Its been 10 years since WaveMaker was founded as a company. Like the rest of the founding team, I was part of the parent company, Pramati, that acquired the product from VMWare, and already had a reputation in platform technology – having won the global software industry race to the world's first J2EE certified App Server. By 2013, all of us in engineering had our share of experiences in building, selling and supporting world-class software platforms to global customers.
Also, a few years before Pramati’s original middleware server had morphed into an AWS infrastructure automation platform for another Pramati product called Qontext, a SaaS collaboration platform that was acquired by AutoDesk in 2012. Called CloudJEE, it was built to provide services for provisioning, configuration, observability and scaling to manage a large footprint of microservices for any SaaS Product.
After the Qontext exit, Pramati co-founder Vijay Pullur saw an opportunity to evaluate WaveMaker, then an open source Spring-based development platform being divested from VMWare, as part of their split of enterprise-software portfolio into Pivotal back in 2013.
Pramati acquired WaveMaker to combine CloudJEE capabilities with the development platform from WaveMaker, which had a community of 5,000+ developers world-wide. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) was the buzzword then and a lot of enterprise software product companies were working on this idea, such as CloudFoundry, IBM BlueMix and RackSpace. WaveMaker developers were deploying to CloudFoundry. CloudJEE’s merger with WaveMaker gave us an edge to dive into this space and we transitioned them seamlessly to CloudJEE post acquisition.
Pramati founder Jay Pullur’s keen interest in UI/UX development and his desire to simplify UI development by providing Photoshop-like WYSIWYG tools for UI developers, set us on a path to re-build WaveMaker Studio.
When we got the product and its code, it was already aging fast in the light of new developments in JavaScript frameworks and HTML5, and Web in general. Recasting a product stack is always messy and full of surprises – especially when it has been acquired. But bravely, we began by ripping off the Dojo JS library and re-writing the studio in Angular JS. Sharad Singh Solanki – who had joined us a decade back as a furniture-designer turned UX-designer turned web-developer – headed this initiative building the initial UI team of JavaScript experts for WaveMaker.
Thus began a new road with challenges ahead to roll out this new recast studio, promising a radically new and accelerated development workspace entirely on cloud for a large community of developers. This was before anything called low code.
The idea was to enable developers to sign-up or log into a SaaS development environment, without the hassles of downloading and setting up software on their Desktops or laptops. But the problem ahead was to provision a developer workspace within seconds, but at that time to launch a cloud or AWS instance it would take a few minutes even for the tiny or micro instance.
My engineering honcho and journeyman, Venugopal Jidagam, and I always had an inclination to explore new architecture and geek out on infrastructure. Light weight containers (LXC) were the thing of the day then. Docker was just kicking off. After evaluating Apache Mesos, Venu chose Docker to create a container orchestration platform. Soon enough, we were provisioning developer workspaces using containers in seconds, the first and fastest of its kind. Of course, being traditionally shy, we did not tom-tom this.
And then in September 2014, we launched WaveMakerOnline (WMO) bringing to your browser a full-feature WYSIWYG, open standards, modern app development cloud studio.
The Low Code Moniker
So, how did we end up being a low code platform? The category “low code” was created by John Rymer, a Forrester Analyst some time around 2014, to bucket a wide range of products that offered application building tools to non-specialist developers, so called “citizen developers”, with moderate software engineering skills. In 2015, we started to see several app development platforms re-position as low code platforms to gain analyst and enterprise attention. By early 2016, WaveMaker was surveyed and mentioned in the low code vendor landscape report for the first time by John Rymer. Since then, WaveMaker has been associated with low code application development, offering developers significant productivity gains for end-to-end custom application delivery.
WaveMaker’s initial trajectory is a culmination of ideas from the founding members and we were all focused on building a modern development platform, to simplify enterprise app development. Chandrashekar, then heading creative and marketing functions, guided the design and branding efforts to set WaveMaker apart from the rest, giving it a unique brand identity as a design-led development platform, targeting developers who were happy to code complex applications but without the grunt work that comes with it.
WaveMaker inherited its work culture from the group company Pramati, where each individual has a lot more ownership and cognitive responsibility in how they contribute to the growth of the product. While the overall strategic direction for the product is given by market and business imperatives, engineering strikes the right balance between embracing newer approaches and product stability. Product leaders and key developers are constantly scanning the technology landscape for new advancements and business impacts.
