According to Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code or no-code technologies by 2025. This represents a more than 180% increase from 2020, when less than 25% of new applications were built using low-code/no-code technologies.

As Microsoft Gold Partners, we’ve helped a number of customers take advantage of Microsoft's low-code application platform, Power Apps, to quickly drive ROI. In this post, we’ll look into a few of the factors that have companies flocking to Power Apps and this promising new method of application development. We’ll also lay out some ways you can realize the value of low-code application platforms, like moving away from legacy code bases and automating time-consuming, repetitive manual processes.

Factors Driving Users to Low-Code Application Platforms

There are a number of factors that are converging to give low-code application platforms their moment in the sun in 2022. These are a few of the main advantages we’ve seen using low-code application platforms in both helping customers take advantage of these platforms and using them in our own business to improve efficiency.

Increased Speed & Collaboration

With low-code application platforms, what used to take months or years can now be measured in days and weeks. Citizen developers can develop their own applications without writing a line of code. If an app requires additional complexity, they are flexible enough that experienced developers can layer that complexity on. This creates synergies and collaboration between business users and IT teams rather than an overreliance on IT teams that may already be stretched to capacity.

Improved Platform Capabilities

Microsoft and Salesforce are two behemoths in the IT and SaaS space. Each is listed as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant referenced previously, and each is heavily investing in innovating on their technology solutions to make them attractive to a wider audience. Microsoft spent close to $21 billion on R&D in 2021, compared to Salesforce’s $3.6 billion on R&D in 2021. The results in the investments show, and the market is paying attention. 92% of the Fortune 500, for example is using Microsoft’s Power Apps each month to drive rapid application development.

Enhanced Productivity & Automation

People aren’t converting to these platforms in droves because they’re shiny new toys. Increasingly, they’re using them because they can dramatically increase their organization’s productivity, help reduce reliance on repetitive manual processes, and shorten the innovation cycle from idea to in-market.

How Companies are Taking Advantage of Low-Code Application Platforms and How You Can, Too

This is a golden age for rapid application development. It has never been easier to build business applications that reduce manual work, bring your tech stack into the 21st century, and provide you with actionable insights based on data. These are a few of the ways we’ve helped customers tap into the promise of Power Apps.

Automating Painstaking Manual Processes

For one large children’s hospital, Cambay was able to save them an estimated 6 months of manual work by rapidly developing an application in Power Apps that automated updates for nearly 2000 employee records and integrated with DocuSign for enterprise-wide document management. This not only improved employee morale, it also freed staff up to perform higher-level work.

Modernizing Technology Stacks & Sunsetting Legacy Apps

Legacy code can be incredibly costly to maintain. A 2019 study by the Consortium for IT Software Quality found that legacy systems cost US companies $596 billion in 2018, up from $70 billion in 2003. With employee retention an increasingly challenging proposition, low-code application platforms make it easier than ever to replace home-grown applications that are prohibitively expensive to maintain or apps created by employees who have departed your organization. It also makes it easy to replace applications that were built on outdated technologies or applications/functionality like Sharepoint 2010 Workflows that are themselves being sunset.

Using Data to Make Informed Decisions

Microsoft provides an extensive list of connectors to more than 400 popular services, enabling companies to bring data from a wide variety of sources into the Power Apps ecosystem. You can tap into data from sources as diverse as Stripe and Sharepoint, Twitter and Salesforce, and PowerBI and Excel to feed data into your apps. There is no limit to the number of connectors an app can have, which means the sky is the limit for just how data-driven you can become.

Cambay’s Expertise

Cambay Consulting helps customers get the most out of Power Apps and the Microsoft Power Platform. We help you rapidly build, deploy, and manage the applications and experiences that power your business, enabling you to continually improve the customer and employee experience. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have more than a decade of experience consulting with organizations like yours to drive value from your technology solutions, including Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Dataverse, and Dynamics.

Services

• Rapid App Development using Power Apps
• Automation Engineering using Power Automate
• Data Analytics and Visualization using PowerBI
• Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning using Dataverse

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you transform the member, patient, and provider experience.