Streamline the IoT App Dev Process with Low-Code

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the leading digital transformation initiative, according to a recent IDC survey[1]. That’s because organizations are finding that IoT applications help them achieve cost savings, improved productivity, and better product quality, as well as other benefits.

For example, a condition monitoring app can help manufacturers proactively identify and diagnose production line issues before they occur, reducing expensive downtime. In addition, this IoT app can provide real-time data to help managers improve machine performance and maintenance scheduling decisions.

While there’s little question that IoT apps make a significant impact on the business, there are challenges around building them. Application development is a time-consuming, resource-intensive process. It requires not only IT infrastructure capacity but more importantly, skilled human talent. And this is a growing problem: The IDC survey found that an ongoing skills gap is making it difficult to hire the developers necessary to build IoT apps in a timely fashion to reap business value. There’s a faster way to get the return on IoT that also accelerates digital transformation.

Low-code is a visual approach to application development that leverages drag-and-drop components and model-driven logic through a graphic user interface. Low-code development platforms relieve non-technical developers from having to write code while supporting professional developers by abstracting the tedious plumbing and infrastructure tasks that are required. In a nutshell: low-code platforms are designed to accelerate the entire development lifecycle (from ideation to deployment and operations) and support developers of varying experience levels to create multi-experience applications collaboratively.

“Low-code development platforms are emerging as a key strategy to accelerate app delivery to support digital business transformation. And they have the potential to make software development as much as 10 times faster than traditional methods,” wrote[1] John Rymer, Vice President, Principal Analyst for Forrester Research.

Commonly known as the business stakeholder or non-technical individual with little or no coding experience, citizen developers have first-hand knowledge of the problems that need to be solved and how IoT data can improve the outcomes. So, it makes sense that they have a heavy hand in building a solution that addresses those needs. For enterprises with over-burdened or small development teams, low-code platforms provide citizen developers the right tools and resources to build an application to address business needs, while collaborating with professional developers so that they can quickly and securely building solutions.

Collaborating with citizen developers to create applications, professional developers can focus on other parts of the application development lifecycle, building various extensions, integrations, and connectors. They are empowered to continue building solutions by gaining another tool in their toolkit.

With Mendix, organizations can connect their ecosystems across any device, from any location, on any cloud and platform to launch new and innovative applications. Based around three core principles of speed, collaboration and control, Mendix offers a complete platform for enterprise application delivery.

With Mendix organizations can:

• Support users across an organization to contribute to application development, Mendix provides purpose-built IDEs for citizen and professional developers on a single model repository.
• Connect to any resource, as Mendix is truly open and extensible at every level, platform, model and application – there are numerous pre-built connectors to common applications and data sources.
• Meet customer demands across a variety of devices, from iOS and Android to augmented reality and virtual reality as Mendix is the first 100% low-code native mobile offering.
• Deploy on either the Mendix Cloud or a provider of their choice as Mendix applications are cloud-native.

Low-code is just one of many IoT-based solutions that enterprises can use to quickly accelerate digital transformation initiatives.