Presented by DronaHQ
Today, seamless digital experiences are crucial for businesses to compete. Low-code and no-code technology are emerging as essential solutions to remove roadblocks and accelerate digital transformation. Gartner predicts that low-code/no-code solutions will make up 65% of application development by 2024 because the technology helps address productivity issues, skill shortages, and business project backlogs. While this sounds futuristic, there are already areas within the application development space where low-code/no-code has been adding 10x value compared to traditional development.
Have a closer look at these 4 areas.
1. Business process management (BPM)
When speaking about the benefits of low code and its implication on business process management, Forrester’s Clay Richardson, an expert on low-code platforms, shared that:
- You can create and deploy BPM apps in minutes
- Development and testing costs are minimal
- Devs with minimal training can effortlessly learn development through a low-code platform and create apps
There are successful BPM tools for both enterprise and small businesses across the market that are demonstrating these points.
BPM tools are not new. However, key players like Appian and Pega have quickly added a low-code layer on top to help non-tech users build business processes visually with little to zero code needed.
Example: The business team at an online threat prevention company often tackles processes that require technical skills to complete. That meant it often had to rely on the engineering team to get work done. The process took away engineering focus time. The business team would have to wait on the engineering team before they could get back to customers. It was not the most ideal set-up on both sides and slowed down results for their customers. Using low-code they could create and connect a personalized front end to the necessary data so that people only have to press a few buttons to complete the functions they need. This not only aided in reducing dependency on the engineers but also helped with faster adoption and continuous use.
2. Internal tools
Internal tools are applications generally meant for internal teams like rev-ops, sales-ops, mark-ops, hr-ops, etc. These usually are custom apps, typically ranging from CRUD apps to a bit more complex apps.
DronaHQ is one such tool that is helping teams build internal tools. Using such tools, you can build frontends, connect to various data sources (APIs/databases) and write frontend workflows.
The output would be web and mobile apps for internal users in the HR, sales, finance, or marketing teams — for example, an internal tool to calculate and capture sales incentives and sync the data with payroll and CRM.
Just like BPM tools, internal tools are an extremely popular category. Usually, small to large enterprises opt in to speed up building internal tools to free up engineering resources for working on critical features rather than clogging them for the essential ops based apps.
Example: To speed up the customer ticket resolution process, an online retail company used low code to integrate customer data, payment info, and order and shipping data easily into a customer support tool to help resolve refund issues faster. The customer success reps would have to request information from different sources any time a new ticket was received. The process of fetching the information was delaying problem resolution and impacting customer satisfaction. With a low-code platform, the business team easily connected the data from different business functions and created an internal tool.
3. Field force applications
Adoption of this category of low code for building field force apps has been rapidly growing.
These tools cater to the needs of industries like utility, oil and gas, and telecom, where field force needs digital tools for their day-to-day operations. Generally these industries would be needing a solution for enabling field force with digital tools on mobile or handheld devices. For example, inspection and audit teams would need an app for recording site observations to generate a signed audit report.
Low-code platforms, in this space, are enabling the building of mobile apps to capture field data, generate reports, see the next task or day schedule, etc.
You would find both large and medium size organizations using such tools to help them speed up building field force apps. Popular tools in this category include players like Fulcrum, Workmobile, and more.
4. Online databases
This is yet another emerging area where low code has become very effective. As per Gartner’s Pace-Layered Model: a system of record is the fundamental base layer for digitization. Low-code platforms powering Online DBs usually enable “System of Records.”
Low-code tools enable the quick setup of databases without much technical expertise using drag and drop build forms to capture data and pages to view and work on the data.
Examples of such tools are players like Knack, Quickbase, Airtable, etc.
The future promise of low code
Apart from these four areas, there are other segments with growing traction:
- Automation tools
- Automation Testing
- Ecommerce
- Website builders
- And many more
As low-code/ no-code continues to see high investments, more and more niche players and categories must emerge.
The next wave of SaaS will be spearheaded by no code. Why is that? Simply put, SaaS applications are meeting 80% needs of all organizations and leave 20% on the table for finding ways to meet those needs.
If you take an example of CRM or HRM SaaS like Hubspot or Workday, you would need customization as you implement these tools to meet your business needs. The torchbearer of SaaS — Salesforce — has already added a low-code layer to its platform to enable their customers to customize underlying SaaS in sales, marketing and service cloud offerings. This addition of low code to the underlying SaaS is a big bang in the world of low code and would only continue to expand low-code/no-code boundaries at high speed.
While it is just the beginning of the low-code movement, it’s clear it has the power to disrupt digital engineering.
DronaHQ has enabled some of the world’s largest CPG, ecommerce, manufacturing, ITeS, and banking enterprises as well as startups to help them go low code and stay ahead of the competition with a strategic roadmap for the future. Interested in learning more? Contact us, we are here to help!
Jinen Dedhia is co-founder of DronaHQ and drives DronaHQ product strategy, relentlessly focusing on customer delight. He helped scale DronaHQ to a SaaS platform. Jinen heads Customer Relations, Sales, Finance and Operations at DronaHQ. He has nearly two decades of experience in technology. He is a passionate techie and helps define product strategy to address enterprise customer needs – from small businesses to large enterprises.
Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact [email protected].
Source: Read Full Article