shows just how important low-code has become, with “77% of enterprises in six countries have already adopted low-code, and 75% of IT leaders said it’s a trend they can’t afford to miss.”
A major factor in the sudden uptick of low-code adoption has been the COVID-19 pandemic. As companies and organizations have transitioned to digital-first workflows, many have used low-code development to enable non-IT personnel to relieve some of the pressure on the IT staff. In fact, 59% of low-code projects involve collaboration between business and IT.
Even among IT professionals, 64% say low-code is their go-to option.
“This study confirms what we’ve long believed,” said Derek Roos, co-founder and CEO of Mendix. “Low-code is the future of software development and Mendix is leading the way. It’s agile by design. It dramatically expands the pool of development talent. It’s built for collaboration and it’s built for rapid development. Low-code, and specifically low-code with Mendix, is fast becoming a core technology enterprises need to succeed in a digital-first world.”
Youreka Labs, a company that enables Salesforce-based businesses to build assistants using no-code development, has raised $8.5 million.
No-code development is the next major evolution of software development, with Gartner predicting 80% of services and products will be created using low-code or no-code development by 2024. Youreka’s solutions focus on helping Salesforce enterprises use low-code to create assistants, an area with a growing need as a result of pandemic-fueled worker shortages.
Youreka’s mission is to help close this skills gap by upskilling frontline workers. By making it easy to complete complex procedures in the field with less training and experience, Youreka improves customer service and opens access to new career opportunities.
Led by Boulder Ventures and Grotech Ventures, with Salesforce Ventures joining them, Youreka has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. The investment comes after the company saw 300% growth in 2020.
“The new investment and collaboration with Salesforce will help us to further our innovation and expand our reach,” said Youreka CEO and former GM of IBM Cloud Platform Bill Karpovich. “While new technologies such as AI and automation are often viewed as putting people out of work and depersonalizing customer service, Youreka helps individuals do their very best work and helps organizations deliver exceptional experiences. This is an important technology with broad application. We are excited to enter the next chapter of market leadership, growth and impact.”
Low-code may be one of the fastest growing trends in development, but over a quarter of C-level execs haven’t heard of it.
Low-code and no-code solutions allow individuals to create applications and services with little to no coding or past experience. The tech is a boon to companies of all sizes, speeding up development and letting non-IT departments contribute. Low-code is gaining ground so fast that Gartner predicts that 80% of tech products and services will be built using low-code by 2024.
Unfortunately, according to research from CLEVR, 27% of C-level execs have never heard of low-code or no-code.
“It reminds me of when cloud technology was just on the rise and many businesses thought it was the same as iCloud or Dropbox,” Angelique Schouten, CEO of CLEVR, told WebProNews. “To fully access the power of low-code and no-code platforms, you must understand it first.”
CLEVR’s research illustrates the importance of closing the knowledge gap for one of the most important trends in modern development.
Microsoft is integrating GPT-3 — a natural language model developed by OpenAI — with its low-code development tools.
Microsoft Power Apps is the company’s low-code development platform, designed to allow individuals to create software with minimal coding experiencing. GTP-3 is a natural language model developed by OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that was co-founded by Elon Musk.
By combining GTP-3 and Power Apps, Microsoft hopes to revolutionize low-code development, alowing individuals to program using natural expression commands.
Microsoft’s Jennifer Langston outlined the benefits in a company blog post:
For instance, the new AI-powered features will allow an employee building an e-commerce app to describe a programming goal using conversational language like “find products where the name starts with ‘kids.’” A fine-tuned GPT-3 model then offers choices for transforming the command into a Microsoft Power Fx formula, the open source programming language of the Power Platform, such as “Filter(‘BC Orders’ Left(‘Product Name’,4)=”Kids”).
Integrating GPT-3 into Power Apps will help the company’s development tools go from low-code to no-code.
“Using an advanced AI model like this can help our low-code tools become even more widely available to an even bigger audience by truly becoming what we call no code,” said Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s low code application platform.
“This will allow people to query and explore data in ways they literally couldn’t do before, and that will be the magical moment,” Lamanna added.
Google has made its low-code automation tool, AppSheet Automation, generally available.
Google bought AppSheet, one of the leading no-code development platforms, at the beginning of 2020. The company has been building on that acquisition by developing AI-based automation to help organizations automate their business processes.
