The rise of ‘citizen development’ signals the end of shadow IT. That realization is one important takeaway from QuickBase’s second annual Empower customer conference, and its first since Intuit sold the company to an equity firm earlier this year.
QuickBase is an up-and-coming player in the exploding ‘low code’ platform market, as larger vendors like Appian, Mendix, OutSystems, and Salesforce.com have helped to differentiate low code platforms from overlapping markets like the Application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) and the earlier Rapid Application Development (RAD) markets (see my October 2015 article on Mendix).
It’s clear this burgeoning market segment has turned a corner. “The low code market has finally arrived,” explains Allison Mnookin, CEO of QuickBase. And yet, the players in this space are not unanimous in how they define it, as the term ‘low code’ often competes with ‘no code.’
‘No Code’: the ‘Low Code’ Holy Grail?
The central feature that all low code platforms share is an environment where non-technical business users can create and modify business applications. In the large enterprise environment, however, none of these vendors expect business users to perform all the tasks necessary to build and maintain the apps they have a hand in building.
The question, therefore, is whether ‘no code’ is really different from ‘low code.’ In fact, both low code and no code platforms allow for IT or other technical resources to add code when necessary. The real difference is how much application building business users can accomplish with no coding whatsoever.
QuickBase prides itself in the extent to which business users can build applications all by themselves. “92% of QuickBase citizen developers have no coding background,” says Mnookin. As confirmation, most of the attendees at Empower were such citizen developers.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/05/16/citizen-developers-low-code-is-now-enterprise-class/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, OutSystems and ServiceNow are Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned are Intellyx customers. QuickBase covered Jason Bloomberg’s expenses at Empower, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
