As the low-code development market continues to grow, there’s a consistent source of good resources about how and why companies are using low-code. When looking for a low-code platform, Gartner and Forrester are the leading analyst companies. Gartner’s low-code reports are fewer than Forrester’s low-code details, but both provide a lot of interesting data.
In addition to reports on low-code from Forrester and Gartner, several other companies distribute interesting and insightful reports. Here’s a summary of the best ones.
Published: 8 May 2018
Source: Forrester
Previously, most process automation was focused on cost reduction. However, now the focus is more on moving towards digital transformation and a better customer experience. As customer experience becomes more important, streamlined and efficient processes (both front and backend) become high priorities for businesses.
This Forrester low-code application platform report looks at these issues. Among 354 business professionals surveyed:
The report also reflects on how large the issue of digital transformation is and how impossible it is for IT to handle it on their own.
“Organizations are uncovering a multitude of process elements they need to be automate or streamline. It isn’t practical, or even feasible, for one centralized IT department to tackle the enormous magnitude of the software end-to-end transformation requires, making process automation ripe for low-code tooling and business user empowerment. Decentralization prevents IT from becoming a bottleneck and spreads responsibility throughout the enterprise. Vendors are adapting to this shift with speedier, lighter-weight process solutions aimed at business professionals.”
Published: 24 July 2018
Source: Gartner
This Gartner low-code platform report details how enterprises can use these tools to meet growing IT demands. Many of these options are cloud based and can assist developers in significant ways.
The Gartner low-code report also details the difference between no-code and low-code and describes specific use cases for enterprises, including creating satellite applications, replacing legacy applications, making team workflows, mobile applications, and disruptions in the space. Best practices such as increasing options for citizen developers, and investing in APIs are also covered.
Published: 22 June 2018
Source: OutSystems
OutSystems has delivered some really interesting low code statistics in this report. They surveyed IT leaders around the world to find out about their application development strategies.
The top three answers were:
Published: 26 April 2018
Source: Gartner
Here’s a mouthful for you: hpaPaaS.
This low-code platform Gartner report only covers vendors and doesn’t give a lot of insight over the spectrum as a whole, but spends more time looking at each vendor and how they compare. For the first time, OrangeScape, makes of Kissflow, appear in this report. Here’s what they had to say:
“Kissflow is designed for citizen developers who prefer drag-and-drop creation and visual layout for designing their application flow. This is further complemented by a rich UI for development and extensions to presupplied apps, as well as an apps marketplace.
“Kissflow offers simple, one-tiered competitive pricing with provision for custom bulk pricing and special pricing for education and not-for-profit organizations.
“OrangeScape has a sharp focus on customer support and claims its median response time to be approximately 34 minutes, which is good among smaller vendors. It also keeps its product roadmap transparent and prioritizes features based on its customers’ wish lists.”
It also lists out some cautions, including the (at the time) limitation of only creating workflow-based applications, the lack of appeal for professional programmers, and no industry-specific customizations.
Published: November 2017
Source: Kintone
This one comes as a partnership between Kintone and Unisphere research. Most of the data focuses on the prevalence of Shadow IT, or software that is created and used outside of IT’s knowledge. Here are some interesting findings:
Published: 12 October 2017
Source: Forrester
Application development professionals are turning to low-code platforms to meet customer demands and provide apps that can be quickly built and edited. Low-code platforms also allow for connections to advanced technology.
This Forrester low-code platform report lists findings from a small survey of 41 application development professionals. The number one challenge in building custom applications is the difficulty in meeting business requirements on time (31 of 41 application development respondents). 21 mentioned the lack of flexibility and 20 said it took too long to update apps.
68 percent develop apps across the organization with their low-code platform.
Most of the vendors evaluated cater to professional developers in the features they offer, and risk overwhelming many citizen developers, although they work well when used with developers and line of business heads together.
These are general purpose low-code platforms and there are only about 5-6 vendors who dominate this marketplace.
Published: 28 Sep 2017
Source: Gartner
This low-code Gartner report looks deeper at the issues around citizen development, referring to business users who are involved in creating their own applications. IT leaders will not be able to meet the demands on their own and must turn to citizen developers to reach scale and velocity.
In this report are statistics from a small survey on the state of citizen development and how it was driving digital transformation. Insights include:
In half of those companies surveyed, citizen development was already happening and others were already planning. Generally though, IT is not close at hand. Only 16 percent of respondents’ IT departments were fully involved with these efforts. 33 percent said they gave back-end support.
This report tries to make the case for IT to embrace and govern citizen development as the only viable option for digital transformation.
Published: 19 July 2016
Source: Forrester
This low-code Forrester report looks at BPM from an application development and delivery (AD&D) leader’s perspective. They are increasingly responsible for delivering apps for business process management (BPM). The are faced with the challenge of creating platforms that can deliver rapid benefits without large financial investments. It makes the case to abandon legacy platforms and use low-code approaches instead.
Published: June 2017
Source: MWD Advisors and Appian
In this report, Neil Ward-Dutton, a highly respected industry analyst, lays out the reason why low-code platforms are becoming more and more popular. He links it to the “relentless pressure” on the IT department. MWD’s own report says that 81% of CIOs plan to be more involved in the digital transformation in the next two years, yet 69% say they are already struggling to keep up.
Published: 13 February 2017
Source: Forrester
Similar to the previous report, this Forrester low-code report says that application development professionals should be more involved in governing citizen development, but not too heavy-handed. Being too restrictive will prevent a march forward to digital transformation. But being too casual will create chaos and disorder that will be almost impossible to recover from.
Published: 25 January 2017
Source: Geneca
Finally is this low-code report from Geneca called, “Doomed From the Start? Why a Majority of Business and IT Teams Anticipate Their Software Development Projects Will Fail”.
We’ll continue to collect the best data and resources that show why now is the best time to get into low-code development platforms!