The expansion of Low-Code development
It is well known that companies with a high level of digital maturity make up to 3x more revenue and profit than companies with a low level of maturity in this area, an indicator that encourages companies of all sizes and segments to invest heavily in their digital transformation, demanding much more from their information technology areas.
According to the SourceGraph consultancy, companies' development teams are currently dealing with 100x more code than in 2010, making the complexity of creating, evolving and, above all, maintaining applications and systems exponentially greater. In a recent survey, Gartner revealed that more than 72% of information technology budgets go towards maintaining current systems, leaving less than a quarter of financial resources to be used for innovation-related initiatives.
With development activities still following a traditional line, and with the majority of the focus dedicated to maintaining legacy applications and systems, it is difficult for information technology areas to keep up with the needs of their companies' businesses, ending up delivering a lower volume of projects than expected, causing an increase in backlogs, dissatisfaction among internal and external customers, and a multitude of missed growth opportunities.
Without the adoption of new strategies in the development and maintenance of systems and applications, the scenario will only get worse. After all, business areas will continue to demand more and more technological solutions, which will generate and manipulate more and more data, and which will cause more and more changes, restarting this cycle endlessly.
It's no coincidence that for almost 20 years we've been following the emergence and maturing of various solutions that facilitate the entire development and maintenance cycle of systems and applications, such as low-code development platforms. Gartner estimates that, by 2024, around 65% of all development worldwide will be done on low-code platforms, demonstrating the high level of maturity and extreme scope of this type of technology.
With low-code and its new development approach, companies' information technology departments are focusing more on business innovation and improving the experience of their employees and customers, rather than on less strategic and more operational dimensions, such as code customizations, system integrations, application lifecycle maintenance, information security, governance activities, and the availability and scalability of their technological environments.
It's impossible not to associate low-code with the world leader in this technology - OutSystems, the company that helped coin this term in the market. Founded in 2001 in Portugal, OutSystems is present in more than 87 countries, with Enterprise solutions developed and running on its award-winning low-code platform, serving customers in more than 22 industries, and with an ecosystem made up of more than 350 partners and more than 520,000 developers around the world.
Customers who have adopted OutSystems' Enterprise low-code development platform have seen a return on investment of around 4x, as they have reduced their project delivery effort by up to 80%, applications to meet business needs have been made available up to 7x faster, application maintenance and support costs have fallen by more than 50%, total IT infrastructure costs have been reduced by more than 25%, and with the same development teams they have been able to deliver up to 5x more.
In fact, we are witnessing the expansion of low-code development platforms, a movement with no turning back that will accelerate the journey to the cloud and the digital transformation agenda in all companies.