By Greg Belkin, Senior Director, Product Marketing
Give LOB the tools they need to build business-critical applications securely with low-code application development platforms.
Gap Apps bridge gaps between disparate systems which ultimately improves organizational efficiency. The question, however, is – who can build them?
The answer is anybody.
For many business owners, finding an innovative way to upgrade their existing suite of applications can be challenging. Fortunately, low-code/no-code application development provides a solution that allows companies to quickly and easily develop new apps to fill in the gaps in their stack of business systems.
The gap app concept
The concept of the Gap App is best understood by considering the typical approach to business systems. We call it the problem of too much software or too many applications. Recent figures from study by Vendr confirms as of 2023, organizations are now using 130 apps on average – an 18% increase compared to the previous year.
Why so many? The reason is that companies tend to have separate systems for different aspects of the business. For example, a company may have a CRM to manage customer relationships, an ERP to manage resources, a separate system for sales and inventory management, and various applications to manage internal communications, tasks, and productivity, finance, accounting, HR, marketing, and so on and so on.
Unfortunately, with such a huge, complex, and disparate suite of apps and solutions, there tends to be a lack of orchestration between the systems – and many gaps in between them that thwart any possibility of harmonization. For instance, a sales manager could find themselves performing numerous manual copy/paste, import/export actions to extract sales agent performance data from many different systems (payments, phone logs, live chat, email, etc.) and insert them into another – say, an Excel spreadsheet – for further analysis. With a team of six or eight agents, this could take hours – the gaps are many and the whole system in discord. A better, more effective and efficient solution would be to fill this gap with an app – that is, to have an integrated application that pulls data from all relevant systems to provide a single view of sales and performance data which is then mapped to the correct sales agent.
Low-code application development
Using low-code tools, any member of staff – including those without technological expertise or experience – can build custom apps quickly and easily without having to learn to code or engage the IT department. This means that businesses of any size – from SMEs to large corporations – can build or customize applications without having to hire coding experts or provide specialized training to existing teams. This saves time and money, and ensures seamless integration with existing systems.
As such, it’s no wonder that usage of low- and no-code tools is set to increase dramatically over the coming years. According to Gartner, 70% of new applications will be built using low-code or no-code tools by 2025. The market for low-code application platforms is also growing at a frenetic pace, and is expected to hit revenues of over $12 billion by 2024, nearly doubling in size from 2021.
Jitterbit’s low-code Vinyl platform
Jitterbit’s Vinyl platform is a game-changer for enterprise application development and integration, providing a powerful solution that simplifies the complex and time-consuming processes of building apps and integrating them with existing systems.
Using Vinyl’s drag-and-drop functionality, guided development, and visual rule builders, non-technical teams can easily create and customize enterprise applications without needing extensive coding skills or resources. This eliminates the need for specialized training and reduces development time and costs, allowing businesses to get their new apps online faster. Also, its intuitive design allows for faster prototyping and testing, making it easier to iterate on ideas during the development process.
