Mercato Solutions’ Simon O’Carroll considers whether the technology is the future of cloud app development
Elly Yates-Roberts |
This article was originally published in the Summer 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox.
Warp back to 2014 and suggesting a low-code platform (ready-made platforms that enable the rapid delivery of business applications with minimum coding) to build sizeable cloud-based enterprise solutions would have resulted in a roundtable of bemused looks and the thought that you might have gone crazy.
The idea that low-code could accomplish half of what traditional development methods could achieve at the time was thought to be generous. As with the majority of ‘too good to be true’ technologies, low-code initially attracted a stigma amongst large enterprises and development groups.
Fast forward back to today, however, and organisations of all sizes are looking to adopt low-code and release the enormous benefits it brings to their cloud-based solutions.
Gartner predicts that by 2020, at least 50% of all new business applications will be created with high-productivity toolsets, such as low-code development platforms. What’s more, by 2021, market demand for app development will grow at least five times faster than the IT capacity to deliver it. Forrester, meanwhile, calls the low-code market a high-growth area, predicting it will be worth over US$10 billion by the end of 2019.
It appears that the stigma around low-code has finally evaporated. But why is low-code so attractive, and can it be trusted to build true enterprise-scale cloud applications?
Mercato solutions, the company behind the low-code platform KnowledgeKube, performed in-house analysis across ten projects, comparing them against traditional development, and the results were astounding. On average, the solutions were delivered 72% faster, with an 83% cost saving, while offering no restrictions or limitations within the production capabilities using the low-code environment.
Following this study, Mercato ceased all bespoke client development in the traditional sense, instead, moving it all into its low-code implementation department, resulting not only in substantial cost savings but also benefiting an increased number of outputted solutions.
With KnowledgeKube, both Mercato and its clients see no compromise – all they see are benefits of using this cloud-based platform. Solutions of significant scale have been rolled out globally in over 155 countries, through 27 languages, to transact over US$1 billion per month through these low-code created systems.
With solutions deployed using a Microsoft Azure consumption based scalable cloud environment, the low-code platform provides an easy and faster route to cloud infrastructure complete with geographical load balancing, scalability, security, data, data management, connectivity and services such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Simon O’Carroll is marketing director at Mercato Solutions
Mercato Solutions will be exhibiting at Microsoft Inspire on 14-18 July. Find out more about the event.