The World of No-Code
While 90% of no-code users believe that their company has grown faster as a result of their use of no-code, the development of no-code platforms has helped businesses to significantly reduce their development costs while pushing down the delivery time of projects.Not only does it help businesses who can now let their developers focus on more niche projects but it also allows them to embrace innovation at its finest.
How Fortunes 500 Compagnies use No-Code?
No-code is a software development technique that needs little, if any, programming expertise to construct an application rapidly. This enables employees who have the required institutional knowledge and who understand the business’ needs for an app but lack the coding experience to build quick software applications. Applications such as websites or marketplaces, or even adding functionality to a current in-house application.
Gartner issued a new projection for low-code/no-code tools in early 2021. Gartner predicted a 23 percent growth in the worldwide market for this sort of technology owing to the increase in remote work due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Low-code/no-code tools grew steadily in the months that followed as a result of their effectiveness in tackling some of technology’s most complex challenges. In particular the essential need to digitize workflows, improve customer and employee experiences, and improve the effectiveness of operational and business teams. Research states that by 2025, 70 percent of new apps built by businesses will employ low-code or no-code technology, up from less than 25 percent in 2020. This evidently demonstrates not only the growing demand for supportive no-code platforms, but also the impact of such solutions in the global digital transformation of organizations.
Low-code/no-code tools have received growing attention , firstly because of the current Great Resignation. Secondly, with Entrepreneur highlighting that low-code/no-code platforms make it easier for organizations to handle the persistent scarcity of engineering and development expertise. As organizations attempt to transform more of their staff into citizen developers, an increasing number of businesses and IT professionals are using the capabilities of low-code/no-code technologies to capitalize on their existing resources.
According to a recent Mendix study, the need for developers has reached a boiling point among IT professionals. Almost six in ten (57 percent) believe the number of software development workers is expanding while the expense of software development is escalating (61 percent ). An LCAP is the solution for many businesses. According to Mendix’s State of Low-Code 2021 study, based on a poll of 2,025 IT professionals from six countries, 77% of organizations have already implemented low-code to tackle this shortfall, and 75% of IT executives feel it’s a movement they can’t turn down.
Although prototyping and MVP creation have been fantastic uses of No-Code, there is yet another side to it that resonates to more established, bigger, and complicated business models. Every day, large organizations and corporations employ No-Code tools to solve problems within their workflows, allowing their tech team to focus on more niche and large scale projects. Several Fortune 500 companies have adopted this technology to solve different aspects of their business., A majority of them have been using common no-code softwares used across industries such as Airtable and Zapier, for example.
To debrief the main purposes of each of the applications mentioned above, we must understand that the end goal for all of them stands in increasing the operational and technical efficiency of companies using it. Be it top tier or smaller non-profit organizations.
Relational databases may be easily created and shared online with Airtable. Anyone can quickly spin up a database because of the user interface’s simplicity, color, and friendliness. Since these data types are actual records, users can examine and alter a wide variety of data. Airtable gives users the ability to connect to and interact with all of their data in one location. But also to construct straightforward applications by enabling them to work with a variety of different data types inside a single grid-based structure. Top companies including Calvin Klein, Shopify and Netflix have all relied on this tool across various business functions.
In addition, Zapier automates repetitive chores for you by connecting your work apps. By integrating your applications, Zapier automates work by transferring information between them according to preset criteria. For automating corporate and performance functions, Zapier is a fantastic tool. It supports almost all apps you could use and offers a ton of beneficial advice on how to connect services in productive ways. Top corporations such as Accenture and Typeform have been using Zapier´s integration tools for years.
Here’s how some of the best Fortune 500 companies have been using low-code/no-code technologies in their daily lives:
Netflix
There is only one real constant in today’s continuously changing media and entertainment landscape: people’s quest for more. “I think television is going through the Golden Age right now” Carol Li, Post Production Systems and Innovation Specialist at Netflix said while she expressed her gratitude and excitement about joining the company. Li and her team recognized the need of organizing around narrative since they are aware of Netflix’s consumers’ almost unquenchable demand for fresh material. In more than 190 countries, Netflix offers subscribers access to the finest TV series, films, and documentaries spanning over 30 languages. Its foundation was the idea that great stories may originate from any place and can find a home everywhere.
“There’s a lot of great stories out there and I think at the end of the day we’re trying to bring great content to our service. It really requires us to be really organized,” Li said. “Airtable has allowed our teams to be agile and flexible.” Airtable is therefore a technology used by Netflix in their post-production workflow.
Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and other PVH brands.
Airtable has been used widely within supply chain management, and is greatly adopted by top brands such as Calvin Klein and integrated with other PVH brands for the same reasons. Previously a convoluted jumble of tens of hundreds of emails and offline spreadsheets among designers, project managers, and foreign textile mills, the Airtable database streamlines its fabric-sourcing procedures. The management of calendars, photos, production costs, manufacturing lead times, and shipping schedules are now handled by a single central application. Since then, Calvin Klein’s parent company, PVH, has implemented Airtable across all of its other brands.
