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Authored by Shobhit Mathur, Sr. Director and Category Head BFS, WaveMaker, Inc

It is said that 5G is 100 times faster than 4G. An astronomical increase, indeed. Yet, for enterprises, ‘speed’ is not the most significant paradigm shift that accompanies 5G.

The most significant shifts are the ancillary capabilities enabled by the high speed that 5G provides—edge computing, ultra-low latency, massive network capacity, reduced power consumption for devices, stronger security, private networks, and more.

The advent of 5G is a massive opportunity for Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to move up the value chain, from being providers of undifferentiated connectivity to providing platforms and domain-specific solutions for SMBs and enterprises.

Armed with know-how, CSPs are best suited to cater to the demands of network services that enterprises would require. However, to see profitability, CSPs need customers to buy solutions that are built on top of these capabilities. They need to offer a broad spectrum of functional solutions for use cases that go beyond connectivity and communications.

The way forward for CSPs

Enterprises are keen to provide superior customer experiences over the speed that 5G provides while CSPs have the imperative to cater to these very demands and stay in the competition. Instead of being dependent on external vendors, CSPs, understandably, are looking to take control of the customer experience systems.

To bring this to fruition, they would want to build a layer of services over the existing systems like Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operation Support Systems (OSS). In the future, CSPs might select API providers for implementing backend functionalities, but would most likely be self-reliant when it comes to building apps over them.

Yet, as proven across industries, paradigm shifts and opportunities of such magnitude, always need a holistic and fresh approach.

Three things CSPs need to meet customer expectations

CSPs, thus, can take a holistic approach to application development by adopting a multi-layered platform approach, rather than a short-sighted rapid launch of use case-specific apps.

Three strategic layers that CSPs can leverage over their existing infrastructure are:

#1 A Functional API Plane: Typical application stacks at CSPs include both BSS and OSS. The BSS provides the bare-bones customer experience layer to attract, convert, service, and bill a customer. To elevate the customer experience CSPs could take the following steps:

#2 A Digital Experience Hub: A Digital Experience Hub (DEH) built over the API layer can decouple the UX from the functional systems. The DEH can act as a unified API layer over core systems (BSS & OSS) as well as the new use case-centric functional systems.

#3 A Digital Experience Layer: Incumbent CSPs can adopt a next-gen, digital-first approach for delivering a customized and personalized omnichannel experience to customers with the help of a layered platform-based approach. This Digital Experience Layer built on top of the DEH will have componentized telecom-based experiences. This is where low-code can act as the crucial last layer of experience development.

A multi-layered platform for app development is a strategic choice for telcos and enterprises. Yet, a big-bang approach to modernization is not advisable. The stakes are too high when there is an imminent risk of disruption. Instead, CSPs are well advised to adopt an iterative and phased approach to modernization.

In this context, the potent combination of composability, co-existence, and a low-code platform may be the perfect antidote to the modernization conundrum.

 

Composability + co-existence + low-code: a potent combination

Incumbent CSPs need to reinvent the wheel with modern, cloud-native, omnichannel applications to gain traction and prepare themselves for the 5G era. But, the use case by use case approach, or traditional development methodologies will make it difficult to provide the acceleration that they need.

What CSPs need is a foundational platform for the UX layer that can:

 

From apps to Experience-as-a-Service platforms with low-code

An Experience-as-a-Service paradigm can be built by layering purpose-built stacks on one another.

Creating an integration layer enables enterprises to orchestrate experiences from different vendors and internal APIs. These APIs are combined cohesively to create experience APIs that bring the best-of-breed services together and give the customer a unified experience.

Componentized and configurable low-code platforms can then be leveraged to create an Experience-as-a-Service layer on top of these assets.

Components (bundled with logic, data, and UI) that represent entire user journeys can be built into a configurable platform to provide better control to business users and allow them to innovate better. These components in turn can be reused and rehashed for any use case, app, or channel across the enterprise landscape.

 

 

On another note, CSPs are well aware that the skill shortage crisis is real. Either they do not have enough hands or do not possess the bandwidth to acquire the talent they need. Low-code platforms are great enablers in this context. Developers with diverse or even legacy skill sets can onboard and adopt low-code platforms and take advantage of full-stack technologies in minimum time.

With features like pre-built components, faster onboarding, a lower learning curve, flexible customization, and easy configuration, composable low-code are slated to become an enterprise-wide app development strategy.

