The article below appeared on Techwire Asia.
Transforming any business digitally involves a significant change in the attitudes of an organization’s business teams and a different approach in the IT function for developing apps and services. Both departments in the enterprise must work together to achieve the types of gains in efficiency that enable a faster, more agile business model fit for the 21st century.
But because the costs in terms of the development of new services and apps have always been very high, many companies in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) have traditionally shied away from the changes needed to move further along the digital transformation journey. In short, code costs money, and because businesses now run on big data, you must spend big to win big.
But the natural spirit of innovation that runs right through APAC is gaining a new lease on life, without breaking the bank. That’s because of a new generation of development platforms, known as low-code, are capable of producing enterprise-grade applications in a fraction of the time it takes for traditional development projects. What’s more, production-ready systems can be deployed without any compromise in safety or compliance.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, 65 percent of all application development activity will be done with low-code platforms. So, what can this new development methodology bring to the business, and how does it work in harmony with business operations and strategy?
Faster time to market
The innovation and creativity that drives many businesses in APAC are often constrained by the technology that’s already in place. Rather than being able to act quickly on a new idea, an emerging market or a transient market niche, companies must wait until the existing IT development process provides the resources necessary — and generally, that’s just too slow.
That’s not because IT development teams are dragging their heels or are unwilling to respond to new ideas for the business. Instead, teams that want to deploy the most up-to-date microservices-based applications often do not have the skills nor training to take on these projects. Furthermore, a great deal of existing software in the enterprise limits the possibilities open to business operations. The technology is imposing limits, not empowering development.
With low-code development platforms, innovation with no limits is possible. The ideas of an organization’s leaders can be transformed quickly into production-ready apps and services.
Reinventing customer experiences
In all areas of life and commerce, every customer or service end-user expects the kind of hyper- personalized experience they get from the market-leaders with billion-dollar budgets — the likes of Amazon, Rakuten, Tencent, and Alibaba.
Source: OutSystems
For any organization with a smaller budget (that is, 99 percent of the rest), there’s a huge opportunity here to use low-code application development frameworks to differentiate from competitors and even leap-frog the market leaders. Low-code vendors report that several of its customers have experienced double-digit uplifts in sales after new apps launch — apps that have taken only weeks to make the journey from drawing board to live production. That company’s survey of over 3,000 businesses across APAC contains more information — see the download link in the next section.
Streamlining operations
There’s little point in offering new services or products if the overhead for taking them to market is so high there’s virtually no net gain. Digital transformation initiatives like low-code app development mean that the costs for delivering new apps and services fall and the company’s overall production overhead drops as a result. That’s a significant duo of gains, right across the business.
That means that the new technology of low-code development proactively improves production metrics and lowers cost entries.
Read for yourself
Low-code application development activities are changing enterprises throughout APAC, providing a crucial layer of innovation around critical operations. Apps can be created more easily, more securely, and with business goals at their cores. Low-code is producing modern microservices-based apps that are lean, quick to deploy, and proven to bring real business benefits into the organization, fast.
Learn how your business can benefit from this new generation of development methodology, in this IDC Research Infobrief report: The Modern Asia-Pacific Developer Experience for Digital Transformation, downloadable today from OutSystems, the APAC’s premier provider of low-code application development platforms. Nurture the spirit of innovation in your company, today.
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