By Ren Xianghui, founder of Mingdaoyun
Zero-code software development is not a new concept. As early as 1992, the earliest zero-code enterprise software construction tool appeared in Microsoft's Office suite. Many corporate geeks remember the database application called Access. It's just that Access was only a stand-alone application, data sharing relied on complicated corporate networks, and it only provided a visual interface of a relational database, which can speed up the construction of business data tables, association relationships, and input and output forms. And reports.
**
APaaS that gradually rises to the top
**In
recent years, due to the blessing of cloud computing and various development technologies, zero-code tools have reappeared in the SaaS market and gradually gained new positions. The enterprise applications it builds (maybe called "development" is not accurate enough) are already comparable to natively developed enterprise software in terms of flexibility and ease of use, and the speed of realizing business requirements may be less than one-tenth that of native development. The open source OpenERP, Redmine, Jira, and the SaaS era Odoo, Smartsheet, Airtable and Zoho are all typical representatives of this market, and there are already several listed companies. In the Chinese market, there are also manufacturers such as Jiandaoyun, Mingdaoyun, Tritium Cloud and Partner Cloud. Because zero-code construction of enterprise applications has both the characteristics of SaaS and the nature of development tools, this category is generally referred to as aPaaS. The preceding a refers to the meaning of Application. (Statement of interest, I am the founder of Mingdaoyun, but this does not prevent this article from objectively introducing this technology category to the market)
At the beginning, this category was not recognized and valued by the industry. For technical personnel, zero-code tools are cumbersome and not flexible enough. For non-technical personnel, although they do not need to write code, the difficulty of interface and object abstraction full of technical terms also discourages them. The first users in this category are non-technical corporate geeks who know how to solve specific problems in corporate management and are good at using such highly flexible tools.
Any new category will inevitably undergo a developmental journey of product maturity. By 2019, domestic and foreign products in this category will have made considerable progress in product capabilities and interface performance. Not only can they freely define various business object data tables, use a visual way to build association relationships, establish summary statistical analysis, and distribute views through user roles and permission rules, and they even have special controls around the business, such as QR codes , Payment and other capabilities. Some manufacturers even combine workflow engines to not only manage business data, but also drive automated business processes. More importantly, most aPaaS vendors have the ability to design, develop and operate SaaS products, and enterprise applications built through aPaaS almost naturally have a higher end user experience. In this category, the most important vendor is of course Salesforce. In the past 20 years, it has gradually developed from a narrow sales funnel management tool to an all-round enterprise application development platform, from Salesforce applications to http://force.com. The expansion of the platform is a typical representative of the growth of the aPaaS category.
Gartner established a category in 2018, called High Productivity Application Platform (hpaPaaS), and predicts that by 2020, more than 50% of enterprise applications will be built on the hpaPaaS platform.
What is a zero-code application development platform?
Although code-free services such as website building, online store development, and small program development are also called zero-code development in the market, these platforms are generally not classified as zero-code development because they are oriented to a specific purpose and serve a proprietary paradigm. Within the scope of the zero-code platform. A true zero-code development platform is geared to a wide range and diverse needs. When designing aPaaS products, it is not certain what applications a specific user will use it to build.
Of course, although the oriented needs are extensive, it does not mean that aPaaS is a panacea. Zero-code development is almost always oriented to the world of enterprise applications, but it is difficult to extend to consumer applications, such as games, social networking, tool software, etc., which will necessarily belong to the world of native development for a long time.
Therefore, the zero-code application development platform needs a more accurate definition. It refers to a platform for visually designing data structures, user interaction forms, setting access permissions, and defining workflows around the needs of enterprise data and business management. You will find that even if you are developing enterprise software natively, you generally follow these steps.
I use a relatively complete list to describe the capability elements and features of the zero-code development platform as follows:
1) Visually construct a business object data table (Entity) and support the establishment of associations. It even needs to support cross-application data table association. (This is the key advantage that aPaaS may win over other solutions in the future).
