A Song of No-Code and Low-Code
Jason Wong
Gartner expert on digital employee experience, no-code, superapps, citizen development, business technologists, fusion teams, total experience
House AWS has entered the fray! The war for the citizen development throne is getting serious! No-code and low-code development tools and platforms are the newest weapons of choice. The throne itself has been forged from the vanquished 4GL and rapid application development (RAD) tools of past generations.
House Microsoft has laid the strongest claim to the throne, owing to its lineage with the biggest citizen developer “tool” in history–Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Power Apps was created with this in mind to easily allow Excel and Microsoft Office users to learn its low-code Power Platform. Even House AWS acknowledges this fact by basing its new AWS Honeycode no-code tool on the humble spreadsheet. House Google likewise saw this opportunity earlier and wedded its G Suite platform to a minor no-code house--AppSheet. It was a red wedding because at the same time Google killed off its own spawn–Google App Maker. The game of citizen development thrones is a ruthless business indeed!
But the war will be a long and hard fought one, and will include many more participants. Other great houses, such as House Salesforce, House Oracle and House ServiceNow, have their own ambitions to claim the citizen development throne. Numerous minor houses fight battles in various geographies across the globe and in industries where they claim an advantage. Many of these have forged alliances with House AWS, House Microsoft and House Google to run within their kingdoms–but time will tell whether these grow into major houses in their own right, or become yet another tool melted into the throne.
Winter, in the form of Shadow IT, once plagued enterprise kingdoms and it could come once again. And this time it may be even colder and longer in a frozen state of technical debt. All these competing houses must also realize that they need to band together to combat this threat by ensuring that the business and IT peace is kept. The citizen development throne beckons for those who want to play the game of no-code and low-code thrones!
Mendix Engineer
4 年My bet is on the new(er) comers to this space, those which have built their businesses from scratch with low code in mind. Mendix, OutSystems, Bubble etc. Indeed, the tech giants may gobble them up and rebrand them as their own, but the giant corporations are slow to move and aren't currently the leaders in this space. From experience, I've assed Mendix against Microsoft and SalesForce to develop a multi-tenant B2B application, Mendix clearly dominated in terms of flexibility and simplicity of development against both SalesForce and Microsoft Power Apps.
Senior Information Technology Specialist
4 年Great work! Low code platforms have been my passion for a while - have experience in Pega, Salesforce, OutSystems and Power Apps.
Analyst Relations | Marketing Leader | Splunker ex @box @epiphany @oracle
4 年ooooo I love the game of throne analogy for the battle for who will win the battle of #citizendevelopment. What would be the threat of white walkers in this context?
Solutions Development Director at Innoveo | B2B Tech Enthusiast Specialized in No-Code Development Platforms
4 年Nice post Jason Wong! I think House Innoveo will have a word on this?battle because "not today" is what we say to the god of death (he codes...)
We enable companies to build applications, faster and at reasonable costs. Passionate about No code, Low code & Open Source.
4 年#lowcode is now definitely trendy :) . The question is for what type of apps can #lowcode technology can be used ? Probably two types of #lowcode platforms will coexist: - A very "Cloud based" type targeting 100% citizen development - A more "Professional developer" type targeting more complex apps on cloud or on prem, based on open standards, where existing developers (and citizens) will find all the benefits of low code without loosing their flexibility.