Low-code tools help both professional developers and non-technical business users build and deploy sophisticated applications with little to no hand-coding required.
These tools simplify the work of the pros, empower the ‘citizen developer’ business users, and foster greater collaboration across both sides of the business/IT divide.
There are hundreds of low-code tools on the market today, ranging from simple to sophisticated and small business to enterprise. Some such tools are actually ‘no-code,’ as hand-coding isn’t even an option.
Other low-code tools focus on enterprise-class, process-oriented applications that support vast numbers of users both inside and outside the organization.
Entering this now crowded and rapidly maturing market is enterprise application leader SAP.
SAP counts most of the largest organizations on the planet as its customers, as it delivers a suite of sophisticated process-centric applications that such enterprises depend on to run their businesses.
Given this breadth, power, and depth of SAP’s offerings, one might wonder why it’s now throwing its hat into the low-code ring. Why would we ever need a low-code tool from SAP? And who would use it?
Building Applications with SAP
SAP has long realized that its enterprise customers rarely if ever use its software as-is out of the box. Every organization’s requirements are different, and thus SAP has supported the customization of its applications for decades.
Over time, this customization capability has matured, as SAP’s technology became more modularized and eventually cloud-centric. The company’s core business applications are still at the heart of its value proposition, but SAP’s focus has increasingly been on various generations of platforms that support modular application development.
Not only is this platform-based modularity important for supporting customers’ unique requirements, it is also essential for taking advantage of the core scalability and flexibility benefits of the cloud.
Today, SAP offers a range of platform options for building and customizing application functionality. Its Business Technology Platform supports application development and automation, both in pro-code and low-code environments.
SAP Build is the company’s low-code offering, providing solutions for low-code app development and process automation for both professional and citizen developers.
How SAP Build fits into the Low-Code Ecosystem
SAP Build Apps has all the features people have come to expect from enterprise low-code app development tools: a visual drag-and-drop environment for building sophisticated, process-centric apps, a unified design system and runtime environment for seamless deployments, and built-in governance features for avoiding any shadow IT headaches.
These capabilities, however, are simply the price of admission. The real reason why anyone would use SAP Build Apps over some other enterprise low-code tool is because of how well the solution works within the SAP environment.
With SAP Build Apps, application builders (both pro and citizen developers) can securely connect to both SAP and third-party solutions with pre-built components, connectors, and integrations.
Before SAP Build Apps was released, integration with any of SAP’s applications required a depth of technical expertise. With SAP Build Apps, integration between applications is a simple drag-and-drop affair.
SAP Build Apps takes advantage of rich repositories of business-specific content within the Business Technology Platform. This platform contains thousands of components, functions, bots, APIs, connectors, and business services – and with SAP Build Apps, any application builder can take advantage of this depth of functionality without having to code.
The Intellyx Take
Given SAP’s prominence in the enterprise business application landscape, it’s no surprise that many enterprise low-code tools integrate with various SAP applications and platforms, as well as working with SAP-specific data schemas and formats.
There’s no question, however, that no one knows the workings of SAP software better than SAP.
For SAP customers who want the benefits of low-code to build and deploy applications that leverage SAP capabilities and data, the choice of SAP Build Apps over a third-party low-code tool is an easy one to make.
From the end-users’ perspective – that is, the people who will be using the apps people have created with SAP Build Apps – the benefits are two-fold. First, the user interface, functionality, and data will be specific to their needs.
More importantly, they will also have the option of participating in the ongoing development of the applications they work with. Not everyone will take advantage of this opportunity to be sure – but the mere fact that it is available will act to empower people and improve morale.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. SAP is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used to write this article. Image credit: MediaDishNET Greg S.