2) Configure different types of views for different data scenarios, define the filtering of data rows and columns, and set different interface forms such as lists, kanbans, and calendars.
3) Ability to define different user roles (Role), and assign different data access and rewrite permissions (Permission Set) to the role. The more precise the definition of permissions, the better.
4) Ability to build summary tables and statistical charts for data (Report)
5) Ability to create custom input forms (Form) and distribute them to different roles.
6) Ability to create custom print reports (Form Report), used to output various forms, send or print via Email, SMS.
7) Ability to manage enterprise users, departments, and organizational structures, and use them for application logic, such as application distribution, role assignment, and flow information in workflow.
8) Able to visually configure the workflow (Workflow), support operations such as adding, rewriting, and deleting data under specific conditions, and can incorporate manual process nodes such as data filling and approval. The operation of the workflow can monitor and save the log.
9) The application can be packaged and distributed (Distribution) to different users.
10) Features such as workbenches and dashboards for individual users within the enterprise to achieve personalized use.
Different aPaaS products will have different features and focus. Therefore, the above features do not necessarily exist in every aPaaS product. However, the more complete the features, the closer to a typical zero-code enterprise application development platform. In the above implementation, there is a pure zero-code model, and some individuals need to use a low-code approach to reduce product complexity, but it will also make it difficult for non-technical personnel to get started.
Therefore, aPaaS is a mixture of SaaS applications and development tools. It is said to be SaaS because developers and end users use the same product, but the interface is multifaceted through permissions and distribution relationships. It is said to be a development tool because it uses model simulation to build applications that are similar to native database application development.
The coexistence of software application characteristics and secondary development capabilities is not a new thing. Use Excel software to build a personal income tax calculator, so that users can enter their own wages, and then get the tax payable. It is an application for users and a development tool for those who compile this Excel file, but they use All are Excel.
Why can zero-code development be achieved in the field of enterprise software?
Why can't games and social software be developed with zero code, but there are zero code tools in the enterprise software market? Is it because the development of enterprise software is relatively simple?
of course not. The reason why a job can be completed in a pattern is that the job is repeatable, just like we would use 3D printing to make one or two parts, but if we want to produce thousands of the same parts, we would rather spend the cost to make them first Mold. The reason why enterprise software can be developed in a modular manner is that most enterprise management software is composed of very similar requirements and implementation methods. If these similarities and modeling methods are not actively used, it is necessary to repeatedly invent similar wheels.
Of course, not all enterprise applications have similarities. There are always some applications that require specialized design and development in specific industries and functions. However, in the entire operation process of an enterprise, the problems to be solved by enterprise software are very similar to business objects such as customers, suppliers, sales orders, products, suppliers, purchase orders, manufacturing processes, and service processes. These similarities, or usage paradigms, can be summarized as the following links:
1) Collect and store data around the above-mentioned business objects (Business Objects), and verify the validity of the data. For example: create a purchase order to purchase three items from a specific supplier.
2) Data query and presentation. For example: the operation department inquires about the purchase order that should arrive in Warehouse A today. The financial department inquires about the purchase order that the goods have been received and should be paid this week.
3) Calculation of data. For example: When the goods of the purchase order arrive at a specific warehouse, update the inventory information of the related goods.
4) Process control. For example: when a purchase order is drafted and ready to be issued, different review processes are initiated according to the type and amount of the purchase, and different process contents are executed after the review is passed or rejected.
5) Information notification. For example: After the purchase order is approved, the purchase order is automatically generated and sent to the supplier, and the warehouse is notified to prepare to receive the goods.
6) Statistics and analysis of data. For example: Summarize the distribution of the product amount according to the BOM list in the purchase order of the past year, or according to the distribution of the supplier.
Enterprise software designers and developers are very familiar with the above paradigms, and they often appear in the development needs of various enterprise software. In fact, in addition to the above abstract paradigm, there are not too many other unique features of enterprise software, and even many modules that belong to all enterprise-level software, such as managing users and user groups, permissions and roles. It is for this reason that the development of enterprise software has the possibility of a high degree of modeling, so that in most scenarios, it can get rid of the dependence on the development of native code.
