The future of Low-Code

The future of Low-Code

Low-Code-Application-Development is a big trend since Forrester named it in 2014. During this time customers and developers learned how fast new transactions can be developed and how pleasant software development can be in a collaborative working model.

The aim of this article is to give some insights in the Low-Code evolution since then an outlook about what could happen in the future.

Business value dilemma

Before the concept was perceived, application development had reached to a point of stagnation for different reasons:

  • Conventional programming was perceived as slow and expensive which was essentially true, but without many alternatives.
  • Many applications limited on implementation of CRUD patterns (Create-Read-Update-Delete) and users nor business liked those applications.
  • A trend was implement applications based on Process-Modeling Tools (BPM, BPMN, ...). Those applications had the same faith. Not usable, unflexible and not adaptable on business needs.
  • Belle epoque of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and APIs (but Microservices still had to come). Getting leverage of those APIs required a lot of discipline and coordination between teams.
  • Developers were expensive and even paying it was not easy to find the right people in the Labour Market.

To mitigate some of the negative effects, Gartner introduced Bimodal IT and Pace-Layered-Architectures.

Did not work because the application development process was outdated and needed a complete refresh to be able to treat the Business Value Dilemma.

The rising of Low-Code

The Business Value Dilemma inspired the Low-Code inventors. Even devoted Software Developers were amazed about the new concept and how the underlying dilemma was approached.

The principal difference was the clear commitment to the customer to deliver usable solutions in a reasonable time at a reasonable cost with few quality issues. The benefits compared with former strategies were palpable:

  • Focus on the user and the User Experience.
  • Leveraging Micro-Service-Architectures to reduce programming new stuff.
  • Less programming, less quality issues, less cost.
  • Scalable answer times to fit to business timelines.
  • Compatible with Agile Development Patterns, Design-Thinking and Collaborative Styles in general.

Today there is no company without doing Low-Code and the term converted into mainstream.

The Low-Code marketplace

At the beginning the market was composed by a mix of newcomers (startups) and allstars (basically from 4GL and RAD). All those companies intented to benefit from the inherent advantages of the new technology. The common commercial pattern was:

  • Convince customers about the advantages of the new technology.
  • Convince IT Consultants about the business related with the new technology.
  • Demonstrate value getting the job done.

During this process the market place consolidated with the current snapshot of different players:

Gartner Magic Quadrants 2023


The Low-code market is still efervescent, a lot of players with different origins and business models.

But what is doing SAP?

SAP is a big number in the Enterprise Software context, but does not appear In the Gartner LCAP Quadrant, meanwhile its competitors SalesForce and Microsoft do so.

SAP was entering the Low-Code market at the same time at the others, but SAP did not commercialize dedicated Low-Code Products. For this reason SAP does not appear in Gartner's Magic Quadrants about LCAP.

Meanwhile, SAP partnered, and still does, with companies like Neptune, Mendix or Movilizer (acquired by Honeywell). And, they did what they always do: developing their own technology:

  • Low-code with UI5 and Fiori,?
  • Micro-services-architecture with SAP BTP
  • Generative AI with SAP Joule.

Even SAP is not a player in the Low-Code market, the company is deeply involved in this market with explicit or not so explicit relationships with more or less all other players.

Low-Code and Generative AI

Generative AI seems to be a new variable in the Low-code equation. McKinsey already identified Next Generation Software Development as a trending topic in its Outlook Technology Trend 2023.

They might not have predicted the speed of Generative AI adoption. In any case, Generative AI in Code Generation is reality.

What's next?

Low-Code will get bigger chunks of the Software Develoment Market. Generative AI will transform the Low-Code and the Software Development Market. This will have impact on different angles:

  • As a Customer I would take a deeper look on the AI Code Generation evolution. There is a clear opportunity to be more resilient in a market with more demand than offer for well qualified professionals.
  • As a Business Manager I would promote acquisition of AI Code Generation skills to be able to move forward with own resources.
  • As a Recruiter I would promote AI Code Generation skills to attract talented people.
  • As a Developer I would work on AI Code Generation skills to push productivity and to adopt on the market.
  • As a Provider I would review my service strategy to adopt on changing customer needs in the AI Code Generation context.

Philipp Nell

Data and AI SAP Solution Architect - Views are my own

11 个月

Just had a conversation the other day with a friend of mine who is a corporate finance Guy and not a developer and he created his own app for releasing invoices with one of the tools mentioned above. He was very delighted as he could do this by himself without having to wait for anyone. If joule is really already GenAi in full, is not yet really clear to me, I think GenAi within SAP will become much stronger soon than having a helper for "static knowledge" around SAP like help and other things which are more generic for sap products but once Sap is able to provide a personalizable foundation model based on SAPs domain outputs will become much more specific and insightful. Today I saw a first demo of Just ask and it promises a lot. Interesting times ahead.

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