Kintone: You’ve penned several Forbes articles about the rise of the citizen developer and how it’s pushing shadow IT aside. How did this all evolve? Why in the last year or two has it really exploded?
Jason Bloomberg: Ten, 15 years ago, back when I was at ZapThink, we worked with a number of vendors who were trying to do the same kind of thing. You may remember TenFold, or Wakesoft, or Web Putty. None of these companies exist any more, because it was really too hard a problem at that point in time to build a set of modular tools for assembling applications. There just wasn’t enough maturity in the underlying technology to support this kind of capability.
That’s really changed now, because we have deeper technology. The vendors in this space, whether it’s kintone or OutSystems or QuickBase or some of the others, they’re building platforms that have a variety of underlying capabilities that support the ability for now business users or other people to create applications by assembling modular components in a way that provides much greater flexibility for the business user. The platforms themselves take care of security, take care of integration, take care of a lot of the heavy lifting under the covers. That’s the hard part. Building these platforms is difficult. Making it easy to assemble applications, that’s a difficult challenge.
Read the entire interview at https://medium.com/digital-transformation-talk/what-who-are-low-code-business-application-platforms-for-41a918a5eb71.