With low-code, enterprises and telcos will go to market faster, be it through ideation, testing the market with PoCs or MVPs, or performing quick customizations to meet large customer-specific needs.

 

Summary

CSPs have the knowledge and know-how in the telecom industry. This gives them a unique perspective and a special seat at the table when discussing the impact of 5G. It also provides them the opportunity to pivot from being network providers to transforming into facilitators of 5G ecosystems.

To compete well with software providers, CSPs need to provide differentiated experiences at speed, which requires a paradigm shift in software development. Traditional approaches to development take time and the opportunity cost of losing out to nimbler competition is really high.

On the other hand, low-code is an ideal tool to tackle the skill shortage and acceleration problem. It would be prudent to adopt a composable low-code platform that can allow them to leverage their expertise and develop experiences fast. Doing so will enable them to monetize their investment in 5G with speed and scale.

Originally published in The Fast Mode

Authored by Deepak Anupalli, Co-Founder and CTO, WaveMaker, Inc

The Global Digital Transformation Market is expected to grow from USD $469.8 Billion in 2020 to USD $1,009.8 Billion by 2025 while enterprises are responding to market demands by transitioning toward a new digital era – with haste.

There is much to be said about the velocity at which this transition is being made. This is particularly the case for organizations that have relied on traditional software platforms and methodologies for decades.

Take, for instance, large Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and solution providers. They typically create custom software solutions for their clients at scale, but delivering complete customized software using a traditional development team is simply not a scalable business model in these times.

In terms of cost, traditional development platforms and processes are burning a huge hole in the enterprise pocket. Typically, enterprise software costs are factored in on a short-term basis, but the bigger picture leaves much to be desired. The overall cost to maintain, update, re-platform, or rebuild software with traditional development teams on a long-term basis is astronomically higher. Add the cost of lingering technical debt, and enterprises that rely on traditional methods might have a problem that won’t be going away anytime soon.

It’s no wonder that enterprises are switching to Rapid Application Development platforms like low-code that can offer not only speed, but also customization, composability, and the ability to build customer experiences that differentiate them from competitors.

Low-Code for Mainstream Accelerated Development

Low-code is a modern approach to agile software development. A low-code platform enables professional developers to build products in a visually declarative manner, by abstracting commonly used functionalities as components. These components can be dragged and dropped onto an application canvas and then configured and customized per application. Such a methodology allows developers to tackle complexity with ease and build products, almost 3X times faster than traditional approaches. Components that represent an entire functionality bundled with UI, logic, and data can be stored in internal repositories that can be customized for any use case across the enterprise application landscape. This allows SMEs and business users to provide their expertise while building applications, and in turn, democratizes software development leading to better ideation and innovation.

Etching a Sustainable Development Path with Low-Code

While low-code platforms give an initial boost to rapidly build and deliver software to the market, can they also help enterprises build software with the right architecture, provide iron-clad security, and the best software to scale? Most importantly, can low-code approaches help businesses build software that is sustainable in the longer term?

The answers to these questions depend on the choice of platform and the enterprise’s long-term strategy around the platform. Low-code adopted as a quick fix for an immediate problem cannot scale up as a long-term strategy.

On the other hand, the adoption of a low-code platform as the basis for an enterprise-wide, long-term strategy – with the right methodologies and best practices set around it – will enable growth, ensure sustainability, and allow businesses and their apps to scale.

The Low-Code Maturity Path

 

 

1. Faster Go-To-Market: The low-code advantage with composable components and integrations

The first advantage of adopting a low-code platform is, of course, speed and agility. Using a composable experience platform, existing development teams can pool their resources, integrate with best-of-breed APIs, and rapidly componentize them as LEGO-like blocks. These components can then be assembled together to quickly compose custom software that is highly integrable and customizable. Faster go-to-market is just the first milestone.

However, there is an initial ramp-up time for the learning curve, albeit a smaller one than with other approaches, and the gains are usually best observed when building multiple apps or when there is wider adoption of the platform across the organization.

Once existing development teams build familiarity with the low-code platforms and align with the technology stack offered, a core competency for the platform is created internally within the organization. This is a determinant for the success of the low-code strategy within the ecosystem.

2. Respond at the Speed of Need: Allow developers to customize and extend functionality quickly

After the go-live, it is important to look at the turnaround time at which changes can be rolled out using the same low-code platform. Business and development teams should be able to collaborate, review changes, and align on business objectives for successful change rollouts.