Before the cloud era, in addition to Access, Apple also had FileMaker, and Intuit had also developed Quickbase (the name was derived from Intuit's financial software product Quicken). Quickbase was later divested and has been providing services to this day. Even in the field of native development, various ready-made development frameworks have appeared in the enterprise software market. Like today's zero-code platforms, they are all aimed at improving delivery efficiency and quality through modeling.
For the software requirements of each enterprise, start from the first line of code and rely solely on a certain high-level language and integrated development environment to establish development projects. This approach is becoming increasingly unnecessary. As Gartner predicts, most enterprise applications will rely on zero-code platforms in the future, so that in the near future, zero-code platforms will not deliberately retain this prefix, because this will become a matter of course, just like today’s For general requirements, most companies will not customize development, or even zero-code platforms, but directly use a standard SaaS product.
Why does aPaaS have advantages that are difficult to replace?
Users began to choose aPaaS products not only because they could do it, but more importantly because they had to. Because aPaaS has several advantages compared with custom development and standard SaaS products.
Meeting the diverse needs of enterprises The diversification of
enterprise software requirements is the origin of the custom development model. Although standard SaaS products can meet the common parts of enterprise application requirements, because of the differences in industry, scale, and inherent characteristics of products, each enterprise’s management methods and processes have their own characteristics, and it will continue according to the scale of the enterprise. Evolution. The degree of this difference varies in different functions. Generally speaking, the core business flow around product design, manufacturing and service fulfillment has a higher degree of difference, while the degree of difference in the support links of value creation such as personnel and finance is relatively small.
In this context, users are always looking for a method that can maintain sufficient flexibility while controlling the cost and complexity of development. aPaaS is basically born directly in response to this problem.
Relieve from the pain of requirement communication in custom development
The first pain point in the implementation of enterprise software is not expensive, but the complexity of requirement communication. Those who have business needs are not the ones who develop software, and those who can develop software have no personal experience and experience of business pain points. Therefore, the industry relies heavily on professional enterprise software requirements analysis and implementation method design capabilities, but this capability is a very scarce resource. It's no wonder that the main bodies of enterprise software development requirements are always diverse, and they also need to conduct complex communication and information aggregation.
What's more terrible is that in many cases, the requirements cannot be 100% determined before implementation, and the enterprise itself cannot come up with a complete solution. At this time, you either need to ask for help from outsiders like consulting agencies, or you can only take one step at a time. Neither solution sounds comfortable. The former is definitely not something ordinary SMEs can afford, and the latter may affect the quality of system development and implementation.
The emergence of aPaaS makes the step-by-step plan more realistic. Companies can start implementation gradually through the zero-code platform. If the entire system is too complicated, you can start with a specific link and partially digitize it (for example, first manage orders). Anyway, the speed of building with aPaaS is fast enough, and users can even use zero-code tools to generate enterprise application prototypes, which are verified in actual use, confirming that the end user can grasp, and the original identified problems can be effectively solved before continuing to advance. Complete implementation.
It can be said that zero-code tools can sufficiently shorten the distance between developers and users. In extreme cases, users can even be the developers themselves. They may be able to confirm whether this solution can effectively solve the problem after one or two hours of construction.
The need to get through the data center
within the enterprise There is still a fatal pain point in enterprise IT, that is, the data between different business systems is isolated from each other and cannot be used comprehensively, making it difficult for enterprises to conduct cross-functional data correlation and causal analysis , It is also difficult to realize cross-functional data automation. For example, to analyze the impact of a price adjustment measure on financial statements, this work cannot be done in any isolated information system, and if it is to be done, at least data must be obtained from the procurement, sales, marketing and financial systems. By the same token, it is also difficult for companies to automatically make optimal price decisions when they encounter financial goals that cannot be achieved. These are all critical issues that affect the level of business operations. In recent years, the Paced Layer architecture proposed by Gartner and the middle-office solution provided by Alibaba to e-commerce companies are feedbacks for this demand.
