Series B funding

No code platform, Unqork, is known for building industrial-grade software without the use of any code whatsoever. Earlier on this month, the company closed an $80 million deal in a round of Series B funding. This money will be used towards expanding into other markets. Unqork CEO, Gary Hoberman has commented on the funding. He says, “By building on our proven financial services and insurance successes, the additional funding will allow us to help deliver more of the best enterprise no-code technology and enable fully functional application development for top companies all over the world.”

More focus

After a talk at Puppetize in the US this week, Puppet, the automation firm who hosted the event, announced they will be having a higher focus on its continuous compliance, continuous deployment and incident remediation. It believes that by doing this, it will be able to deal with multi-cloud environments on a higher level. “With cloud native architectures on the rise and infrastructure environments becoming more distributed and heterogeneous, ensuring they can scale in a secure, auditable, and efficient manner becomes more challenging,” said Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO of Puppet.

Events

An announcement from Mendix, the world-wide low and no code firm, reveals that they are planning to hold Mendix World 2020 in Rotterdam next year. In a press release, the company recommend people to the event, “To witness how -with low code – you can address the very real business challenges of ubiquitous computing and merging of analog and digital,”

Partnership

Continuing on the coding announcements, another low-code company, OutSystems has publicised its partnership with the FinTech group, CredAbility. The new team will allow the financial company to develop its wellbeing services. “We wanted to move fast and were keen to work in an iterative and agile way in order to get our product ready to launch in as short a time as possible,” said Geoff Dearden, Director for CredAbility. “I was pleased with how quickly OutSystems was able to respond and help us deliver this.”

Responding to demand

Wrike, a company that provides a versatile work management system, unveiled Wrike Analysis earlier on this month. The latest product will impact on the growing demand for end to end management that will cater to individual needs. “Wrike Analyse now makes it possible to connect projects and workflows to business KPIs, so leadership and individual contributors alike can derive insights in real-time and allocate resources to activities with the highest ROI.” Says Wrike Founder and CEO Andrew Filev.

This is all proof of how diverse the DevOps world and everything that surrounds it can be. Organisations are constantly developing and it’s exciting to see what is still around the corner.

The post These are just a few things that are new to DevOps this week appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

DevOpsOnline.co.uk met with Nick Ford, chief technology evangelist at Mendix, to discuss its veracity and to see if there really is something in the burgeoning low code phenomenon.

With his 30 years in software and nine years in the company, it is understandable how Ford has so much familiarity with low-code and why it was so easy for him to shine a light on how accessible, manageable and forward-thinking low code can be.

So, what is low code?  Is it just about making the creation of apps more accessible?

Ford: “The thing about low code, is the problem it’s trying to solve: software development is hard, it’s difficult to do. It’s highly complex and highly skilled. So, what low code is trying to address is two things: to abstract you away from that underlying complexity and make it simpler using visual models, the kind you use to drag and drop; to address the collaboration problem inside organisations.

“It’s about how can we get people speaking to each other in a common language. How do we get business and IT to start working together to solve some common problems?”

So, ultimately, you’re really into making coding accessible for everybody?

Ford: “It has to be for me. We’ve gone on too long for coding to be held by a minority of people. That doesn’t help us build the apps we need. Every company is a software company, but also they’re not.

“On one hand, they are an insurance company, but they are having to carry this huge overhead of building software to differentiate themselves. They are carrying a team of people that actually add significant value. So, how do we expand that pool of developers so that everybody can do that?

“For me, I think, that’s where I’d love to head. I think we are a long way away from it, but the world will change for the better, I think if we can empower more people to do those kinds of things.”

Children as young as nursery-age are now being taught basic coding lessons. Do you feel that coding is something that will be in all of our lives soon?

Ford: “It already is! It’s everywhere we look. It’s hard to understand what the future will look like. What kind of jobs will there be? It’s for sure that whatever will be happening, applications and software will be at the core of it. So, those skills are very, very important and they shouldn’t be held by a small minority of people – they should be held by people who have great ideas.

“Often enough, entrepreneurs bring solutions to life in the intersection between somebody who has a great idea, and somebody who has the capability. What we need to do is to give people the technical capability to do that, which will open up the flood gates for people who’ve got ideas for building software, but not the capacity, money or technology to be able to do it. I think looking forward, low-code will help change that situation for the better.”

