Case Study

Democratizing software development with low-code

Multinational IT organization adopted low-code to democratize experience transformation efforts by empowering a broader pool of developers, both IT and citizen developers.

Company:

Multinational IT company

Industry:

Hardware and Software

Location:

USA

About

Our client is a well-known IT company that sells hardware, software, and other business services. Based in USA, its product lines include PCs and other computing devices, enterprise and industry-standard servers, storage devices, and many more.

Our SI partner is a well-known multinational IT company that offers business consulting, information technology, and outsourcing services.

The pandemic and the resultant disruption and uncertainty in the market have underscored the advantages of using the right digital platforms when it comes to application development. Almost every enterprise is either beginning or making inroads into digital transformation with speed. While offering resilience and cost optimization is paramount, ISVs understand that accelerating this transformation is of utmost importance for organizations to remain competitive in the post-covid era.

The platform offers a set of technology and integration IT solutions that lower the technical entry barriers for IT & Citizen Developers & Integration Specialists. Using our ecosystem & Low-code platforms, developers can rapidly build Multi-Experience (i.e. Web, Mobile, Windows) Cloud-native apps, Microservices, APIs, and data pipelines with greater autonomy and flexibility to turn the business ideas into business IT solutions quickly.

Head of Enterprise Architecture & Innovation Lab

The Digital Transformation Story

Enterprise Architecture (EA) teams enable the delivery of business capabilities by providing direction in terms of technical capabilities. EA teams are involved in modernizing existing technical assets, promoting innovation, taking care of technical debt, improving business process agility, and thereby assisting in the strategic growth of the company. Our client’s EA group had these main objectives:

  • Increase speed of delivery
  • Build platforms that could enable innovation
  • Develop IT efficiencies to reduce costs

To meet these objectives, the Enterprise Architecture team within the client organization strategized a digital transformation initiative that in turn needed agility, creativity, and skillsets to create value at a faster pace with lower investments.

The client’s Enterprise Architecture team collaborated with our SI partner to accelerate this initiative at scale. They also had an explicit goal of democratizing transformation efforts to empower a broader pool of developers (IT and Business) thus allowing the workforce with varied skillsets and subject matter expertise to innovate.

To achieve this goal, WaveMaker SI partner adopted a strategy of creating an accelerator framework, specifically customized to develop and modernize applications for our client. They also suggested that a low-code platform be included within the ecosystem to speed up the process of application building.

The client did a comparative analysis of WaveMaker with other low-code platforms in the market and chose WaveMaker low-code platform for its open standards-based tech stack and flexible licensing model. WaveMaker capabilities were then integrated with the framework to further accelerate their development efforts.

To ease up the process of deployment and code control, WaveMaker engineers customized the platform and created a channel such that applications created on WaveMaker could be easily deployed in the client’s application ecosystem that aligns with their CI/CD process. This also allowed developer teams to have better control over the generated code.

The EA team primarily used the low-code platform to develop an internal HR portal that could be used across the organization. The portal was essentially used by employees and the HR team for recruitment, retention, and employee benefits management such as health insurance.

Results

The EA platform combined with low-code lowered technical entry barriers and enabled disparate teams to experiment and collaborate. With the use of low-code, the EA time was able to drive faster innovation, lower delivery times, and enhance customer experiences at low costs coupled with high productivity.

To enhance productivity and further accelerate app development, our SI partner resold the customized WaveMaker platform to our client.

Deploying a white-labeled and on-premise version of WaveMaker allowed our client to customize the CI/CD process for their ecosystem. This enabled the client to independently use the platform to develop applications outside the framework developed by the SI partner.

The platform enables easy access to data with API, and automation with agile/DevOps for continuous integration and deployment. At the same time, security and governance processes are automated and guidelines are embedded directly into platform workflows.

Head of Enterprise Architecture & Innovation Lab

This also allowed our client to offer WaveMaker as a rapid application development tool on the HR portal for citizen developers to innovate. Other than developing the HR portal, employees have been using the tool for the past two years to develop PoCs/MVPs and convert ideas to app rapidly.

In short, three main objectives using low-code have been achieved:

  • Adding WaveMaker to the SI partner’s accelerated framework to further accelerate application development
  • Creating a white-labeled platform that allows the client to create applications independently
  • Enabling a broader pool of developers, both IT and citizen developers to participate in the digital transformation efforts

Our client has been consistently using WaveMaker for the past two years as an accelerator for app development in their ecosystem. Decision-makers across the organization are seeing the benefits of using a flexible, open standards-based low-code platform for varied use cases. From implementing an HR portal to creating MVPs on a white-labeled platform, WaveMaker’s low-code has created a value proposition that is paving the way for the IT Solutions client to achieve rapid digital transformation and meet its objective of faster delivery, innovation, and reduced costs.

Write to us at info@wavemaker.com