The benefits of custom-built applications (without all the traditional hassle)

Welcome to the 21st century, where apps rule the world and application development is big business. The demand for apps has grown exponentially over the last few years, and traditional development techniques aren’t able to keep up. Modern business needs can change from day to day and require an equally agile development process. At the same time, good development is still a craft, requiring expertise, creativity and a personal touch.

Enter low-code - offering all the benefits of custom-built applications in a fast, flexible, personalised package. Low-code solves problems shelfware isn’t able to and gets the job done without the traditional lengthy app development cycle. Solutions like Mendix provide a ‘low-code application development platform that allows you to go live sooner and get to success faster.’ In other words, we use low-code to meet business needs fast and efficiently.

IT ability and business agility

Traditional development is coding-language-specific, so if you’re building in python, C# or PHP, you’re in need of a developer with that specific skill set. The result is a war for talent, unless you opt for the low-code solution. Building apps in low-code is an intuitive and visual process. It doesn’t rely on an understanding of particular languages, but rather of business problems and appropriate IT solutions - skills that can be applied to the creation of every application.

This means less obstacles for IT. But it also means a more inclusive process for the whole organisation. Since low-code is a visual development tool it allows business teams to take co-ownership of the process and contribute to the final product. Meanwhile IT still remains in charge of the actual implementation and integration stages to ensure a successful launch. In essence, low-code takes away the primary driver for shadow IT (IT systems deployed by departments other than an organisation’s central IT department, to work around the shortcomings of the central information systems).

The future is low-code

At Apvine we’re betting on a big shift taking place in the software development landscape over the next five years. Some sceptics claim that low-code development is only useful for quick proof-of-concepts, but not for enterprise-grade, customer-facing applications. We disagree, and so does the market. Just look at the success of Mendix so far.

SAP became a Mendix reseller, offering the solution on their SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) as ‘SAP Cloud Platform Rapid Application Development by Mendix’, which caused quite a stir in the low-code community. The same thing happened when Siemens announced the acquisition of Mendix.

A solution for all shapes and sizes

As more big names like SAP and Siemens show their support for Mendix it’s clear that the general opinion on low-code is quickly changing. In Belgium, organisations in a variety of sectors are successfully adopting and running Mendix applications. As low-code becomes more recognised we see it surfacing in the mid-market as well. Whether we’re working with big businesses or smaller startups, the idea behind a low-code development project is always the same for us: to build applications that help people work more efficiently. That’s what it’s all about: making people happy in what they do through IT solutions that help instead of hinder.