No-code and low-code tools seek ways to stand out in a crowd
No-code and low-code vendors seek to diversify their products in hopes to cash in on market demand for systems that enable nonprogrammers to build applications.
As market demand for enterprise application developers continues to surge, no-code and low-code vendors seek ways to stand out from one another in an effort to lure professional and citizen developers.
For instance, last week's Spark release of Skuid's eponymous drag-and-drop application system adds on-premises, private data integration, a Design System Studio, and core components for tasks such as of buttons, forms, charts and tables.
A suite of prebuilt application templates aim to help users build and customize a bespoke application, such as salesforce automation, recruitment and applicant tracking, HR management and online learning.
And a native mobile capability enables developers to take the apps they've built with Skuid and deploy them on mobile devices with native functionality for iOS and Android.
"We're seeing a lot of folks who started in other low-code/no-code platforms move toward Skuid because of the flexibility and the ability to use it in more than one type of platform," said Ray Wang, an analyst at Constellation Research in San Francisco.
"People want to be able to get to templates, reuse templates and modify templates to enable them to move very quickly."
Ray Wang
Skuid -- named for an acronym, Scalable Kit for User Interface Design -- was originally an education software provider, but users' requests to customize the software for individual workflows led to a drag-and-drop interface to configure applications. That became the Skuid platform and the company pivoted to no-code, said Mike Duensing, CTO of Skuid in Chattanooga, Tenn.
Quick Base adds Kanban reports
Quick Base Inc., in Cambridge, Mass., recently added support for Kanban reports to its no-code platform. Kanban is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time manufacturing. The system also provides a framework for agile development practices, so software teams can visually track and balance project demands with available capacity and ease system-level bottlenecks.
Mike Duensing
The Quick Base Kanban reports enable development teams to see where work is in process. It also lets end users interact with their work and update their status, said Mark Field, Quick Base director of products.
Users drag and drop progress cards between columns to indicate how much work has been completed on software delivery tasks to date. This lets them track project tasks through stages or priority, opportunities through sales stages, application features through development stages, team members and their task assignments and more, Field said.
Datatrend Technologies, an IT services provider in Minnetonka, Minn., uses Quick Base to build the apps that manage technology rollouts for its customers, and finds the Kanban reports handy.
A lot of low-code/no-code platforms allow you to get on and build an app but then if you want to take it further, you'll see users wanting to move to something else.
Ray Wanganalyst, Constellation Research
"Quick Base manages that whole process from intake to invoicing, where we interface with our ERP system," said Darla Nutter, senior solutions architect at Datatrend.
Previously, we kept data of work in progress through four stages (, execute, complete and invoice) in a table report with no visual representation, but with these reports users can see what they have to do at any given stage and prioritize work accordingly, she said.
"You can drag and drop tasks to different columns and it automatically updates the stage for you," she said.
Like the Quick Base no-code platform, the Kanban reports require no coding or programming experience. Datatrend's typical Quick Base users are project managers and business analysts, Nutter said.
For most companies, however, the issue with no-code and low-code systems is how fast users can learn and then expand upon it, Constellation Research's Wang said.
"A lot of low-code/no-code platforms allow you to get on and build an app but then if you want to take it further, you'll see users wanting to move to something else," Wang said.
OutSystems sees AI as the future
OutSystems said it plans to add advanced artificial intelligence features into its products to increase developer productivity, said Mike Hughes, director of product marketing at OutSystems in Boston.
"We think AI can help us by suggesting next steps and anticipating what developers will be doing next as they build applications," Hughes said.
OutSystems uses AI in its own tool set, as well as links to publicly available AI services to help organizations build AI-based products. To facilitate this, the company launched Project Turing and opened an AI Center of Excellence in Lisbon, Portugal, named after Alan Turing, who is considered the father of AI.
The company also will commit 20% of its R&D budget to AI research and partner with industry leaders and universities for research in AI and machine learning.
Ray Wang
Mike Duensing
