Nicholas Bowman, CEO at riivo recently presented a tech talk to our Saratoga team on the potential of low-code solutions. Following his insightful presentation, we’d like to share some of the highlights from his talk with the broader tech community.
As technological advancements continue to progress and as organisations are forced to embark on a digital transformation journey brought on by COVID-19, many businesses are hampered by the financial or technical constraints of addressing these changes.
Where software development and technology solutions historically require significant budgets and access to skilled developers – low-code provides an opportunity for technology democratisation and increased access to technologies for businesses across the board.
For businesses struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of technological changes, low-code presents a truly exciting opportunity to leap frog to the technological vanguard.
What exactly is ‘low-code’?
Low-code technologies are essentially platforms which simplify the development process, enabling almost anyone to build and solve problems without the traditional overheads.
For example, Mobile apps can now be designed in a PowerPoint-like fashion, run complex logic using familiar Excel expressions and can connect seamlessly to external services with a few clicks. No advanced programming knowledge required!
What are the main benefits of low-code?
The primary benefit is the enablement of a whole new class of ‘citizen’ developers to bring their solutions to life without spending years understanding the in’s and out’s of programming – this ensures the problem solvers are now far closer to the problems.
In addition, experienced developers are also able to deliver solutions at a far-increased rate and with a continuous development cycle, which offers immense value to businesses looking to adopt these new technologies.
Low-code is a complete reversal of the ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ typically associated with software development. By moving the ongoing maintenance overhead to a low-code platform, which takes over responsibility for the infrastructure upkeep, security enhancements and continuous improvement of the underlying tools, businesses of all shapes and sizes are able to maintain competitiveness.
In other words, you get tech far faster, for a far lower price and without much of the hassle.
What types of problems can be solved?
Low-code is highly flexible and can solve most business problems, from basic to complex – with a bit of creativity.
Some high-value use-cases include:
- Rapid CRM development and business process management
- Lead and project management systems
- Utilisation of complex and long-dated automations triggered by almost any event
- Rapid deployment of mobile applications
- Simplified integrations with legacy and new-age services
- Generation of insightful BI reports based on existing datasets
- End-customer portals
Are low-code solutions as robust as traditional custom solutions?
The natural concern with low-code is how it compares to a well-designed and implemented bespoke piece of software.
And the answer is that it depends…
Low-code has not yet reached full maturity, and the key reliance on the underlying platform does, by design, limit certain components which an experienced developer may want to be able to influence.
However, the limitations are typically only a problem when it comes to extremely advanced use cases and for the rest, low-code stacks up extremely well.
For most businesses, all the way from small SME’s to large enterprises, there is significant benefit in adopting low-code to solve business problems, as well as empower the entire organisation to wield technology to their benefit.
Additional Resources
Low-code platforms
Other resources
- Introduction to Power Platform by Chris Huntingford.
- Top 5 Benefits of Low-code.
- Business leaders as developers: The rise of no-code and low-code software.
