Many of today’s no-code platforms give ‘citizen developers’ the ability to assemble simple business apps with minimal involvement from IT. Such citizen developers are generally non-technical line-of-business personnel.
In contrast, today’s low-code platforms simplify and streamline the work of professional developers, enabling them to deliver enterprise apps in a fraction of the time of hand-coding, often with higher quality.
However, these categorizations are shifting as no-code platforms become increasingly sophisticated and low-code platforms become simpler to use.
The obvious question to ask: what happens when a no-code platform is capable of building applications as sophisticated as the best low-code platforms can? At that point, does it even matter what the difference between no-code and low-code is?
The Maturation of Low-Code
Low-code platforms have evolved quickly. It wasn’t that many years ago that the best an organization could expect to create with such tools were lightweight, smaller apps. A simple web form-driven app, perhaps, or a modest workflow – but leave the serious, complex enterprise apps to the hand coders.
Meanwhile, no-code platforms have also evolved. No longer are citizen developers constrained to building simple, lightweight, templated apps. Today’s leading no-code platforms include many options for integration, as well as simple back-end functionality in conjunction with the front-end, user-focused capabilities that were the categories’ primary strength.
Today, modern enterprise low-code platforms can tackle the toughest of modern enterprise applications – from complex, multicloud workflows to elaborate application modernization initiatives.
Such ‘enterprise low-code’ platforms include capabilities centering on integration, security, and regulatory compliance, thus focusing on the needs on the software needs of large organizations beyond simple departmental applications.
No-code platforms, in contrast, are only now rising to the same enterprise challenges, leading to an evolving category we might call ‘enterprise no-code.’
Vendors like Crowd Machine have the simplicity of no-code platforms (including virtually no hand-coding), but also support the broader architectural context of complex, enterprise applications that may span multiple teams working on multiple components of the application at once.
In other words, Crowd Machine brings no-code to the low-code game – competing head-to-head with low-code players that require professional developers and some measure of hand-coding.
Understanding the Modern Enterprise Application
To understand the power and importance of enterprise low-code – as well as the new enterprise no-code category that Crowd Machine is pioneering – it’s important to understand what these large, complex enterprise applications that organizations can now build and update on such platforms look like.
Do they look like the massive, monolithic applications of old? Not on your life. Today’s enterprise applications are fully modular and hybrid, running in cloud and/or on-premises environments as appropriate for the tasks at hand.
Modularity – a core software best practice since the 1990s – now means building containerized applications with microservices following cloud-native best practices.
Even hand-coders realize that in this modern application landscape, it’s impractical to build anything from scratch. Every modern application consists of significant quantities of repurposed code – typically open source modules and frameworks that make up much of the code of any app today.
This modular, cloud native, reuse-centric context for modern application creation increases the practicality and usability of enterprise low-code and no-code platforms relative to hand-coding.
Driving Modern Automation
Another common theme across modern enterprise applications: they generally deliver some kind of automation. From traditional business processes to complex big data workflows, most enterprise apps take some sequence of tasks – some manual, some already automated – and join them into more complex applications, often with the help of artificial intelligence.
As such applications generally focus on automating complex processes that heretofore were either entirely manual or consisted of separate, disparate processes, the business logic associated with such automation must include complex process logic, in addition to the simple rules common to smaller applications.
At this level, therefore, there are a number of forces in play. An enterprise low-code or no-code platform can provide the overall framework for generating such complex logic, typically without requiring hand-coding. The architectural effort will support such logic while dealing with non-functional requirements like scalability and resilience.
Modularized Modernization
Another unavoidable characteristic that most if not all modern enterprise applications share: they leverage and replace existing software. In fact, this challenge is not simply about integration – although integration is difficult enough as it is – it’s also about modernization.
The larger the enterprise, the more likely it is to be burdened with a diverse portfolio of legacy applications. Furthermore, modernizing such legacy systems while simultaneously replacing the remainder of aging application portfolios with new, flexible applications has long been a priority for such organizations – but a goal that has largely been out of reach.
Enterprise low-code and no-code platforms can make this goal a reality.
How, then, does a low-code development team modernize a monolithic legacy application? By targeting specific functionality changes that end-customers require and replacing that functionality with modular software.
Remember, the modern implementation of software modularity consists of microservices in containerized deployment environments. It’s relatively straightforward to implement microservices in a low-code manner with modern enterprise low-code platforms – even in conjunction with existing legacy assets.
The Intellyx Take
Enterprise low-code and no-code platforms that enable organizations to tackle complex, enterprise apps within the context of the modern enterprise IT landscape are no longer simply a wish-list item. Most enterprises are actually achieving some measure of success with such platforms today.
This story repeats itself across multiple verticals, from banking and insurance to manufacturing to retail and ecommerce. An increasingly wide swath of the enterprise legacy application landscape is now a target for such initiatives, in addition to the greenfield digital efforts that have long been the sweet spot of such platforms.
The bottom line: it doesn’t matter what the business context or level of complexity of the application is. Low-code – and thanks to vendors like Crowd Machine, no-code – are up to the challenge.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Crowd Machine is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. Image credit: Tim Evanson.