Large companies can of course invest special funds to build a data-centered system, but small companies can't afford it, which doesn't mean they don't want to acquire such capabilities. The aPaaS platform provides this possibility.
First of all, because the aPaaS platform has a consistent data management model, it can generally provide a highly standardized programming interface. It is relatively easy to merge data from external systems. This is like a router. No matter how many networked devices you have, they All can be connected together using a unified protocol. With centralized data, various application requirements become easy to fulfill. Even if individual systems still need to be developed separately after extracting data services, it is many times more efficient than repeated data integration work.
Even if the aPaaS platform is used to directly manage business data objects, this data integration work can be eliminated. Users can directly establish associations among data objects related to various functions, establish summary queries, extract data in batches to the BI platform, and establish automation between different data.
Outstanding cost and efficiency advantages
Compared with native code development, the zero-code development platform can improve how much efficiency can be improved. There is no accurate measurement, but the efficiency difference is at least 10 times. The traditional development model takes 10 days, and aPaaS can handle it within a day.
The more important difference in efficiency is not only time, but also that the zero-code platform can eliminate the participation of professional and technical personnel. Although it requires the builder to be familiar with the business and complete the basic logic combing, after all, it is much more efficient to meet and communicate with several technicians at every turn. Even on complex application systems, at least 2-3 people are required to divide the work to complete the realization of the entire project. The cost savings due to simplified collaboration is not even worth ten times. Because everyone knows that finding a reliable custom software development team is almost a lucky thing.
At the same time, custom development is often difficult to provide high-quality software. The reliability of software operation and the degree of defect elimination are difficult to compare with standardized products. After all, there is only one user for customized software. An aPaaS platform must not only serve many end users at the same time, but also serve a variety of application builders. It can do it right once and right again; once the defect is eliminated, all users benefit.
Out-of-the-box and do-it-yourself two-
dimensional and shaped SaaS applications, aPaaS seems to have a disadvantage, that is, it still needs to be "built." This is a bit like the overall furniture system, which looks great in the sample room, but the actual purchase requires construction personnel to assemble to achieve the desired effect.
In fact, this problem is not unsolvable, or even easy to solve. It is naturally impossible for aPaaS to obtain the best practices of various industries at the beginning, so that every enterprise can see the effect of "model room". However, with the passage of time, the participation of user companies and integrators will increase the number of sample rooms, even more powerful than the use case solutions provided by SaaS products, because the latter provides a fixed furniture display effect, while the former According to different room types, different furniture combinations can be provided.
Moreover, in a sufficiently clear market segment (such as the granularity of metal processing and manufacturing process management), it is possible to develop completely out-of-the-box applications on the aPaaS platform and distribute them directly to different enterprises. With this capability, aPaaS can not only serve end users well, but also catalyze changes in the work model of integrators. They can not only make money by selling IT services, but also add the value of solutions to services, eliminate custom development costs, and significantly Increase project service margin.
With the ability to use it out of the box, it can greatly accelerate the willingness of enterprises to adopt. Moreover, after the adoption, the ability to "do it yourself" still exists. Just like the advanced overall home system can not only be combined, but also recombined. The applicable model of enterprise software is always related to the enterprise stage. For example, small-scale manufacturing does not necessarily need a quality management unit, but after the annual output value exceeded 100 million yuan, it not only faced the rigid demand for ISO certification, but also inherently needed to introduce total quality management. Such enterprises can continue to adjust, improve and add software modules according to actual needs after the software is implemented. This process is also low-cost and highly efficient.
Computing power guarantee provided by platform features
In database applications, there is a potential computing performance problem, especially when complex queries and linkage calculations are performed in large-scale data tables. Today, the scale of enterprise data in many industries has grown from tens of thousands of records to millions, tens of millions, and even e-commerce companies can easily reach billions of data. In the manufacturing and logistics industries, the Internet of Things technology will inevitably drive more networked objects. The data generated is not only huge in scale, but also the form of calculation needs to be strengthened in a targeted manner.
