Low-code has matured considerably over the past couple of years to offer developers a proven and exceptionally powerful force multiplier—when used to its potential.
Reducing the taxing efforts of manual hard coding, low-code development environments are delivering ever-sleeker UIs for assembling applications via drag-and-drop, Lego-like code blocks. As the pace of enterprise innovation accelerates, there’s no faster way to build production-ready applications leveraging innovations around AI, ML, data connectivity, IoT capabilities, voice, and more.
Here are five distinct advantages that developers gain from a well-executed low-code strategy:
1Truly transformative speed.
With development teams facing increasing pressure to get iterative application improvements out the door and into the marketplace quickly, the frictions of traditional development are both obstacles and liabilities.
In contrast, low-code offers such tremendous productivity gains that teams able to fully leverage this approach regularly achieve a 10x faster pace of development (at a minimum—it’s often twice that). That acceleration applies both to developing fresh applications and completing new iterations, granting developers far sharper reflexes and flexibility when responding to ever-evolving market needs and customer expectations. At the same time, low-code streamlines development by automating and abstracting the block-and-tackle work that bogs down developer efficiency, allowing developers to hone their focus on delivering superior application features and experiences.
2Advanced emerging technologies at your fingertips.
Dev teams face a sheer talent shortage when it comes to building applications that utilize emerging technologies such as AI/ML, big data, IoT, voice and messaging, blockchain, and APIs. For example, globally there are 25 million web developers, but only 300,000 trained AI engineers. The competition to hire and retain such experts is fierce, and prohibitively expensive for most organizations. That said, applications leveraging AI and these other technologies are often now essential to organizations from competitive standpoints.
Low-code solves this talent supply-demand dilemma by abstracting the functionality of these emerging technologies into code modules. This connectivity is low-code’s superpower: any developer can integrate emerging technologies into their applications as effectively as a highly-trained expert, simply by connecting icons within the low-code UI.
3Enterprise-grade applications.
Some hesitance to adopt low-code comes from lingering outdated notions that low-code platforms are solely for prototyping, and can’t deliver the performance, scalability, and security that enterprise applications require. Unfortunately, organizations with development teams that dismiss low-code will be proven wrong by competitors that run circles around them in the marketplace.
Low-code is now a proven strategy successfully utilized by many of the biggest companies in the world, and across industries. Nevertheless, developers ought to take care in vetting their low-code platform of choice to make sure it includes the built-in security layer, sandboxing, and open security tests required for enterprise production implementations. Developers should also enlist their enterprise security teams to instill best practices and provide support across all phases of development.
4Democratized development and access.
Development teams are regularly tasked with building and maintaining applications used by internal groups. Those internal teams often require simple tools and specific access to data and analytics capabilities to do their jobs well.
Low-code can relieve developers of that burden by enabling internal teams to produce and manage the applications they use by themselves. That direct control over their own tooling yields significant benefits around usability, efficiency, and functionality. Meanwhile, developers are freed to focus on customer-facing products that move the needle for their organizations.
5Improved developer experiences.
Low-code promises a far superior developer experience by eliminating much of the tedium and hassles of setting up application environments and writing code by hand. Developers unsure about low-code adoption should experiment with it, and give the simplicity and efficiency of this approach a chance. Low-code isn’t a developer replacement; it’s a developer enhancer. When teams experience the ease with which they can work with exciting new technologies and complete impressive solutions, they find it hard to go back.
Developers need to produce
Developers are now asked to deliver applications that utilize the latest advanced technologies, and quickly deploy new versions to iterate and optimize user experiences and launch new features, all while remaining cost-efficient. A low-code strategy is fast becoming all but required to help developers meet these goals and achieve competitive differentiation for their organizations.
