Microsoft doesn’t want to fall behind as the adoption of low-code and no-code solutions accelerates. Specialized vendors are nipping at the giant’s heels to garner market share, and they are seeing success. Low-code/no-code has become a very competitive market.
There are numerous vendors playing in the LC/NC game. Products such as FileMaker, Google App Maker, Appian, ZoHo Creator, and OutSystems have become big names and are making a run for Microsoft’s market.
Microsoft Has Unique Advantages
Microsoft, of course, is not unarmed in this platform battle. The company introduced its basic PowerApps platform in 2016, and over the last five years, PowerApps has been improved and new features have been added. The latest version of PowerApps proves to be quite robust and offers numerous tools and capabilities. Will the latest improvements sway citizen developers and their managers to adopt PowerApps? Or will they turn to other platforms?
Microsoft does have some unique advantages in LC/NC. The company has made sure that PowerApps can be used in conjunction with its other offerings, such as Office365, Azure, and many of Microsoft’s other applications. What’s more, PowerApps uses a GUI that should be very familiar to Microsoft users.
Microsoft’s goal is clearly one of enticing people to use PowerApps to build professional-grade applications easily and quickly. The company accomplished that goal by including pre-built templates and components, both of which prove to be good starting points to build a custom application, all without writing a line of code.
PowerApps include connectors for hundreds of different data sources and integrates with something the company calls the Microsoft Dataverse, which may prove to be extremely important to those already using Azure. Microsoft presents the Dataverse as a platform where data can be gathered, normalized, and presented as a single source of truth to an enterprise. For application developers, the concept of Dataverse could save countless hours associated with the tasks of locating data stores and understanding the relationship between data elements.
Accelerating Low Code Adoption
What’s more, Microsoft Dataverse can fuel innovation. The company includes an AI Builder, which allows developers to integrate AI into their business applications. That can help make more sense of all of the data and expose relationships or trends. Microsoft has rolled AI and other features into its Microsoft Power Platform, which brings additional capabilities, such as Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.
It seems that Microsoft has built the Microsoft Power Platform to create a holistic approach to enterprise app development, which may help to accelerate the adoption of low code tools, with the ultimate goal of turning an enterprise into a Microsoft shop.
However, there is always the specter of vendor lock-in when embracing something like the Microsoft Power Platform. Simply put, as citizen developers and professional developers look to get more out of their low-code applications, they will turn to the Microsoft ecosystem, which in turn may create a situation where the business is using an enterprise version of Office365, storing their applications and Data on Azure, and building additional application capabilities using other Microsoft products.
Ultimately, that may prove to be the price for introducing agility and simplicity into the application development.
Keep an Eye on Long-Term Costs
Those in the C-suite and other business leaders will find that moving into the LC/NC world is not as simple as the vendors present it. There are many tactical decisions that must be made, as well as having CFOs look into the overall costs. The primary financial concepts of LC/NC development are to reduce operational costs, staffing costs, and modernize legacy applications quickly.
Although those savings may be relatively easy to measure in the beginning, other longer-term costs must be considered, such as licensing, training, support, hosting, and so on.
However, Microsoft intends to remain competitive and will most likely meet the demands of the market to provide identifiable value along with its services and products.
All things considered, Microsoft is making the right moves with Microsoft Power Platform. The company is delivering technologies for citizen developers and professional development teams that may be hard to find elsewhere.