For customized implementation systems, it is extremely expensive to use advanced technologies such as distributed databases and stream computing to overcome performance problems. Although the aPaaS platform provides users with an application-level product, because of its unified paradigm, it has the opportunity to hide these basic calculations, allowing users to obtain high-performance computing services without worrying about these background transactions. Regardless of the size of the data tables managed by the aPaaS platform, how frequently they are read and written, and how high the requirements for real-time query are, there is always a computing framework capable of doing so. The scalability of this platform allows customers to truly rest assured that aPaaS not only improves development efficiency, but also includes a scalable infrastructure service. Even if a company's future business scale grows a hundredfold, it will not need to completely rebuild its IT system. In fact, for a business with annual revenue of tens of billions of dollars, the IT platform behind it is most likely an application built on Salesforce's http://force.com platform, rather than an independent application system.
It is precisely because of these advantages that aPaaS has gradually penetrated into the field of enterprise IT services before it was named by the industry. In recent years, it is quietly replacing a large number of custom-implemented software projects, which also allows companies that originally relied on standard SaaS products to find new options.
What kind of enterprise is aPaaS suitable for?
Although aPaaS has huge advantages, it does not mean that it can meet all IT needs of all industries and enterprises. Some common exclusions are listed below. The aPaaS solution is not very attractive to the demands of these properties.
Industries have obvious proprietary characteristics.
Some industries have a high degree of specialization and the differences between companies are not large. At this time, vertical industry applications may be more reasonable.
The most typical examples surrounding this feature are the catering and hotel industries. The operating logic of all catering industries is similar, except that single stores and chains may use different complexity solutions, the application modules are similar. Moreover, the problem-solving methods and paradigms of this industry have obvious industry characteristics, such as queuing and waiting systems in restaurants, and order checkout systems. It is more troublesome to build such a proprietary scene with zero-code tools, and it cannot effectively provide industry-specific views.
The industry has independent code audit requirements
. The core business systems of industries such as finance cannot use the zero-code platform because of regulations and other requirements because it cannot meet the requirements of code audit. The aPaaS platform may not be able to provide source code to user companies, and even if provided, it cannot prove the accuracy of the application system's data processing. Because these industries have high regulatory requirements and ample funds, they will not apply aPaaS solutions to core business links.
Customer-oriented front desk system
This of course refers to the e-commerce online store platform. Although there is not much distance between the basic data management of e-commerce retail and the capabilities of aPaaS, consumer-oriented front-end systems generally require greater flexibility and supporting marketing facilities. Business systems, such as Youzan, Weimob, etc. They provide not only storefront functions, but also marketing services and payment platforms around customers. These are areas where aPaaS is not good at.
In addition to most of the enterprise IT requirements, the zero-code platform has enough advantages to be competent. Moreover, with the blurring of the boundaries between software and services, it is difficult to say that the future of aPaaS cannot expand its territory. The essence of enterprise software is a productivity tool, and the core spirit of aPaaS is to provide high productivity options around the digital operation of the enterprise.
In the process of user penetration, the zero-code platform at the current stage is more than satisfying the needs of ordinary enterprises, but those enterprises with certain self-built IT capabilities. They generally have several information specialists who can understand the core business processes and problems of their own companies, and can effectively communicate with business departments. In addition to end enterprise users, industry consulting groups and ISV groups have also begun to pay more attention to zero-code tools, because industry consultants always want to have their own set of tools, and it is difficult for them to invest in making their own high-quality native software products The ISV group faces the pain points of high project implementation costs and large differences in customer demand all the year round. They hope to reduce development service costs through a certain platform, precipitate their own program capabilities, and make project implementation more replicable. Industry consulting, management consulting, and ISV groups’ mastery of the zero-code platform will eventually allow this category of solutions to enter more mainstream enterprise users.