The Era of Low Code Platforms

Low-code platform (LCP) is an application platform designed to facilitate swift application development, streamlined deployment, and efficient execution and management. It achieves this by leveraging declarative, high-level programming abstractions, including model-driven and metadata-based programming languages.

Initially, low-code development primarily targeted smaller, departmental, and less critical functionalities. However, the current landscape of the low-code market is undergoing a significant transformation towards enterprise-grade solutions, driven by the involvement of major industry players. Unsurprisingly, the market is anticipated to experience exponential growth.

The following compilation outlines the key benefits of low-code platforms:

• Speed: Low-code platforms offer the ability to accelerate the development process, by utilizing boilerplate code, pre-built templates, and other building blocks.

• Agility: Low-code platforms facilitate enterprises realize and test their innovation hypothesis.

• Cost: Low-code platforms decrease the total cost of development by reducing the demand on internal IT department.

• User Experience: Low-code platforms empower the users designing the application interface and experience as they require and wish.

• IT Governance: Low-code platforms improve IT governance and eliminate shadow IT by clearing the mess of third-party tools.

Low-code platforms market consists of diverse players with different skills and focus. However, despite the differences, these platforms share some common features, briefly outlined below:

1. Visual modeling enriches the design activity and realize the WYSIWYG approach with featuring simple modeling interfaces.

2. Drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built user interfaces and ready-to-use data models enable the rapid development of business processes and logic.

3. Cross-platform support helps to build web, desktop, and mobile apps, for any type of the device and application architecture within full-stack approach.

4. Cloud based architecture provides the applications with scalability to meet variable workloads and transportability for diverse environments.

5. Diverse language support allows technical users to customize their code structure or data models by extending the outputs of low code platform.

6. One-click application delivery automatically tracks all changes and handles deployment processes, eliminating many time-consuming operational activities.

7. Real time analytics deliver the capability to leverage multiple data streams for monitoring, analysis and reporting.

8. Security layer ensures the data protection with encryption and access management.

9. Collaboration between business and IT teams is facilitated with fluid communication and simultaneous development capabilities.

10. AI-assisted framework brings artificial intelligence to the development process, by automating redundant tasks and preventing potential defects.

Commencing a free trial access for any low-code platform is a seamless process. However, making an investment decision from a long-term perspective demands significant effort for investigation and evaluation. Throughout this process, several highly critical points must be taken into consideration, as outlined below:

• Functionality: Low code platforms are primarily meant for internal use. They have not matured to the point to easily create a good-looking consumer-facing application that can scale and be developed over the years.

• Platform lock-in: Leaving the platform requires to completely redevelop the application. Improved ability to migrate data and assets will help lessen the risk of adoption.

• Pricing transparency: There is no clear way to predict in the long-run the true cost of these platforms. Pricing will continue to act as a blocker until companies can clearly understand predicted costs over time.

• Product communities: More and larger communities are needed to support these platforms. Users have questions and a solid community is needed for meaningful development.

• Security: Between data concerns, shadow development, lack of auditing there is a lot to solve. Inexperienced users can easily create a solution that is insecure — and expose user data or worse.

• Dependency: When you have your application created on the third-party platform, you do not own the code. If your low-code vendor decides to make changes or fails to secure the codebase, there is not much you can do about it.

• Technical debt: Are you sure you have access and the ability to export the data you need? Is anyone else trained on the specific platform this person used? What needs to be fixed in order to change or adapt to the software? Going too fast can have consequences you need to fix.