In a traditional development setup, software updates typically must go through the entire build, review, and QA process. Some of the changes could lead to regressions, which necessitates the need to have expert software development teams to govern them.

With low-code, changes can be confined to specific layers of an application, ( such as user interface, data model, and business logic), and only the functional aspects of the app are impacted, leaving the underlying software components, integrations, and their integrity intact.

3. React to Disruptive Market Forces: Compose and create new experiences

Changing market needs usually demand that software development teams be very agile to remain in sync with business changes. It is here where the true differentiator of low-code lies.

Only a few low-code platforms enable a composable way of defining and creating new experiences from existing components, cutting down the time it takes to make drastic changes or even a complete overhaul of the app experience. A composable low-code platform offers a powerful way to create components that can be reused by development teams to compose new applications and user journeys, allowing businesses to experiment with new product ideas and innovate.

4. Evolve with The Industry Trends: Adapt to industry trends with continuous product evolution

Every software product goes through its own evolutionary process and has to scale as the number of users grows and adoption kicks in for wider markets. It becomes very critical for the product to support a wide array of capabilities such as internationalization (e.g. i18n), support for accessibility, multi-cloud deployment, versioning for components, penetration testing, industry-specific compliance, and so on.

Mature low-code platforms have out-of-the-box support for these capabilities making the development process easier for development teams as the software evolves.

5. Scale and Sustain: Respond to technology disruptions quickly, upgrade, and sustain

It is estimated that engineers spend a whopping 30% of their time resolving issues arising due to technical debt when modernizing software. A changing technology landscape renders it very difficult for software to withstand the test of time. Technical debt will show its damaging effects unless the platform was built with resilience in mind and there is a process in place to handle the debt.

With new technology innovations, software should adapt and change course to thrive and sustain itself. Low-code platforms enable a layer of abstraction for development teams, allowing them to stay closer to their business solutions and do the heavy lifting of technology advancements underneath the platform strategy.

Migration of underlying JavaScript frameworks such as Angular JS to Angular, stack upgrades for the backend such as Java 9 to Java 11, and so on are only possible if the right architecture is in place. Upgrades happen under the hood, and since low-code does all the laborious work behind the scenes, the transitions happen seamlessly.

Summary

Organizations that are contemplating adopting a low-code platform are making a wise choice. However, due diligence is required to zero in on the right platform. If the motive is to enable business users to develop simple apps for their internal use, any no-code platform can do the job.

However, if the low-code platform is for serious app development, then all stakeholders including IT teams, business users, CTOs, and CIOs need to create a strategic plan for its adoption in a collaborative manner. Organizational best practices of change management, upgrades, and rollouts need to be consolidated and built around low-code. Processes for each stage of app creation need to be set in place. The low-code platform of choice must offer flexibility and scalability unconditionally. It should ideally be able to ride the maturity curve as the use cases expand and as adoption spreads throughout the organization, allowing organizations to deliver, customize, compose, and upgrade at the speed of their need.

Originally published in DEVPRO JOURNAL

Authored by Vikram Srivats, Chief Commercial Officer, WaveMaker, Inc

After the grueling stress test of a global pandemic, corporations must now contend with the stresses of war and a weakening macroeconomic environment and yet transform to become modern, composable, and competitive enterprises. Technology executives at the center of this transformation are pursuing bold yet pragmatic strategies, including building and scaling new software-driven business capabilities quickly. For them, the holy grail seems to be democratizing software application development itself – with low-code/no-code (LCNC) approaches – to deliver at speed and at scale to the business.

Professional developers and enterprise architects get involved in governing LCNC development as enterprises become deliberate about policies, processes, and people to scale this movement responsibly. But pro-coders themselves are not yet active adopters of LCNC platforms – they range from interested observers (at best) to those that detest LCNC platforms (for valid reasons).

Based on industry estimates, around 35-40% of a pro coder’s time is spent in setting up, creating guardrails, importing, and integrating with data sources, writing code from scratch, making code secure, testing and retesting applications, managing source control, and versioning, adding internationalization, making them accessible, optimizing for performance, and maintaining or upgrading applications. Another 30% of the time is spent on non-technical or operational activities. That leaves less than half of their productive time for thinking, innovating, and crafting complex and compelling apps and experiences.

Clearly, pro-coders experience pain. So, what should low-code platforms offer to entice pro-coders to adopt and, better yet, embrace them? Let’s dig in.

