With organizations continuing to push toward digital transformation, the developers and business analysts within these businesses hold the key to accelerate this evolution. Under pressure to help deliver more engaging customer experiences and optimize operations, they’re discovering that low-code development practices—which simplify or remove manual coding from software development—are proving to be the future of digital innovation.
According to Gartner, low-code as a general social and technological movement is expected to continue growing significantly. For example, low-code application platforms (LCAP) are expected to remain the largest component of the low-code development technology market through 2022, increasing nearly 30 percent from 2020 to reach $5.8 billion in 2021.
Why low-code? Why now?
COVID-19 has put more pressure on organizations to respond nimbly, yet strategically, to shifting market and customer demands. The ability to adapt and pivot has never been more important: there’s a need to digitize and take advantage of automation to improve productivity, engagement and support across the entire organization.
Low-code development platforms allow developers to turn the intense pressure to keep pace with fast application development cycles into six key results:
- Make an impact: Create applications to enable smarter, more personalized experiences for customers and employees
- Move faster: Eliminate lengthy cycles of development and testing for faster time to value
- Improve business processes: Close process gaps and reduce manual tasks
- Modernize and digitize: Replace legacy applications and enhance existing systems with new capabilities
- Optimize skills and reduce budget shortfalls: Lower the barrier to entry for non-IT employees
- Fuel innovation: Deliver applications to tap into new markets, new customers and new revenue opportunities
The power to create better software faster will push the adoption of low-code platforms to critical mass in the years ahead. According to IDC, low-code and no-code developer populations will significantly expand within the next three to five years; by 2024, three quarters of the Global 2000 will be high-performance, large-scale producers of software-powered innovation.
Unlock enterprise information
Low-code development has grown from a tool for departmental applications to a strategy to support widespread digital transformation. With enterprise information often existing across a variety of enterprise systems and content repositories, this hinders digital transformation due to disconnected processes, disjointed tasks and rigid processes that do not meet user needs and, ultimately, customer expectations.
Low-code development and applications help create new interactions infused with enterprise information to streamline business processes, improve operations and introduce automation. With the right automation platform, both the business and IT teams can collaborate to access information from disparate systems and re-engineer processes for efficiency. This allows users to interact with information through engaging applications aligned to customer and business needs.
Lean on an application development platform
The best low-code development platforms power digital transformation through enterprise applications that are engaging, smart and easy to deploy. Rapid application development with less IT involvement is made possible due to low-code, drag-and-drop components, reusable building blocks and accelerators to build and deploy solutions more easily.
Low-code development platforms allow enterprises to optimize resources through collaboration and to build mobile and web applications faster to automate manual processes and accelerate time to value. Other features and benefits include the following:
- Connect and orchestrate information flows across lead applications and other systems from within business applications
- Modernize legacy applications without rearchitecting the complete applications
- Take advantage of pre-built, customizable visual reports that aid decision making and eliminate the complex task of building, deploying and using an external business intelligence tool
- Tap into artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics for smarter automation and rich applications
- Build, iterate and deploy process-centric and case management applications that integrate with other lead applications and systems of record
Create smarter, low-code applications
OpenText™ AppWorks™ is a low-code development platform to support business process automation and dynamic case management applications as part of a digital transformation strategy. Learn more about how OpenText allows business experts to quickly build, deploy, iterate and scale business applications, tapping into existing information assets to generate more business value for the organization, stakeholders and customers.
