Low-Code development platforms:

Five must-have capabilities you need to know about

The rapid rise of cloud computing in the past 15 years has reshaped how businesses operate. And it also had a direct impact on how we build custom enterprise applications.

Taking a step back, the pivotal moment in this transformative journey was 1999. It was when Marc Benioff, an ex-Oracle executive, founded Salesforce. Together with a team of innovators – Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez – they unleashed the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

This triggered a transition from an infrastructure-heavy business model to a service-centric one.

Moving away from managing physical data centers to buying cloud-based services led to three major trends.

  1. Democratization: Non-IT employees can create tech solutions for business without complex coding skills.
     
  2. Composable Business: Businesses started designing their technology systems and applications in a modular, Lego-like fashion for quick, flexible adaptations.
     
  3. Hyper Automation: Business and IT teams now use multiple technologies and tools to automate most business functions. 

 

This also gave rise to a unique breed of software called the low-code development platforms. Forrester explains Low-Code platforms as a transformational technology to make apps and empower many decentralized developers — including both professional and citizen developers. The technology helps teams to build custom apps by reducing the need for complex programming languages.

But not all low-code platforms are equal. It's essential to distinguish the exceptional from the ordinary when you test which low-code development platform aligns with your enterprise standards.

Using Forrester's advice, let's review the five must-have capabilities for your low-code development platform.


1.    Tooling for Data and Integrations:


  • The platform should have ready-to-use integration connectors (more below) 
  • Integration tooling is the most crucial evaluation factor for an enterprise-grade low-code development platform. For instance, AgilePoint provides ready-to-use integration connectors with 125+ services (APIs, RPA, ERPs, CRMs, AL/ML Cloud Services, Popular Databases, IoT, Accounting and Payments, Document Management, Message Brokers, and Chat Bots)   
  • Data modeling features that allow you to build a logical structure of data within an application. (Source, type, relationships, fields)
  • Integration with agile project management platforms (Asana, GitHub) and pre-integrated content management systems (WordPress)


2.    Tooling for Process Automation:


  • A strong (and intuitive) automation engine   
  • Process automation features that are “intuitive” to use and useful for long-running processes. 
  • Orchestration, rules, process mining, and support for robotic process automation (RPA) 
  • The platform should have features for AI development or provide deep integration with AI services (Amazon/Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Cognitive Services) 
  • Supports high-scale production-grade apps and reuse of development assets.


3.    Tooling for User Experience:


  • The platform should provide a toolset for UX and native mobile app development 
  • A marketplace of platform add-ons and apps to jumpstart your low-code development journey 
  • UX and mobile dev capabilities, no extra development effort to build the native mobile version of your apps.


4.    DevOps, collaboration, and developer experience:


  • It should be suitable for multiple personas (more on this below) 
  • Your low-code development platform should activate multiple user groups like Citizen Developers to build innovation-driven apps, Professional Developers for serious enterprise apps, and Data and Process Analysts to help them build data- and process-centric apps. 
  • Your low-code development platform should enable fusion teams (combining professional and Citizen Developers) to work collaboratively on different parts of the same app/apps. 
  • Native and ready-to-use document management/collaboration capabilities 
  • Allows for scaled citizen development — a low-code and no-code application development paradigm in which a low-code development platform supports use cases across departments, business units, subsidiaries, and global business teams. 
  • The integrated development environment (IDE) should not be overly technical and should cater to businesspeople. 
  • The platform should have Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) features that may include Package Manager (to compile and deploy apps for consistency and reliability in the deployment process), automated testing, rollback mechanism, notifications, and alerts.


5.    Governance, admin, security, extensions:


  • Features for developer governance and portfolio management that provide a very granular and comprehensive list of access controls and governance settings for every component of the platform 
  • A significant range of prebuilt reports to monitor app and process performance 
  • Governance features provide an end-to-end view of the whole app portfolio 
  • Version control capabilities



Deployment: 

  • Your low code development platform should provide flexible deployment options like SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), on-premises, private, public, and hybrid cloud. If your current provider is limited to a SaaS model, it might be time to consider a more robust tool that enables you to deploy virtually anywhere, including on-premises and in private and public clouds.


