In a fast-moving and often fiercely competitive marketplace, companies need to embrace technology to stay relevant and drive growth. To this end, the business community is increasingly placing a high priority on digital transformation. In fact, more than 80% of organizations believe that digital transformation is crucial to business success.
Digitally driven processes can power increased business speed and agility, as well as enhance competitive differentiation. Many organizations are now focusing on tools and methodologies that allow them to optimize more processes through accelerated internal application development efforts. Their goal is to be able to create, test and deploy the volume (and variety) of applications required to elevate performance and unlock more opportunities.
In response to these growing needs for rapid app delivery, DevOps practices are evolving and becoming more critical to the success and agility of a business. According to a study conducted by Verified Market Research, the global DevOps market was valued at $3.62 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 20.01 billion by 2026. Today, many businesses are combining DevOps approaches with low-code or no-code app development platforms, because these solutions provide them with the tools to build applications faster and more efficiently. This strategy helps to alleviate the immense pressures placed on developers today, by streamlining their workloads and responsibilities, while simultaneously enabling them to reduce their development cycle times.
The Business Benefits of Fast, Agile Application Development
Due to combining the roles, practices and culture of software developers and ITOps teams, DevOps allows a business to deploy apps more rapidly and with a higher degree of consistency. This is essential in organizations where there’s more pressure than ever before to deliver applications at the speed of internal and external demand.
Often, the goal of adopting DevOps within a company is to reduce the tedious manual tasks that monopolize developers’ time and lead to app delivery backlogs. Solutions that help lighten and streamline the workload of DevOps–through automation and low-code development environments–are becoming more critical as a growing number of demands are being put on this still somewhat evolving, yet increasingly prioritized, team role and culture.
Outlined below are a few examples of how low-code app development platforms can enhance the growing role of DevOps and improve the bottom line. This approach helps to:
- Broaden the app development space to non-technical professionals: As mentioned before, low-code platforms enable a wider pool of less-technical users to work on and improve the speed at which applications can be built. Instead of the traditional app development team being solely responsible for a growing number of application requests, business users are now able to support digital transformation efforts by building and modifying their own processes, without writing complex lines of code.
This approach makes the process of development more accessible to non-technical professionals. As a result, businesses can liberate their developers from routine coding work and redeploy these highly skilled individuals to more strategic projects that are critical to core business processes.
- Facilitate faster application building: In addition to making application builds more accessible and less complex, the low-code environment also speeds up the entire development and deployment process. With this approach, companies can reduce development timelines from weeks or months to hours or days. Accelerating this cycle is crucial in any business that aims to outpace competitors.
- Streamline consistent application deployment: Low-code platforms can integrate into toolchains (or a set of programming tools) that can automate the deployment of applications across various business environments. This ensures that apps created by non-developers can be deployed in the same manner as traditional, developer-based applications. This consistency provides a lower cost of ownership because it allows a low-code platform to more easily integrate into the business processes and workflows the organization already has in place. This minimizes the risk of disruption and irregularities.
As businesses embrace innovation and elevate performance across the enterprise through agile, accelerated app delivery, the role and function of DevOps will continue to grow in influence and priority. Businesses that strategically leverage low-code solutions in combination with modern DevOps practices are likely to position themselves for growth, competitive differentiation and sustainable business success.
