No Code like Low Code
Low/No-code platforms are coming to the fore in tackling labour supply shortages borne out of major tech-skill gaps
In a recent research note, consulting giants Gartner found that Low-code and No-code technologies are set to ‘nearly triple’ by 2025. In fact, they believe 70% of the new applications developed by organisations will use low-code; up from the 25% recorded in 2020.
The growth of low-code application platforms (or LCAPs) has been seen as a driving force to increase citizen development and the growth of business technologists “who report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use.”
This, experts opine, is radically shifting the way that applications are built, with application development in the future set to transition more towards assembly and integration. “In fact, it’s likely the percentage of new applications developed in LCAP environments will go way beyond the 70% predicted by Gartner.”
But why is the low/no-code market suddenly seeing such prolific growth expectations?
Born out of Skill Shortages?
Forbes reports that for fast-changing growing economies like ours, the demand for certain skills grows much faster than the supply of people to fill that need. Today, a majority of said skill shortages seems to be stemming from the healthcare and tech sectors.
Interestingly, experts believe that CEOs may even be able to turn said shortages into a competitive advantage in business. By hiring, growing and retaining the right employees with the right skills, they may be able to outperform their peers and upskill over their competitors. According to TechTarget:
“..research from Enterprise Strategy Group’s “2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey” shows a push to secure environments against increasing cybersecurity threats has made these skills the most sought after – and the hardest to find.
Other top areas include cloud and IT orchestration and automation. Reducing this skills shortage will take both individual and company action.”None of this should come as a surprise, though. Skill shortages in tech, especially in terms of application and platform development, have been rather well documented in the recent past, and the need for a solution has become imperative. Several start-ups, such as US-based Unqork, have been seeking to tackle exactly these issues, developing cloud computing and enterprise software solutions to the aforementioned problems.
In fact, recent research from Boston-based low-code software platform Mendix indicated that the demand for developers has reached a ‘fever pitch’ among IT professionals. Nearly 57% agree that the staff needed for software development is increasing while the cost of software development is rising (61%). For many enterprises, research has found, the solution is an LCAP.
In fact, CMSWire writes: “according to Mendix’s State of Low-Code 2021 report, based on a survey of 2,025 IT professionals across six countries, 77% of enterprises have already adopted low code to meet this shortage, and 75% of IT leaders say it’s a trend they can’t afford to miss.”
Flexibility and Agility
There are, of course, several factors attached to the adoption of low/no-code technologies, especially with businesses now prioritising a complete digital transformation of daily operations and processes. This, especially given the lower costs and reduced technical barriers to entry, makes low/no-code an especially lucrative option.
Businesses today require flexibility and agility in their tech stacks, and low/no-code provides opportunities in business process management (BPM) as well as robotic process automation (RPA) in order to automate and digitise business processes, while LCAPs can be used to develop enterprise applications internally.
Consulting agency Nucleus Research interviewed BPM and LCAP users and found that said tools can allow professional developers to complete tasks almost two to three times quicker when compared to traditional developer tools.
Low/no-code tools also “enable business users and citizen developers to lend their expertise to reduce friction between IT and end users and create standardized processes or applications that require less IT intervention and better match the use case.”
Clearly, ain’t no code like low code.