Venture Capital Firms: J.P Morgan and Salesforce Ventures
When managing their company and deal pipelines alongside numerous stakeholders, including investors, portfolio businesses, founders, transaction prospects, and others, VCs must perform a difficult balancing act. No-code technologies like Airtable provide a method to more successfully, financially, and efficiently address these conflicting objectives. VCs may overcome the toughest obstacles in controlling their deal flow pipelines by utilizing Airtable’s simple designs, templates, and key features. The ideal pipeline for most VCs begins with a lead and concludes with a signed agreement and a potential exit. The finest deal trackers start with a fully functional database and framework that makes it possible to manage and report fund performance as well as scale the system and add new features fast and effectively.
The no-code platform from Airtable is simple for many VCs to integrate into every aspect of their operation. Teams may also easily modify essential procedures without the aid of programmers, automate database operations, and keep track of referrals, payouts, capital requests, and fees.
OpenVC and The Capital Network are two of the several VCs and business associations that utilize Airtable, whereas Fortune 500 companies such as J.P Morgan and Salesforce Ventures have led investment rounds for Airtable, valuing it at over 11 billion dollars.
Key functions of Airtable for these firms include: Investor Deal Flow has interfaces with Crunchbase and LinkedIn, a contacts database, value monitoring, notes, and attachments and tracking current portfolio firms, fresh investment rounds, term sheets, and media attention with the customizable Investor Portfolio Companies tool.
Meta + Nectar
Zapier is a crucial tool for many large and expanding enterprises across divisions. It is used by the marketing division to automate lead management, by sales to easily plan meetings with prospects, by HR to streamline recruiting operations, and so on. With Meta, Zapier makes it simple to integrate conversions API, lead Ads, and offline Conversions with more than 3,000 applications in an instant to record conversions and gauge the success of campaigns. Nectar integrated conversions API with Zapier’s assistance, which allowed for 28 percent more events to be caught than with Meta Pixel alone. These conversions came from Meta campaigns but had been accomplished offline through the business’ call center and other online events.
As more and more companies capitalize on this industry’s growing tools, there lie certain challenges that may complicate the adaptation processes.
A Challenging Side to No-code
The thriving low-code/no-code market is a huge advantage for firms and business owners since there are several benefits to having a variety of alternatives in the no-code domain. You can pick the best platform for your needs, up and running quickly, and hopefully avoid learning a new coding language altogether, just to make great and quick ideas come to life.
However, determining which one is ideal for you might be difficult. With so many alternatives, it’s hard to keep up with all the modifications in the area. Furthermore, it might be difficult to discover a suitable community and network of support. Nevertheless, no-code also introduces one of the most significant challenges to your platform running: data protection with security, and compliance, documentation of all tools that are connected to each other and the no-code team development, and monitoring of errors in real-time on no-code platforms. That’s where solutions like ncScale come in handy.
If you already have been familiar with no-code platforms and struggle to combat the challenges that come with them, we’re here to help. Our platform is tentatively compatible with Make, Bubble, Airtable, and Zapier. We ultimately aim to make No-code meet the same quality criteria as code for app development. While working with no-code platforms, if you’re tired of not being able to compare your development and production versions, if you’re afraid of accidentally deploying production elements that you haven’t finished, if you struggle to retain documentation with a modification history, if you find yourself with a bug but don’t know which element you’ve changed, and if you can’t explain to a new team member how the application was built, all of these frustrations can be easily resolved through ncScale.
ncScale assists businesses in making their no-code applications stable, safe, and maintainable. This all-in-one no-code Software Development Life Cycle management solution helps to compare development and production workflows before release and retains your version history for a reliable and documented application. This allows you to link all of your no-code tools in one location and prevent regression while building strong apps. Not only can you review development versions vs. production versions, overview modifications and verify property changes, and deep-dive in workflows to spot critical reviews with ncScale, but you can also keep deployment logs in your history to investigate at any time and gather all your tool modifications in one place.
It is becoming increasingly evident that these technologies will create the dominant wind of innovation, boosting digital transformation for decades to come and have indeed dubbed it the most disrupting trend of 2021. However, many businesses are only now beginning to appreciate the true potential of no-code, with the top five being retail, insurance, banking and fintech, healthcare, and manufacturing. Not only companies that fall into these sectors have embraced the change but also companies like Mercedes Benz, Spotify, Eurail, Yahoo!, e.on, Accenture, Toshiba and Pepsi from other diverse industries have adopted no-code.
Unlike many previous disruptive innovations, which were frequently distinguished by their originality, the advent of no-code is enabling more facilitated innovation and is making it more accessible across the board. While the businesses listed above are all well-positioned to profit from the no-code revolution, the above-mentioned industries are merely the tip of the iceberg. No-code platforms’ development capabilities will only improve in the next few years and the scope of these smart tools will expand as well.
You can also learn why Usability is a major factor of No-Code platform here!