Why did you decide to go into this type of coding?

Ford: “What I have a passion for is creativity and one of the areas you can be very creative in is the software world. You can build something that doesn’t exist yet!

“So, I went into software off the back off that, but was quickly disillusioned as to how difficult it was to do the things I wanted. I moved into low code very early on in my career but recognised we weren’t getting it right yet, as an industry. I’ve been chasing down that goal ever since and thinking about software enrichment.

“Low code, for me, is an ideal way of doing it. I genuinely think that low code will be one of those things that people have on their CV’s in the next 12-18 months, along with FISS (Fiscal Intermediary Shared System) and the other products we use every day. It’s more than just coding, it’s about how we change business for the better and use this kind of technology to help us.”

You mention that applications are done right the first time, with the ability to integrate without multiple code. So, how does that work?

“What we do is get people to use something they are able to see and visualise and use, much quicker than you can do with other code. We’re talking minutes, hours, days, weeks, rather than months and years. We’re able to converge on a solution that works for the businesses making a minimal, viable product, in a very short time. Your opportunity to find out what will work and what won’t work just becomes much more frequent. What’s interesting is that you find the people that you are working with get really excited. That doesn’t happen much in software!”

If you could work with any tech, what would be the dream?

“What I’d love to be able do to do is to strip out and simplify that product as much as we possibly can. Inevitably, it’s a balancing act. How do you balance the complex needs of a full stack developer with someone who’s a RAD (Rapid Application Developer) and someone who’s a different kind of developer? How do we make sure that absolutely anybody can really use this software and they can pick it up with no training and no background? I guess it’s not the sexiest of things I’d like to change, but simplicity for me is what it’s all about.”

What do you see for the future of low-code tech?

“The future’s bright – I’ve been in this space since the early 90’s where co-generators and rapid application development and 4^th generation languages were trying to chase down the same problem, and it was tough. It was hard because it was difficult to get people to think about writing software in an abstracted way. Low-code is certainly something bright.

“The future for low code is that it’s used by anyone and everyone. I think from a technology perspective, we’ve got good competition in the market place, which validates the market, but what I would really like to see is that it becomes mainstream. I want it to just become a part of what people do and the way they live their lives. People have great ideas about what they do on a mobile app, things that would help them every day.

“So, pushing it from enterprise and business into mainstream and having the future generation of software developers to build the next Facebook, the next Twitter, whatever it might be.”

How will this affect more highly-trained software developers?

“The landscape for software development is changing and there are some forward-thinking developers who get it and are embracing low-code and understand it. But there are those that aren’t. I think it’s an environment that they see as a threat, which they shouldn’t do.

“There’s a clear role for the full-stack developer in a low code environment. It’s not like we’re trying to take those people and make them redundant by replacing them with low code. That’s absolutely not the case. What we are saying now is there’s a role for the maker, or the ‘maker movement’ as we are calling it. RAD maker or the decision application maker: they all have a role to play in the development of software. Where I see the future for our traditional software developer is, they still need to use those skills to build the connection into services, the integration into the landscape, the things that they do very well.”

What implication does low code have for individuals and for the whole industry?

“Software testing is something that is critically important to building applications that run inside the enterprise. We take testing across the DevOps and CICD pipeline. There’s the initial regression testing, performance testing. There’s the inbuilt testing of the platform. So, a lot of the things that we’re able to abstract away from are things like consistency checks within the application.

“I still think as you come out of that, there’s still a role for functional testing, for performance testing. We also have a quality and monitoring solution that is based on an IOS standard which allows you to look at the quality of your model at the time because the challenge when you are building software at speed is you continuously need to refactor – because you build something, it works, you re-factor, you build.

“I don’t think these tools necessarily take away the need to test, but what they do do is allow you to automate testing upfront and to integrate into the test space that you find, and to build into your CI/CD department.”

You do a lot of touring, so how does speaking about this sort of thing help the DevOps world?

“I think what it does is it makes it real. There’s a lot of talk about DevOps and how they are building in a DevOps way and there’s a lot of success in this. I think, by me touring and talking about what we do and really putting that in front of people, it really shows the simplicity and the speed at which we can do things. There is the capability for developers, now, to be in control of how they push products into test. It just means we can be more productive as teams. It helps us realise our goals much better and develop technologies that help us to do that.

