Power your Enterprise's Digital Initiatives with Low-Code Platforms
The Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and more: all of these technological trends are having a profound (if not revolutionary) impact on the way people communicate and collaborate. To take advantage of these groundbreaking developments and bring their businesses up to speed, more and more organizations are seeing the benefits of digital initiatives and digital transformations.
Unfortunately, in far too many cases, companies that embark on digital initiatives struggle with having the technical and programming expertise that they need to bring these envisioned changes to life. In response to these difficulties, enterprises are turning to low-code platforms that allow them to easily get applications up and running, without getting bogged down in long, costly development cycles.
Why Is Traditional Coding So Challenging?
Traditional coding has one big problem: it's not accessible to the masses. If you have a brilliant concept for the next great mobile app, for example, you first need to learn a programming language such as Objective-C or Swift and tools such as Xcode or Visual Studio.
However, learning enough to develop non-trivial mobile applications will require at least several months of study to reach a sufficient level of expertise. This creates barriers to entry for many entrepreneurs. Smaller businesses are unable to draw on the deep well of experience and expertise present at larger organizations, thereby preventing innovation and new ideas from gaining a foothold in the market. Hiring external developers is likewise often not an option. Price tags for building a professional, polished mobile application can be as high as $50,000 or even $100,000.
According to a 2017 survey by IT research and advisory company Forrester Research, 39 percent of companies cited high costs as one of the most challenging aspects of programming custom-built applications. Many companies also listed difficulties such as slow development, scalability issues and fulfilling business requirements while staying under budget.
The Benefits of Low-Coding Platforms
By now, it's clear that manual coding is too slow, expensive and unwieldy for many business objectives. As a potential solution, many organizations are experimenting with low-coding platforms in order to improve their development speed and productivity.
In contrast to traditional development models, low-coding platforms are the great equalizer.These solutions automatically handle concerns such as security and cross-platform support, allowing you to concentrate on fulfilling your unique business needs rather than on the tedious parts of application development. As the name implies, little or no coding is needed when using such a platform. Users can describe the app's business logic and data integrations using a straightforward drag-and-drop interface, and then compile and deploy the code with the push of a button.
According to the Forrester Research study, the top three advantages that companies have observed since using a low-coding platform are better customer experience, easier fulfillment of business requirements and faster updates. Low-coding platforms are of particular interest for your company in the following situations:
- Your in-house development team is too slow for your needs or has a backlog of applications to build.
- The application needs to run on a variety of platforms and devices, or will be supported and updated well after release.
- You lack expertise in the languages and technologies that you need to develop the application.
Of course, manual programming certainly has a role to play in many cases, now and in the foreseeable future. For many businesses, however, low-coding platforms are exactly what is needed to quickly and efficiently bring their ideas to life.