The Siemens subsidiary announced the new offerings at its annual Mendix World event last week, along with a range of products and services including new AI features for its low-code PaaS, an updated Data Hub designed to allow developers to more easily connect to a variety of off-the-shelf and custom data sources, and new Smart AppServices to digitalize and automate business workflows.

Low-code and no-code platforms are often used by companies to help developers rapidly develop applications and cut labour costs. According to Gartner, nearly 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives by 2024. Gartner associate principal research analyst Akash Jain commented:

“It is a growing trend within many enterprises to empower business technologists and citizen developers with low-code tools that will allow these enterprises to rapidly develop required digital solutions.”

The COVID-19 crisis showed that companies that adopted a low-code approach to development adjusted more quickly and effectively to the crisis than businesses that relied solely on conventional development, proving that rapid app development and constant iteration of software have become table stakes for competitive enterprises, according to a recent Forrester Wave report.

Industry Clouds target key business sectors

To help facilitate rapid app development for key industries, the new Mendix Industry Clouds will feature reusable templates that focus on addressing challenges specific to the targeted business sectors. According to Mendix CTO Johan den Haan, Industry Clouds will help form an industry-focused, low-code community as it will incorporate APIs, Mendix AppServices, connectors to data sources, and offer ways for its community of 250,000 “makers” to share app development and industry knowledge.

Mendix for Manufacturing and Mendix for Financial Services are available now. The financial cloud offers templates for Credit Rating, Claims Management, and Portfolio Management, while the industry cloud includes templates for Smart Warehousing, Predictive Maintenance, and Smart Workforce Planning.

Mendix also announced an AppServices Framework, available now for ISVs and partners who want to sell their services on the Mendix marketplace. The framework includes provisioning, metering, and billing. A new Solutions Platform for ISVs includes IP protection on top of integrated metering and billing, as well as tools to extend and maintain low-code-developed applications.

Mendix offers new AI, Data Hub services

A new Mendix suite of Smart AppServices is designed for those building applications with digital business workflows and offers capabilities for document data capture and cognitive services such as language and sentiment analysis, including the ability to understand conversations that take place via messages. The suite can be used to enhance applications acquired through the Mendix Marketplace.

According to Gartner’s Jain, low-code capabilities are increasingly being utilized for automating business workflows owing to their AI capabilities such as optical character recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and sentiment analysis. The new Mendix capabilities should enhance the ability of the company’s platform to quickly offer value to developers, said Thomas Boogert, strategic planner and ICT product owner at Secrid, a Dutch wallet maker and Mendix customer.

“One of the biggest strengths of developing with Mendix lies in the startup phase of developing an app. Where a code solution would take weeks or months to set up the basics of an application and security, Mendix only takes a couple of days,” Boogert said. “The announcement of the AppServices Framework and Industry Solutions enable us to start building actual business value with Mendix even faster.”

Mendix enhances automation capabilities

Boogert said:

“Even though the expansion of Data Hub is not that relevant for us yet, as we only have two applications up and running, we already see that a lot of the budget is spent on integrating different apps. Expanding these capabilities is helping Mendix become the core of larger corporations IT landscapes.”

A new AI capability slated for availability later this year is Page Bot, part of Mendix’s AI-based service called Assist. In combination with the previously available Logic Bot and Performance Bot, it looks into instances of application development and ensures that apps follow architectural patterns. Page Bot will assist developers in UI and UX development, after learning from anonymized data sets.

The company also announced a separate machine learning kit for Mendix, available later this year, that will allow organizations to incorporate custom machine learning models into their applications.

For some developers, these platforms are a welcome time-saving solution to focus their efforts on other higher-value projects. While other developers might disagree and instead of fear that low-code and no-code platforms will result in fewer jobs for developers. A survey uncovered the good–and the bad–of low-code and no-code platforms and what their usage means for the enterprise.

The survey asked the following questions:

• Does your organization currently use low-code or no-code platforms?
• Does your organization plan to use low-code or no-code platforms in the next 12 months?
• How is your company currently using or planning to use low-code or no-code platforms in the next 12 months?
• Which of the following benefits does your company get or expect to get from low-code or no-code platforms?
• Which low-code or no-code platform is your company currently using or planning to use?
• Why isn’t your organization currently using or planning to use low-code or no-code platforms?
• Do you think low-code or no-code platforms will result in fewer jobs for developers overall (not just in your organization) in the future?
• Why do you feel that low-code or no-code platforms will result in fewer jobs for developers?
• Why do you feel that low-code or no-code platforms will not result in fewer jobs for developers?

Low-code and no-code (LCNC) software development platforms are steadily gaining in popularity as businesses seek to streamline workflows and digitize business processes. Nearly half (47%) of those surveyed currently use LCNC in their organizations. Of the 35% who are not currently using LCNC, one in five (20%) said they intend to adopt the technology in the next 12 months.

Most respondents are using LCNC to automate workflows (17%), create new applications (15%), speed up development time (15%) and automate data collection and reporting (14%). Another 10% of respondents mentioned reducing the burden on developers and connecting and creating inter-departmental applications, workflows and business processes for reasons to incorporate LCNC.

The survey found that the ability to utilize LCNC to provide business solutions provides many benefits to organizations. The top benefit survey respondents receive or expect to receive from LCNC platforms is improved productivity (15%), followed by reduced application development time (14%), and automating manual processes (12%). Rounding out the ranks of top benefits was increased use of automation in business processes (11%), and at 10%, streamlined, easier-to-use workflows, empowering users to solve problems, and reducing dependence on spreadsheets.

The majority of survey respondents (67%) do not think low-code or no-code platforms will result in fewer developer jobs. However, 16% of respondents do. They cited that developers are too slow to help businesses respond to fast-changing market conditions and opportunities and that developers will feel undervalued and will quit instead of working on these platforms as the top reasons why.