“I think the one challenge left in DevOps is the organisational challenge. There’s still a cultural aspect to development and operations, and what people often find is they can speed up development, but if it’s a traditional organisation that can slow the deployment of applications down. To me, DevOps is critical to this.”

What do you think is around the corner for DevOps?

“DevOps is a way of pushing the operations more into development and pushing it back down the stack towards developers. [Talking about app development] you hit one button and anyone in the team can use it. For me, that’s the future of DevOps.

“You don’t want people just building production applications and pushing them into cloud with live data. You need to put some governance and management around it. I think automation is enabling developers to build and deploy systems that they can use instantly – that’s where we’re heading. I think we’ll see it begin to evolve into the world where anyone can spin up a container, deploy into the cloud of their choice and run into something they have just developed 30 seconds before.”

Grace Palin Barnott was speaking to Nick Ford at Mendix

The post Low Code and the future of DevOps? appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Less than a year after Siemens announced its acquisition of Mendix, the leader in low-code and no-code application development is now the primary application software for all of Siemens Cloud Solutions.

With Mendix in its core, the new Xcelerator platform will offer customers the ability to build multi-experience apps and share data on any device, from any location, on any cloud and any platform and more quickly realize the benefits of digital transformation.

It will be powered by the cloud-based open IoT Seimen’s operating system, MindSphere.

The software used

It was described in a blog how Xcelerator will use the manufacturing company’s software usually used in design, engineering, and manufacturing. It also includes a multi-experience application development platform that has been created through an expanded Mendix function.

Tony Hemmelgarn, CEO, Siemens Digital Industries Software says: “Siemens has a long history of delivering innovation by blurring the boundaries between engineering and operational domains and bringing together the virtual and real worlds. Xcelerator continues that tradition, combining our full portfolio of software that spans from electronic design automation through product lifecycle management with the Mendix platform and MindSphere for IoT.

He continued, “Unique to Xcelerator is the ability to build personalized applications that can capture feedback and performance and feed those insights back into design and manufacturing — delivering on the promise of the Digital Enterprise across the discrete and process industries,”

Combining skills

As part of the new product, the Xcelerator also integrates Siemens’s broad and deep portfolio of software for electronic and mechanical design.

It’s hoped that the new platform will enable firms to digitally transform through personalised and adaptable software solutions.

“I am also excited to be moving into the future as Siemens Digital Industries Software – a new identity that reflects our broad portfolio of digitalization software and services that are where design, engineering and manufacturing meet tomorrow.” The CEO added.

The post Siemens fully embeds Mendix rapid application development appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

In a report, Gartner spoke of the reason for acknowledging no or low code with such high esteem. It said: “By 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity. The enterprise LCAP market is growing strongly, due to continued demand for applications and a shortage of skilled developers. Low-code development is a natural evolution of rising abstraction levels in application development, which will eventually lead to viable cross-enterprise, highly scalable citizen development and composition of applications.”

Dealing with the growth of rapid software

“Delivering on rising demand for rapid software development takes more than just great tooling and technology,” said Johan den Haan, chief technology officer for Mendix.

He continued: “Platforms need to deliver comprehensive capabilities with an experience that is intuitive, efficient, and tailored to users’ needs. And having the right architecture — one that is well-equipped for multi-cloud and hybrid computing, and fully supports on-premises, virtual private multi-cloud, and multi-tenant public cloud deployment options — is essential.”

Mendix, a Seimens owned business, is able to provide low-code applications through combing a cloud-native architecture, full stack visual development capabilities, AI-assisted development, and an integrated set of tools for the complete application lifecycle.

Improving businesses

On the positioning, Derek Roos, Mendix CEO says: “We believe Gartner positioned Mendix furthest for completeness of vision in this report for a number of reasons including our unified IDE approach, which further improves and enables the collaboration of IT and business, making Mendix one of the first enterprise LCAPs to offer a multi-persona developer experience in a single integrated platform,”

Roos added,  “Our platform is designed with the ability to support both business developers in Mendix Studio and professional IT developers in Mendix Studio Pro…We believe we’ve worked hard to earn our position as a Leader in this important category and are thrilled to be recognized once again as having the leading market vision among all low code vendors.”

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