January 24, 2017

Ideal use cases for low-code platforms

According to Forrester Research, the low-code market is here to stay as they estimated it will go up to $15.4 billion by 2020. This in other words defines that enterprises are beginning to realize long-term benefits while they make a shift to using low-code platforms. Businesses today seek app-based solutions built quickly and easily to meet their business needs. This has caused a change in the dynamics of low-code platforms, which earlier offered niche-based solutions are now expanding with the rising number of use cases being offered by enterprises from various industries as mentioned in the table below,

 Banking and insurance Healthcare and pharma  Energy and utilities Information technology and services
 CRM apps  Patient management app  Business process management apps  Legacy app modernization
 loan approval app  Accounting and invoicing app  CRM apps  Business process management apps
 Insurance management app
(Read case study)
 Laboratory information management app  Monitoring dashboards  CRM and ERP platform dashboards

5 common use cases of low-code platforms

While there are a plethora of industries with varying app requirements, the use cases to build these apps roughly remain similar.

  1. Business process managing applications:
    They deal with process management, case management, process automation, and social features to manage business processes. They support business process management and can ease work in industries such as healthcare and hospital management with apps for maintaining patient records, surgery procedure management, etc. Now, let us take a look at a few elements required in such apps like forms where data is captured. Low-code platforms provide these features like forms out of the box with design in place allowing you to run CRUD, sorting, caching, and loading of data. This saves time for the developer while building the application as this can be easily integrated into the application.
  2. Database managing applications:  
    Most businesses require platforms to work with relational databases. Data is key and crucial to most businesses. With a low-code platform, you can easily bind, view, update and visualize database tables without having to write any code. Databases like SQL, MySQL, PL/SQL to mention a few are supported by most platforms making database management easy. Let’s look at a CRM tool that needs to send out an email on the successful creation of an invoice or an order in the CRM database. This can be achieved using a low-code platform as it allows you to tie business logic, to the occurrence of various events that get fired during the management of data.
  3. Omni-channel platforms:
    These are best suited for business sectors such as BFSI and call centers. Low-code platforms can help reduce the time and effort in building applications required for online banking where customers can manage their personal and/or business accounts anywhere, anytime, and on any device. These requirements need the application to fetch data from multiple data sources (databases, APIs, Custom Business Logic, files, legacy apps, cloud services) and create web as well as mobile-ready dashboards. Low-code platforms not only provide these integrations with APIs and business logic, but also provide real-time charts, live data grids, and live lists that give immediate visibility into data. This allows businesses in the BFSI sector to see their applications finally reach a production phase.
  4. Microservices-based applications:
    Netflix and Amazon have implemented microservices architecture and have seen a great deal of success in their business models. Enterprises looking to make the shift from a monolithic approach to that of microservices can do so with low-code platforms. They have the ability to create web applications that are modular in nature. It allows an enterprise to create a suite of micro applications that can integrate with each other using services that are exposed by each application to one another. These services are automatically published by certain low-code platforms for each application allowing your enterprise a microservice architecture.
  5. Rebuilding legacy applications to modern mobile applications:
    Many Enterprises have legacy applications that are developed a decade back but are still relevant in terms of business functionality. The problem is these applications' user interface due to their age lacks usability, modern design principles, and most importantly a responsive user interface. With low-code platforms, existing legacy applications can be migrated while keeping the backend data source and business logic intact. The migrated application can take advantage of the modern UX and user interface that most low-code platforms provide out of the box. The application UI built by good low-code platforms is good-looking and responsive in nature, which means it can run on any mobile device.

With more enterprises and businesses making a smarter choice with low-code platforms, this list will further grow and provide greater depth in the capabilities of low-code platforms in the future bringing success to more businesses.

WaveMaker’s low-code platform has supported enterprises that can bring their applications to life with minimal code, effort, and at a reasonable cost. With WaveMaker’s out-of-the-box features, the use cases mentioned above and more can be tackled easily providing a smart choice for your enterprise application-based needs.