Automation is more important than ever as companies and industries try to return to normal. According to Forrester, “automation has been a major force reshaping work since long before the pandemic; now, it’s taking on a new urgency in the context of business risk and resiliency… As we emerge from the crisis, firms will look to automation as a way to mitigate the risks that future crises pose to the supply and productivity of human workers.”
Google is clearly working to position AppSheet Automation as the platform of choice for companies looking to improve their automation.
Last fall, we announced early access for AppSheet Automation, a significant addition to AppSheet, our no-code development platform, that leverages Google AI to make it easier to automate business processes. Today, as part of our mission to further support the future of work, we are making AppSheet Automation generally available (GA). AppSheet Automation empowers even those without coding skills to reshape their own work with powerful new features including smarter extraction of structured data from documents and compatibility with a wider range of data sources like Google Workspace Sheets and Drive.
Google says companies around the world are already using AppSheet. AppSheet Automation should open up important new possibilities.
IBM and Palantir are partnering to make it easier to develop and deploy low-code AI applications to IBM’s hybrid cloud.
IBM is all-in on hybrid cloud, with plans to split the company and spin off its legacy business into an independent company, while the core company focuses on the cloud. As it moves toward that goal, IBM has been shoring up its cloud business, buying up startups and inking deals with complimentary companies.
The latest deal involves partnering with Palantir, with the two companies announcing a new product, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data. The new application is designed to address the disparity between those companies that want to deploy AI and companies that have the necessary experience. According to IBM, 75% of business are exploring AI implementation. Unfortunately, 37% have limited AI experience, while 31% cite data silos and data complexity as major challenges.
Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data is designed to address these challenges by bringing a no-code/low-code approach to AI application development.
The new product will leverage Palantir Foundry and will integrate with IBM Cloud Pak for Data services, such as Watson, providing an information architecture that includes data and AI with built-in governance. It is designed to provide an easy to use “no-code/low-code” environment for building applications that use AI to inform data-driven decision making and automate tasks and processes. Built on Red Hat OpenShift, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data is intended to help businesses reduce data silos, integrate data sources across hybrid cloud environments, and govern data throughout the AI lifecycle. The product is being designed to help users securely build and deploy AI applications with that data quickly, to rapidly complement and extend existing enterprise systems and accelerate their digital transformation.
The new application will be available in March 2021 and may very well help speed the adoption of AI.
“Even ahead of COVID, the market for companies who are undergoing digital transformation and who need to use digital technologies to compete and win in the modern economy was enormous,” says Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson. “COVID has been a tailwind to Twilio business but really is an acceleration of the trends that have gone on for the last 10 to 20 years as a result of digital transformation in nearly every kind of company.”
Even ahead of COVID, the market for companies who are undergoing digital transformation and who need to use digital technologies to compete and win in the modern economy was enormous. What COVID did is it accelerated many of the initiatives, many of the use cases, the things that companies needed to build to be competitive in this digital era were accelerated.
They were accelerated because of COVID, because of social distancing, work from home, and migrating a lot of these business processes to software and into the cloud and modernizing all of this. COVID has been a tailwind to Twilio business but really is an acceleration of the trends that have gone on for the last 10 to 20 years as a result of digital transformation in nearly every kind of company.
I’m Not Very Concerned About Microsoft
I’m not very concerned (about new competitors like Microsoft). It’s the same reason that (I wasn’t concerned) when Amazon started building products in the communication space or Facebook or Google or even Blackberry once announced that they were going to compete with Twilio. First of all, we’re no stranger to competition. This is a huge market. It’s no surprise that a wide variety of companies have products in the communications domain.
We compete by focusing on our customers, listening to what they need, and building differentiated APIs, a differentiated platform, and a differentiated super network. We’ve got a 12-year head start on anybody entering the space. The last thing I’ll add is that we are not a company that is very focused on competition. We’re focused on our customers. That focus has driven us for the last 12 years and has served us very well. We will continue to focus on the things our customers need in this enormous market and be able to take a lot of market share.
Digital-Native Companies Want APIs That Work
Strangely, I don’t think Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wakes up every day thinking about Twilio. But we are also no stranger to pricing competition. In fact, that is how most companies have tried to compete with us through our 12-year history. They come in with an inferior product and they say we’re going to be cheaper. But it turns out that the biggest enterprises on the planet or digital-native companies, what they want are APIs that work, mature, scalable, and that work everywhere around the world.
