The lowdown on low-code

Amid pressure to meet the demands of tech-savvy consumers and to streamline and automate processes, companies across the globe are transforming digitally.

This all equates to greater demand on company IT departments, especially the employees working at the digital coalface, those tasked with actually building the solutions.

Among the tools that can help ease the burden on IT staff are low-code platforms, which allow profesional developers to quickly create applications using a drag-and-drop interface instead of having to input thousands of lines of code manually. 

To find out more, BNamericas spoke with Jason Bloomberg. President of Intellyx, a US industry analysis and advisory firm focused on digital transformation, Bloomberg also talked about no-code, which people can use to build applications without having to have any programming skills whatsoever.

Bloomberg was sponsored by Latin American banking technology firm VeriTran to write a book on low-code, called Low-Code for Dummies. VeriTran, with offices in Latin America and the US, offers a low-code platform that is used by more than 50 banks, reaching 14mn users who safely run more than 10bn transactions annually.

BNamericas: Can you tell us a little about low-code? 

Bloomberg: Low-code is a market category that includes products that are both tools and platforms that enable developers to build applications more quickly, in a streamlined visual fashion that requires little or no hand-coding.

So it accelerates application development and also improves the quality of the resulting application. 

BNamericas: Which industries can this technology be used in? What about energy, mining, infrastructure, banking, etc?

Bloomberg: Really, any segment. These days every company has a software component to what it's doing. Mid-sized companies, large companies. So really any industry. Sometimes the applications are for employee use, so they could be HR applications or things like that, that any company might take advantage of. 

There could be mining-specific applications, or field service applications, banking applications, insurance applications. 

Some low-code vendors specialize, say, in financial services or some others, but other low-code vendors don’t specialize or have some other broad capability.

BNamericas: What are some of the barriers to its adoption?

Bloomberg: There are a few barriers. There's a lack of understanding about the role that low-code plays in the organization. Among developers there is often push back, [they consider] it might put their jobs into jeopardy. In reality that’s not the case; they are tools for developers to help them become more productive and to take the grunt work off their plates. 

There’s also resistance from IT management, who is committed to doing things even though it's maybe slower and may lead to poorer results over time. 

Low-code represents a new way of doing things and people generally are resistant to new ways of doing things. 

Both of those situations are really problems of education. People just don’t understand the power of the technology.

BNamericas: What opportunities do you see for low-code in Latin America?

Bloomberg: There’s nothing particular about Latin America in terms of low-code adoption. We see low-code adoption taking place around the world. 

[In] Latin America, generally speaking, compared to North America or Europe, we might find fewer large enterprises, so there'll be more uptake among the small and medium-sized enterprises and mid-sized companies. 

A number of the big low-code vendors, as well, have fully internationalized software, so the big players are multinational in scope. So there are some Latin American players like VeriTran that are based in Latin America but there are others that, say, are based in Silicon Valley that meet the needs of Latin America as well as the rest of the world.

BNamericas: Where do you see the technology heading?

Bloomberg: There are a number of challenges with hand-coding, which would essentially be the alternative. It’s a slower process, and it’s more difficult to achieve high-quality software. And as organizations require software that can be delivered more and more quickly it becomes more and more difficult to meet the needs of the business following traditional hand-coding approaches.  

Traditional hand-coding is just leading to backlogs … the developers just cannot work fast enough. They have this long list, wish list, and low-code can help address that. 

The problem is only getting worse, so the economic pressure driving low-code is only increasing.

BNamericas: Any final words?

Bloomberg: There's confusion between no-code and low-code. 

Low-code is really aimed at professional developers trying to simplify their work. No-code tools and platforms are for the non-developer, for business users who don't have technical backgrounds, enabling them to build a certain class of application, again, without any coding at all. 

They are different in the sense they have different audiences and the sweet spot for no-code are simple business applications, where low-code products can build not only simple applications but more complex ones as well. But both markets are moving into the other's space. Low-code tools are getting easier to use, so less technical people can use them. No-code products are getting more powerful and sophisticated so they're becoming tools that even professional developers may want to use because they're so simple and straightforward to use. So both of these markets, even though they're different in a sense, they're both converging into the same space.