What IT leaders should look for in a low-code platform

Every business today runs on software, but for many, it’s one-size-fits-all. Businesses are unique, and so are their software needs. So how can you make your software really work for you and deliver differentiated value? This article explores the answer to that question.

How businesses adopt software: The three paths

There are three typical paths to acquiring software, and each has its pros and cons.

SaaS/Off-the-shelf

Designed to serve the broadest number of customers, prebuilt or subscription software can provide quick point solutions for general business processes. It can be customized to a certain point, but not enough to meet specific business requirements or provide differentiation for your business. Should your IT or dev teams try, the results are difficult to maintain at best and easily broken at worst.

Developed from scratch

Businesses can really differentiate when they build their own software. However, this can be a complex and costly endeavor, requiring a significant pool of specialized talent. Also, when it comes to responding to rapid changes in business needs, the speed and agility just aren’t there.

No-code/low-code development platforms

No-code and low-code platforms have stepped up to solve the issues of speed and agility. Development speed and simple interfaces are what no-code platforms can offer. Some low-code platforms have limited CI/CD and DevOps capabilities, but little more. These no-code and bare-minimum low-code tools can be good for tactical or workgroup apps, but for traditional professional development tools? Not hardly. This leaves businesses feeling like Goldilocks: software development options are either too rigid, too complex, or too simple to address their needs.

Just-right low-code

The good news is that there is low-code that not only offers the speed and agility that made it famous but also provides the enterprise-grade development capabilities needed for mission-critical applications.

In the broad space that low-code occupies, there are platforms that help developers meet the security, governance, and performance that characterizes enterprise software, integrating with nearly anything in the enterprise ecosystem. They offer integrated lifecycle management and a hosting infrastructure to deploy and run your applications. Apps are built to evolve with shifting requirements over time, making it easier for devs to keep up with changes rather than adding to technical debt.

5 capabilities to look for in a low-code platform for enterprise software

To help you evaluate whether a low-code platform is right for your mission-critical enterprise applications, the following defining features and key capabilities can help.

1. AI-powered development

Picture this: Your developers are knee-deep in code, trying to build an app that connects your football team's fans to one another, concessions, and team content during live games in your smart stadium. Now imagine an AI assistant sitting beside them, helping them tackle their tasks in half the time. This is what a low-code platform with AI-powered development can offer. Therefore, when evaluating low-code platforms, look for:

• AI mentors that help developers enhance code, architecture, maintainability, and performance
• AI-based impact analysis that checks for issues before publishing large-scale enterprise applications and their updates
• Connections to AI models from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services that take advantage of natural language processing, content generation, and more
• Generative AI agents be easily added to apps to deliver fast, relevant responses and actions—without coding

2. Full-stack for everyone

The right low-code platform for meeting enterprise software needs has no limits when it comes to what developers can accomplish. They can use it to build the frontend, UI, and backend of any app the business requests, including mission-critical web and mobile apps that directly engage users and customers. The right platform should have:

• Built-in support for developing mobile apps, pixel-perfect UIs, web portals, web services, kiosks, IoT devices, and more
• Integrated lifecycle management with full CI/CD and DevOps capabilities
• Easily reusable code, application logic, and UI across multiple channels
• The ability to easily update code shared across multiple apps
• A hosting infrastructure to deploy and run your applications

3. Agility

When you’re building the software that matters most, you need a low-code platform that not only accelerates development, but also provides the agility to adapt apps as quickly as business needs change. It should help you achieve elite performer status as defined by DORA DevOps best practices research. Specific capabilities to look for include:

• Built-in AI automation to accelerate the entire application lifecycle
• Real standardized code output that can run anywhere traditionally coded applications can run
• Integration with your enterprise CI/CD infrastructure
• 1-click publishing that removes the complexity of compiling, publishing, and updating apps

4. Security

Many low-code application platforms offer basic security, governance, and compliance. Typically, what they provide is just enough for internal and tactical applications. If you’re building the apps that run your business or drive customer loyalty, you need comprehensive enterprise-grade security capabilities and governance that keep those apps secure from design time to runtime. Look for a platform that has:

• Multiple built-in security checks across the application lifecycle
• Zero trust, role-based governance model
• AI-based code analysis that automatically identifies security vulnerabilities

5. Scale

The right low-code platform for building applications that can support hundreds of millions of users—and their usage peaks and valleys—requires high scalability. It should be ready to distribute your apps globally with on-demand autoscaling without performance penalties. Look for:

• True cloud-native architecture for the application runtime that is container-optimized
• A platform built on exclusively cloud-native services for data, networking, CDN, compute, and more that are scalable and optimized for a container-based architecture
• Automatic scaling of both compute and data infrastructures to address traffic surges
• The ability to continuously update the underlying platform and add new capabilities seamlessly without impacting application uptime or availability

OutSystems: The low-code leader

OutSystems is the only AI-powered low-code platform that offers full-stack development for everyone, along with the agility, security, and scale needed to build mission-critical applications. With the OutSystems low-code platform, you can get new applications and capabilities to market sooner, improve customer experiences, build apps with AI that use real-time data, eliminate inefficient processes, and have the freedom to innovate without being tied down by slow legacy software.

To dive deeper into what differentiates a high-performance low-code platform like OutSystems from entry-level low-code, download our free Buyer’s Guide to Low-Code Platforms, which includes a handy checklist for your vendor evaluation.