We’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and money to build the leading platform out there and what we found is that customers value that. So we’re no stranger to people trying to undercut us on price. What we think and what we hear from our customers is that they want quality, they want reliability, and they want HIPAA compliance. They want all sorts of capabilities that let them power their business and that’s what we offer.
Low-Code, No-Code, and Yo-Code
Low-code is a really exciting area. There are three buckets. There’s low-code, no-code, and then yo-code for the people who love to write code, developers. We’ve got products really for that whole spectrum. The typical way a developer might build on top of Twilio is to write code and host it themselves. We have a Twilio Functions product that allows us to host the software for our customers. Then we have Twilio Studio which is a drag and drop designer for the non-developer to be able to build out sophisticated workflows like interactive voice response systems on top of Twilio.
We have embraced really all three of those categories of builders. We do believe that at every enterprise there is a large number of builders with different skill sets who are building the future of how those companies engage with their customers. We want to enable all those people to succeed on Twilio.
Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: COVID Accelerated Digital Transformation
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a beta of Honeycode, a low-code development service for cloud computing.
AWS is the current, undisputed champion of cloud computing, with a commanding lead in the market. In spite of that, both Microsoft and Goole have made headway and are chipping away at AWS’ lead.
Simultaneously, one of the biggest trends in the tech industry is low or no-code development. These tools provide a way for organizations to quickly prototype, develop and deploy applications with minimal coding. This can significantly reduce investment cost, and speed up development. Both Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud offer low-code development options.
Now Amazon is playing catchup, with the release of Honeycode. Honeycode is described as “a fully managed service that allows customers to quickly build powerful mobile and web applications – with no programming required.”
According to the company’s announcement, “customers can use a simple visual application builder to create highly interactive web and mobile applications backed by a powerful AWS-built database to perform tasks like tracking data over time and notifying users of changes, routing approvals, and facilitating interactive business processes. Using Amazon Honeycode, customers can create applications that range in complexity from a task-tracking application for a small team to a project management system that manages a complex workflow for multiple teams or departments.”
It’s a safe bet Honeycode will be a popular addition to the AWS ecosystem and help the company as it continues to fend off Microsoft and Google.
Google has announced it is shutting down App Maker, its low-code development environment.
App Maker was unveiled in 2016 and provided a way for IT departments, developers and enthusiasts to create apps to improve G Suite workflows. App Maker users will need to find another solution, however, as the development environment is nearing the end of its life.
In the blog post announcing the change, Google said existing apps made with App Maker will continue to work, and critical bugs will be addressed, but the tool is no longer under active development. Effective April 15, 2020, developers will no longer be able to create new applications and effective January 19, 2021, all App Maker apps will stop working.
The company says there is no migration path to other platforms, including any of its own tools. In the meantime, Google encourages app developers to start recreating their apps using AppSheet, a similar product the company acquired in mid-January. Of course, given the abandonment of App Maker, with no easy migration path, Google may have trouble convincing users to trust another of the company’s solutions.
Google has announced its acquisition of “AppSheet, a leading no-code application development platform used by a number of enterprises across a variety of industries.”
Custom applications are an excellent way for businesses to meet their needs and adapt to an ever-evolving landscape. As Google points out in their post, however, not all businesses have the resources to have a large, in-house development team. No-code or low-code solutions are an excellent way to address that shortcoming and AppSheet is one of the best available.
The platform uses a database, spreadsheet or form to build a mobile app. According to the company site, “AppSheet will automatically generate an app by using the data in your column header (i.e. the first row of your spreadsheet) as fields. These fields determine how the app captures or displays data.” Once the data is pulled in, the platform’s tools provide a way to alter how the app looks and behaves.
“AppSheet complements Google Cloud’s strategy to reimagine the application development space with a platform that helps enterprises innovate with no-code development, workflow automation, application integration and API management as they modernize their business processes in the cloud,” wrote Amit Zavery, Google Cloud VP of Business Application Platform. “AppSheet’s ability to power a range of applications—from CRM to field inspections and personalized reporting—combined with Google Cloud’s deep expertise in key verticals, will further enable digital transformation across industries like financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, communication and media & entertainment.”
AppSheet currently works with AWS, Box, Dropbox, Office 365, Salesforce and other cloud hosted databases. Both Google’s announcement and an announcement on AppSheet’s site reassures users AppSheet will remain cross-platform.