Rule 1: Be Open. Provide Familiarity and Visibility

What if a low-code platform used an open standards-based, popular tech stack (React, Angular, and Bootstrap for UI; Spring for backend; Docker containers)? What if developers could actually see and read real (not model-generated or metadata-driven) code being generated? What if this code was written the way they code?

Pro coders are accustomed to seeing, reading, and understanding real code in a language or framework that is open and widely accepted. So, just give it to them.

Rule 2: Custom Everything

Developers need the ability to add fine-grained logic to their applications; that is, writing custom services or creating custom APIs in a code editor alongside the drag-and-drop canvas.

Low-code platforms should offer developers the ability to configure each out-of-the-box widget to a high degree to allow for creating visually captivating experiences.

Imagine if developers could go beyond a standard UI widget library and create their own custom components – building blocks of API-infused UI – and add them to their private library. Sometimes, developers may also need to import pre-built components (React or Angular or GraphQL components exported as standard Web Components) into their low-code development platform and reuse them.

Finally, developers may want to create their own application theme – a combination of fonts, layouts, colors, and styles – to create a differentiated yet consistent branded user experience across one or more applications or products.

Rule 3: Integrate Easily with Data Sources. Set Up Quickly.

Integration and extraction from data sources such as APIs (REST, SOAP, or WebSocket), databases (such as MySQL, Maria DB, PostgreSQL, Oracle DB, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Amazon Redshift, SAP Hana, HSQL, and Mongo DB) or streaming data sources (like Kafka embedded in the app) – must be supported and be effortless.

CRUD operations are usually hardcoded by the developer and take up a lot of time. If a low-code platform could automatically generate all the CRUD APIs once the data source is imported, it cuts down the development time immensely. Similarly, an editable abstraction of the database that replicates the schema of the DB can help developers manipulate the data from within the platform itself.

Once imported, developers should be able to bind their UI easily and quickly to the backend via passing variables. Data from a REST call should then be easily displayed as entities on a page without any workarounds or wordy importing and model definition. Likewise, with a Swagger import, descriptions should be able to handle reusing the same model in multiple endpoints or recursive models.

Rule 4: Apps Must Be Secure, Scalable, and Performant

For user authentication, developers may need to integrate with database, LDAP, Active Directory, SAML, and other authentication providers. SSO should be easily enabled with support for SAML federation and Central Authentication Server (CAS). For authorization, low-code platforms need to support coarse as well as fine-grained permissions that extend across pages, individual widgets on a page, and even individual APIs exposed by the application.

Developers look for protection against OWASP vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, brute force attacks, SQL injection) and support of encryption standards such as TLS 1.2+ during app hosting. Ideally, low-code platforms need to be certified by security leaders like Veracode who perform rigorous static and dynamic tests (iAST, SAST, DAST, and SCA).

Through session-less architecture, distributed caching, horizontal scaling through containers, and UI framework-specific performance features (for example, Angular 13 has lazy loading, Brotli compression, tree shaking, Ivy), developers using low-code platforms can build highly performant apps, minimizing chattiness and UI-to-backend roundtrips. As an example, instead of storing the state in a session, it can be backed by a distributed cache (such as Redis) to allow apps to scale horizontally.

Rule 5: Deploy Anywhere, Anyhow

Developers cannot be constrained to a vendor-specific app deployment infrastructure. They need the freedom and flexibility to host their apps anywhere – on any public, private, or hybrid Cloud, on K8s clusters, or on bare metal/on-premise infrastructure. Low-code platforms that offer a development model where the UI is decoupled from the backend, can allow UI and backend artifacts to be separately packaged and deployed (UI to CDN; as an example, backend to a standard Java server like Tomcat) using a standard archive or a Docker image.

Rule 6: Complex and Long-Lived Apps & Large-Scale Platforms

Developers hand-code some of the most complex apps and systems in use today. They need low-code platforms to step up to the plate and deliver equally complex apps that can be sustainable over the long term in terms of maintenance and enhancements.

For example, low-code platforms need to integrate with 3rd party BPM tools (Camunda, jBPM, Flowable, Activity) that help developers orchestrate detailed workflows/tasks and need to support a full 2-way data exchange with the BPM tool’s runtime engine. Within low-code platforms, developers will expect to easily manipulate complex data (pick a certain number of arrays and use logic to combine them into a new set of arrays) and easily represent complex graphs without custom styling/CSS or tangling with data formats.

