Have you heard the news?

According to Gartner, a whopping 65% of application development will be low-code by 2024. We’ve been talking about this shift for years, so what has sped up the timeline? Let’s look at 5 differentiators of low-code/no-code development, and the journey we’ve taken to get to this transformational point.

Low-Code/No-Code Allows for Quick Time to Market

71% of people believe it’s faster to build with low-code/no-code tools, in fact – 4.6x faster. Speed is a core differentiator in today’s fast-paced business landscape, and if you’re second to market, you often may as well be last. According to a Sopheon study, 79% of new products miss their launch date, and although there are a number of reasons for this, hold-ups with DevOps are up there with the biggest. Providing easy to use tools that can help bring staff up to speed quickly at ten minutes to midnight can really make the difference between going live on-time, and being in the trenches of bug fixing instead of celebrating your win.

The No-Code Productivity Boost

Research shows a 5-7x leap in productivity when building with low-code or no-code tools. But the excitement around low-code/no-code is not necessarily about swapping existing processes out with the new shiny ones. In fact, for low-code/no-code application development to thrive, organizations need to recognize that coders love to code! Many developers don’t want to work with low-code or no-code toolsets, and they do their best work by building from scratch. Instead, many companies are utilizing low-code/no-code to allow other business stakeholders to become what’s known as “citizen developers” and get involved in adding features, making changes, and taking ownership of products without needing to head to IT for every small tweak or fix.

The Link Between Low-Code Development and Agile Working Methods

This helps us to understand why low-code and no-code application development are such a perfect fit for the Agile working methodology. Instead of having DevOps work on fully-featured, complex builds for new products or features, low-code/no-code application development can allow for a ‘quick and dirty’ version of any product, allowing you to lean into failing fast where necessary, or get a MVP out the door with minimal fuss and overhead. This kind of flexibility is essential for the time to market we spoke about earlier, as well as for saving the efforts of DevOps for where they’re needed the most. With low-code/no-code tools that are growing in depth and richness to the point where they are desirable for both citizen developers and enterprise-class coders, organizations can pick and choose the tools to meet the needs of their users, with the ultimate ‘choice-first’ mentality.

The Need for Low-Code/No-Code in Virtualization

As cloud-native deployments continue to grow, low-code and no-code development have also found a home on the cloud, in container solutions, and with virtualization more widely. The goals of virtualization include portability, resource efficiency and cost-savings, speed, scalability, and improvement over developer pipelines. These are the same benefits that we see with low-code application development, so it’s no wonder that the two are a match made in heaven! In a container-based infrastructure, you eliminate inconsistencies, and you benefit from CI/CD for new features and updates. Together, these solutions have the same goal – to add flexibility and agility to product and service development.

Low-Code Development and No-Code Development for New Business Use Cases

As complementary technology evolves, many organizations are seeing the benefits of low-code/no-code, when previously they saw it as merely a drag and drop interface. Take AI for example. Organizations can now use AI inside their low-code/no-code platform to integrate with both unstructured and partly-structured data sources, or to work with stateful and stateless processes to build complex process logic for various workflows. AI can allow developers to create exception handling, branching conditions and more, adding automation and intelligence to the build. Suddenly, your low-code platform has become the route to business acceleration.

5G is another great example of how all of these goals have come together to usher in a new era of creative business development.

KPMG describes the challenges too well not to quote.

“Even as digital technologies change our world at a breathtaking pace, some companies are finding their own digital strategy stuck in low gear. They struggle to bring their work to scale, integrate it into their legacy information systems, or orchestrate their activities in a coordinated way across the enterprise. Too often the end result, too is an unwieldy collection of siloed applications and disconnected digital experiments with only marginal business use and no measurable return on investment… Low-code platforms may be the missing link.”

As enterprises such as Telcos and Utility providers look to climb the value chain and offer new low latency or high-speed offerings for their customers using 5G, these risks are too great for business stakeholders to consider. Getting it right needs to be easier than ever before, and getting it wrong has to be quick to recover and rebuild from, with minimal impact. Low-code and no-code application development is exactly the toolset to streamline this journey.