In the past decades, software development required highly trained developers taking weeks or months to create thousands of lines of code for new business applications. It was time consuming, costly, and if you were building solutions for the external market, it gave the competition plenty of time to come out with their own version of the application. And if you got the application wrong, the time to re-tool it could put you at a serious marketplace disadvantage. Plus, your organization depended on advanced software development skills that were in short supply. Fortunately, this is no longer the case.
The concept of flexible cloud application development is to give the business person or IT professional a platform containing the necessary building blocks to configure new applications. Note that we used the word “configure” not code because there is no coding involved in our new flexible RAD model. Instead of learning several complex technologies, the flexible cloud developer utilizes user-friendly drag and drop tools to create workflow-rich business solutions. These solutions can be immediately deployed on premise or to a public or private cloud and accessed on desktop or mobile devices.
Configurable cloud application development gives the business or IT professional a platform (not just a point tool) containing the necessary building blocks to configure new applications in a much easier manner. Industry analysts are seeing a major move to codeless applications. As an example, John Rymer of Forrester stated in a recent InfoWorld article, “I see a lot of interest and a fair amount of adoption,” of codeless environments.
While there are many additional advantages you will discover once you have embarked on the codeless application path, here are six major benefits.
- Quick Time to Value (TtV). As Margaret Rouse, editorial director of whatis.com stated, “Time to value (TtV) is a business term that describes the period of time between a request for a specific value and the initial delivery of the value requested.” Codeless development provides a much faster TtV.
- Lower costs. Faster time to adoption and reduced need to hire highly skilled code developers means that your costs will be significantly lower.
- Short learning curve. You can avoid the need to learn complex software development technologies and you don’t have to know the rules of a programming language such as syntax and hierarchy.
- Primary focus on the business. Less complexity on the downstream application development process means more time and energy where it counts – finding the best solution to a business problem.
- Frequent updates. Codeless application enables you to quickly incorporate new features into your solutions. If you are building a corporate solution, the ability to configure vs. code allows you to change fields, screen views, workflow processes, etc. almost instantly. Naturally, this will keep your internal users happy. And if your application is public facing, you will be able to release new versions of the cloud application in weeks, helping you achieve competitive advantage.
- Much easier deployment. Building the application is just one part of the equation – you then need to test and deploy it. This is much easier and faster with configured and codeless applications built on a configurable cloud platform like KeyedIn Flex Platform.
Time to value, cost savings and happy users – these are pretty good reasons to configure instead of code. Let us know if you would like to know more about the benefits of the codeless KeyedIn development platform.