Developers may need to conditionally retrieve data using a parent-child relationship, be able to localize and internationalize applications, handle complex core code merges and upgrades with customized apps in deployment, deal with Swagger changes pushed to already imported Swagger files without rewiring all the variables, write and support complex business logic interleaved with visual development, support multiple app themes at runtime, support apps as deep links, set click targets to measure/launch intents or URLs, and so on.

Rule 7: No Vendor Lock-In, Restrictions, or Fine Print

Lock-in is a strict no for developers who value independence and freedom. That starts with access to generated code. Low-code platforms that do well in this space readily offer developers the ability to not only see and read generated code but also to export source code outside of the platform to an IDE of their choice.

Developers also don’t like low-code platforms that force them to use their runtime environment to deploy their apps, effectively locking developers and their employers into the platform through the app’s lifecycle. Lastly, from a licensing perspective, low-code platforms that restrict developers to a limited number of apps, app objects, or end users effectively throttle developers to a commercial model that becomes quickly expensive with usage and more apps.

Rule 8: Modern (Cloud-Native) Environments, Practices, and Standards

Developers using cloud-native low-code platforms benefit in terms of collaboration, ease of access, availability, flexibility, security, frequent and easy upgrades, horizontal scaling, and the overall unit economics of the model for their app development and deployment.

Developer-friendly low-code platforms generate code using modern design patterns (for example, a Java maven project) enabling developers to see, extend, and customize code across all layers of the application stack. They enable every user to have a workspace running as a container instance. When an app is built, a repo is automatically created for it in the low-code platform’s source control/Git (and integrated with Prometheus/EFK for logs and metrics).

Finally, developers appreciate low-code platforms that embrace modern standards, say Android Material Design specification for visual design and building interaction across multiple devices using out-of-the-box widgets and themes. They value the ability to create functional, distributable, reusable, API-integrated, and independently testable experience components. Low-code platforms that offer twelve-factor standards assure developers that their apps are trustworthy.

Rule 9: Play Well with Design, Build, Test, and Release Processes and Toolsets

Developers using low-code platforms will want their apps to connect to, integrate with, or be embedded in other hand-coded apps. Beyond iFrame support, low-code platforms that support embedding via a micro frontend approach (such as Single SPA) offer sophisticated functionality for developers to create seamless end-to-end experiences that cover high-code and low-code developed apps.

Professional application development teams tend to use design tools like Figma, Sketch, or UXPin; QA tools like Selenium, Protractor, or Karma for testing web apps; Appium for testing mobile apps; and performance testing tools and app profilers like AppDynamics or New Relic. DevOps teams have a plethora of tools for the build, test, integration, and deployment processes. Post-deployment, developers would like to monitor app performance events, and page tracking via Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Low-code platforms that endear themselves to developers will have to play well and integrate seamlessly with these toolsets and design, build, test, release, and monitoring processes.

Lastly, while low-code platforms may provide their own VCS (such as Gitlab), they need to offer easy integration with external repositories like GitHub or Bitbucket. Developers should be able to pull, view, and push changes and merge conflicts between source control systems. They will appreciate low-code platforms that support app versioning from code-level commits to component-level and application-level versioning for releases (including a major or minor version format), allowing multiple versions of the app to co-exist in different deployment environments such as test, stage, or pre-production.

Rule 10: Future-Proof Me, My Apps, and My Employer

A UI developer or backend developer using low-code platforms should be able to develop a complete application with, for example, a basic knowledge of SQL, JS/Java, and zero DevOps, and transform to full-stack developers. Using the Java world as an example, developers don’t need knowledge of advanced JS framework, HTML5, CSS, Bootstrap, Spring, ORM, REST, advanced SQL, native device programming, mobile integration, building and running Docker scripts, or manual integration with CI/CD pipelines.

For technology stack upgrades for apps built using a low-code platform, developers should be able to open apps in the target version of a low-code platform with the latest tech stack (as an example, Angular 14 for UI). The app upgrade should be automatic, and the transition seamless.

Developers and CTOs/CIOs alike are constantly worrying about creating technical debt for the future. Enterprise-friendly low-code platforms are built on an open-standards-based modern tech stack, shift the burden of tech upgrades to the platform, offer source code that is extensible outside of the platform using commonly available skillsets, and play well with a modern enterprise’s toolsets, practice, and standards.

Originally published in Embedded Computing Design