Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Will the Low-Code Movement Get Even Bigger in 2022? Yes - and Here's Why
By Shomron Jacob, Engineering Manager at Iterate.ai.
The benefits of using low-code
techniques for application development are less of a secret every day. Done
right, IT leaders can ideate, develop, test, and produce full-featured
applications far faster and far less expensive than traditional development.
But in 2022, look for low-code platforms to make significant strides across
both the breadth of industry adoption and the depth of capabilities they can
deliver without (or at least with magnitudes less) hardcoding.
For enterprise IT leaders, low-code
is hitting a maturity point where the advantages will be too clear and too big
to ignore. Here are three things to look for in 2022:
1) Low-code will enable
organizations to tap into the most cutting-edge technologies crucial to
competitive differentiation.
In 2022, enterprises will expand how
they utilize low-code to unlock fast and cost-efficient access to include a
swath of emerging technologies, from AI/ML to the IoT, to blockchain, to
advanced voice and messaging experiences, and more. With the uber-rare talent
in these emerging fields commanding tremendous salaries and recruitment akin to
a bidding war, low-code will instead enable organizations - that would
otherwise be priced out - to incorporate these technologies into their
applications and realize the competitive differentiation they deliver. Versus
traditional code writing, low-code can enable a 10X (or more) pace of
development and all the associated time-to-market advantages, even for existing
technical staff harnessing the most cutting-edge capabilities. For these
reasons, a broader set of businesses across more industries will be leveraging
low-code next year as well, from retail to healthcare to government
organizations and beyond. In short, we'll see a marked acceleration in the
democratization of low-code.
2) Low-code security practices
mature.
As low-code becomes increasingly
essential within enterprise environments, organizations will naturally seek
platforms with sufficient security to match their use cases. Low-code platforms
intended more for prototyping applications - or those that lack
enterprise-grade safeguards or even any built-in security or sandboxing
whatsoever - will no longer make the cut as organizations seek more end-to-end
(and out-of-the-box) security from their low-code strategy.
In 2022, look for enterprises to
align their low-code development with security best practices, adopting
platforms with internal security layers and tapping their own security teams
for oversight. These teams will emphasize timely implementation of security
updates and patches, securing low-code environments as they utilize various
open source and third-party code to deliver their broad capabilities.
3) Low-code advances into
production environments.
The days of rapid low-code
prototyping followed by slow-code development of production applications are
coming to an end, as enterprises demand the best of both worlds. Appropriate
low-code platforms can now produce production-ready applications that are as
scalable and secure as those that experts code from scratch, the only
difference being that they come cheaper and faster. In practice, IT teams hold
ultimate responsibility for the operations, safety, and effectiveness of coding
environments, and won't have patience for low-code platforms that aren't up to
enterprise snuff. To avoid such issues, enterprises will increasingly require
buy-in across teams, driving the adoption of production-grade low-code
solutions in 2022.
2022 will be a big year for
low-code, and it'll be exciting to see how more enterprises put the strategy
into action to solve application development hurdles.
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About the
Author
Shomron
Jacob is an Engineering Manager focused on Applied Machine Learning and AI at Iterate.ai,
creator of the Interplay low-code platform for rapidly
prototyping AI-based applications across industries. Shomron began his career
as a software engineer and soon found himself learning ML/AI, and switched his
professional direction to follow it. He lives in Silicon Valley.