Pricing:

  • Your low-code development platform shouldn’t bind you into deal sizes. In fact, it’s best to have ‘value-based’ pricing. Value pricing allows you to switch between plans based on adoption and consumption pattern. 
  • Also, a steep per-user fee pricing undermines your plan to scale your apps and automations. Therefore, choose platforms that are cost-effective. 
  • Your LCNC platform provider should have a published pricing and should be able to give you an estimate based on consumption/usage scenarios. You can refer to AgilePoint’s pricing or this document to understand pricing structures of low code development platforms.   

 

Takeaway:

Enterprise architects and decision makers should consider five core capabilities of a low- code development platform before making a purchasing decision. These include data and integration tooling, process automation capabilities, tooling for user experience (UX), tooling for DevOps and collaboration, and lastly governance, security, and extensibility of the platform.

To learn more about the 14 Low Code development platforms that matter the most and how they stack up, download The Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Development Platforms For Professional Developers, Q2 2023.


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AgilePoint is an adaptive enterprise process automation platform. Our philosophy is that all code creates future choke points, ultimately leading to system collapse. That is why our platform is completely codeless. Allowing you to transform your business model by simplifying the processes that fundamentally underpin the applications you are running and making your organization faster, more secure, resilient, and fully adaptive. We save our clients $ 32 million or an ROI of over 400% on average. For more of our amazing result metrics, see " Total Economic Impact of AgilePoint." Introduction Transformation Trailblazer AgilePoint has emerged as a visionary trailblazer in the realm of digital transformation, offering a powerful adaptive process automation platform for enterprises. Stemming from lessons learned during the turbulent period of the dot-com bubble, where high-profile failures highlighted the critical need for agility and resilience, AgilePoint set out to empower organizations to react and respond quickly and continuously to a relentlessly changing landscape. The Codeless Differentiator Today, AgilePoint remains the preferred digital transformation platform for many global organizations, thanks to its codeless architecture delivering unrivaled agility and cost efficiency. Remarkably, even after two decades, numerous customers continue to rely on AgilePoint as a core capability and key competitive differentiator. We pride ourselves in the long-term relationships we maintain with our clients. Today, where companies stay an average of 5 years with a technology vendor, many of AgilePoint customers have been with us for up to two decades. Speed, adaptability, transparency, cost efficiency, security, trust, and confidence. These are the reasons our customers stay. The following experiences come from Fortune 100s and publicly listed companies, including a longtime customer where AgilePoint enabled a successful €166 billion merger. 1. Accelerated Development and Adaptation AgilePoint enables organizations to be adaptive without the significant upfront investment. It enables the rapid deployment of highly adaptable business solutions and gives organizations the ability to evolve them in real-time to cater to emerging opportunities and continually drive towards better customer outcomes and product-market fit. 1.1 Speed "If a project is two years long, then we can't spend six months building an application. We need to build it in two to three weeks. With AgilePoint, we can." These are the words of a director at a Fortune 100 Engineering firm that has been with AgilePoint for 14 years. His comment highlights their need for rapid development cycles essential for quick turnaround initiatives. Indeed, with a stream of constantly evolving requirements, the firm needed a platform that would allow them to ramp up and put into production tailored solutions as quickly as possible. 1.2 Continuously adaptation But they also wanted the ability to adapt these solutions continuously and have the flexibility to bespoke them for specific customer projects rather than halting production lines and redesigning solutions from the ground up to cater to specific customer requirements. "The flexibility to adapt is crucial." as stated by the same director, "Changes are needed because we are a project company. [The business] changes [and] the rules and people constantly change. So, we needed something flexible." 1.3 Keeping pace without breaking the bank AgilePoint has provided the essential capabilities this Fortune 100 engineering firm has needed all these years to keep pace with high market demand while delighting its customers with highly personalized solutions without breaking the bank. Henry Ford famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Indeed, the entire production line would have had to be shut down to accommodate a different color. Not so for this engineering firm. 2. Transparent, Adaptable Automations 2.1 Lengthy process cycles, lack of visibility, and non-compliance A spokesperson from one of the world’s largest defense companies, and an AgilePoint customer for the last 17 years, highlighted the challenges their organization faced before AgilePoint, including lengthy process cycles, lack of visibility, and non-compliance with regulations. 