Attention to detail, engineering excellence in terms of performance, quality of software and focus on design are highly regarded and they become the yardstick for measuring success. Our steadfast adherence to these simple principles for more than a decade clearly reflects in the teams that we have assembled and the way they have shaped the product’s success.
While there are no shortcuts to building a world-class product, experimentation is key to innovation, even if they are orthogonal to the business direction. Eventually, when they converge, the impact on customer value is significant. Prashant Reddy, who was part of Qontext and joined AutoDesk as part of the acquisition, returned in 2018 to lead UI engineering efforts. He brought the right ingredients to create a culture of product innovation in WaveMaker.
WaveMaker’s journey started at the beginning of an era with emerging Cloud adoption, fueling the proliferation of SaaS platforms, mobile apps and social collaboration. We have witnessed the phasing out of the PaaS and BPM markets with the resurgence of low code. Also saw the beginning of container deployments using Kubernetes.
At WaveMaker, we doubled down on enabling developers and software development teams in large organizations to embrace accelerated development, combined with a fully open-source strategy. As against the norm with low code platforms generally appealing to business users and leaning towards building internal departmental apps or business productivity apps, we tackled a harder challenge of enabling customer facing, experience app building with pixel-perfect UI needs.
WaveMaker’s unique approach of code-behind for Low-code app development set us apart from the competition, appealing to the development teams. The choice of technology stack and how the app code is generated, played a significant role for developer adoption. So, this also brought in a tedious task for us as a platform to keep up with the technology stack updates and make sure we beat the software upgrade cycles, so that our platform developers don’t need to go through this pain.
After the launch of WMO, we started to see mostly small businesses, startups and individual developers signing up to the platform, but the capabilities that we have built into the product are supposed to solve development challenges at large organizations. We rolled out WME (Enterprise Edition) in 2016 as we started to engage with in-house development or IT teams from large enterprises with a developer-based licensing model.
Some of these teams have skills shortage, but they have the steep hill task of building partner facing or customer facing apps, with stringent security and compliance requirements depending on the industry they are operating in. We have successfully onboarded some of these early customers on our Enterprise Edition and we were really excited to see these developers embracing the platform.
However, adoption of WaveMaker from a larger team of developers in an organization was still not on the cards, but we know for sure we’ll hit that mark very soon. Then in 2018, we signed a deal with a large financial services company in the US, in the analytics and credit scoring space. WaveMaker is adopted by their large professional services team to build and deliver fully custom apps integrated with their products.
While most organizations presume low-code platforms to enable citizen developers or those who don’t have technical expertise, some platforms started to position themselves as low code for professional developers. Analysts started to create a separate segment to accommodate low code for developers, while these platforms actually didn’t offer capabilities that appealed to software development teams. This posed difficulty to position ourselves in the market and to maximize the unique advantage we have as a development accelerator that really appealed to developers.
Vision for the Future
The big realization, we are not a low code platform! We are an accelerated development platform or AppGen platform for the future. Thanks to Gen AI and LLM’s ability to understand programming languages, frameworks and spit out real code. LLMs have been trained on open source frameworks and projects, that means we now have a huge advantage to leverage LLM’s ability as a code generator to amplify our acceleration strategy. WaveMaker had been a code generation platform all through emitting Angular and React Native code for building web and mobile apps.
While LLMs can be a co-pilot for assisting development, the code has to be brought in at developer’s discretion and developers need to really author the code for any real use. That may not sound much like acceleration nor skill reduction, but a platform strategy combined with approaches like design to code or prompt to code could really bring true acceleration.
UI development is very complex and UX plays a significant role in the growth and relevance of organisations. At WaveMaker we've seen the evolution of UI development trends, simplified web and mobile app delivery with component based reuse, providing a scalable development methodology for building and rolling out apps. By embracing Design Systems and combining AI-led approaches like design to code and UI co-pilot, we are embarking into the future of app development.
I'm very humbled with the journey so far and had an opportunity to really challenge my thinking and ability to bring novel approaches into our products. As a team we’ve always been at the early adoption curve for technology, that really puts us ahead of the rest. Also, the multitude of customer opportunities with a wide variety of application use cases over the last decade really challenged our ability to scale and adapt as a world-class product.
I'm grateful to the amazing team who have been through this journey with me and their perseverance in keeping spirits high through the thick and thin of product adoption and growth. What's remarkable is our team’s ability to spot talent and create developers with a deep understanding of technology and a purpose to solve problems and differentiate.