2.2 Struggling to adapt Before AgilePoint, they were struggling to evergreen their cross-functional automation (complex, end-to-end, cross-departmental automated workflows) as their incumbent platform could not provide them with the flexibility and dynamism they needed to prepare for and deliver a massive overhaul of their operations (they were amid a large, time-sensitive merger) while keeping in line with regulatory requirements. The company needed more transparency concerning its automation processes, which significantly hampered its ability to pinpoint compliance issues. 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Ultimately, the high level of transparency of their process automation and ease of adapting them on the fly proved to be the game-changers for the defense company. 3. Simple Modernization 3.1 Straightforward and painless A publicly listed German Leasing company and an AgilePoint customer for over 15 years had considered replacing AgilePoint as their enterprise automation platform a few times, driven by internal strategy initiatives to consolidate their technology footprint. However, they decided to stick with AgilePoint when it became evident that alternative solutions could not match the “straightforward and painless” upgrade and modernization experience. 3.2 No additional cost AgilePoint never charges for the ongoing, continuous modernization of the platform, a key driver in sustaining prolonged customer loyalty. Nor does the modernization require expensive implementation partners to carry out upgrades. 3.3 The alternatives are expensive A vice president at a Media company noted that their previous platform required costly implementation partners to manage changes and upgrades. He stated, "[Our old platform] was costly because we didn't have developers for it. We always needed an implementation partner, meaning we had to pay both the partner and the licenses [for our old automation platform]." 3.4 Avoid heavy investments Additionally, AgilePoint's integrations are not hard-coded, meaning that customers avoid having to invest heavily in ensuring continued interoperability and harmony across the IT ecosystem with each new AgilePoint release, or with any changes they make to their underlying IT infrastructure. 3.5 Disruption-free, seamless upgrades The platform's core principles are simple, continuous modernization without predatory pricing schemes. With its codeless architecture, AgilePoint has ensured that, for the past 15 years, the German Leasing company's business experiences a disruption-free, seamless upgrade to the latest release. Downtime is virtually negligible. As a result, the publicly listed company had the peace of mind that their business-critical solutions and automation were kept safe, secure, and up to date at no additional cost. 4. Continuous Innovation 4.1 Compatibility AgilePoint's commitment to sustaining long-term value through innovation resonated strongly with customers. A business manager at a global Non-Profit organization expressed concern about other vendors' lack of product advancement. In contrast, AgilePoint actively ensures its product retains its robust security credentials, remains compatible with evolving technology platforms, and regularly delivers the latest capabilities and enhanced functionality into the platform. 4.2 Keeping pace with technology According to the director of the Fortune 100 Engineering firm, "AgilePoint helped us because the technology advanced fast." This focus on continuous technological advancement ensures that organizations can continue to rely on AgilePoint to keep pace with the latest industry standards and competitive pressures." The same business manager stated, "AgilePoint made it possible for us to stay updated with the changing digital transformation happening around the globe. AgilePoint has made it possible for us to do things that we wouldn't have thought of." 4.3 Groundbreaking and robust The Non-Profit organization and the Engineering firm, both customers for over a decade, continue to benefit from leveraging AgilePoint across their core business operations. Drawing on cross-industry best practices and incorporating the latest trends and innovative thinking, AgilePoint continually infuses the platform with ground-breaking features and robust capabilities. This steadfast commitment to technological advancement enhances its customers' long-term experience and outcomes. 5. Transparent, predictable pricing 5.1 Transparent and cost-efficient licensing A Fortune 100 technology and manufacturing conglomerate, and an AgilePoint customer for over a decade, illustrates the power of transparent and cost-efficient licensing in the digital transformation journey. 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