Interpretation and evaluation of Gartner’s report on the competition pattern of China’s low code Market
The following is the Interpretation and evaluation of Gartner’s report on the competition pattern of China’s low code Market recommended by recordtrend.com. And this article belongs to the classification: Gartner.
Gartner released the competitive landscape: enterprise low code application platforms in China at the end of last month. This is one of Gartner’s few competitive landscape reports for the Chinese market, which is enough to show the current and future importance of this market segment.
Gartner has always excluded no code products from the LCAP category. But this time, the zero code and business developer oriented CADP (citizen application development platform) is explicitly included in the market segment, which is a relatively large adjustment. In addition to CDAP, Gartner includes the extended development platforms of application manufacturers such as Kingdee and UFIDA, as well as the low code tool products of cloud computing companies. Therefore, this competition pattern report relatively completely includes all diversified products and manufacturers aiming to improve the efficiency of application development and deployment.
1. Market composition
Gartner uses the Wayne diagram to express the distribution of manufacturers in four sub categories, which I think is very reasonable. Low code development platform, zero code application platform, application manufacturers and cloud computing manufacturers enter this market for different reasons, but they meet the common goal of “rapid application realization” of customers.
Main forces: LCAP & CADP
Gartner claimed in the report that CADP products in the Chinese market are more than LCAP products, and the competition is more intense. But my intuitive feeling is not so. The actual distribution in the list of representative manufacturers provided in the appendix to the report is also similar. In fact, most of the major players I observed in the market should be divided into LCAP category. Even the platform products implemented by cloud computing platform manufacturers and head application manufacturers also adopt the inherent canvas model of LCAP products. Among global products, almost only Microsoft’s power apps take into account two modes: model driven and canvas.
Many readers are still confused about the difference between model driven and canvas mode. Although these concepts are proposed by Microsoft products, they do accurately reflect the completely different market assumptions and implementation paths between LCAP products and CADP products.
LCAP product assumption: development duplication is too much, and we need to let programmers reduce the amount of code.
CADP product assumption: code development is not necessary for many applications. We need to enable more people to configure applications.
It should be said that these two assumptions are both right and have their own values. Because of the different initial assumptions, the two types of products must have different initial user groups, and there are differences in fitness and cost when solving different types of problems. But these are just the beginning of every manufacturer and product. With the continuous improvement of product maturity, there will be mutual reference and intersection between the two. In other words, the two positioning products start from different motives and initial conditions, but ultimately make up for their own defects and improve the ability to meet the needs of customers. At this point, Gartner also made clear the direction in the competitive challenges and suggestions.
2. Competitive situation
Gartner believes that the whole LCAP market is still in its early stage in China because of the fragmentation of the Chinese market and low product maturity. The report lists a number of challenges in competing in the Chinese market, including:
(1) Fragmentation of local applications and ecology
(2) Requirements for global supplier compliance
(3) Support for multi cloud deployment and private deployment capabilities
(4) Diversification of customer enterprise IT maturity
(5) Diversified products compete across market segments
These competitive challenges certainly exist, but I don’t think Gartner has identified the key obstacles to this market breakthrough. These obstacles include at least the following:
(1) The dependence of large and medium-sized enterprises on customized development mode. As a result, many business opportunities entering LCAP manufacturers mostly appear as the demand of a specific project, rather than the purchase demand for LCAP platform products. Since last year, we have observed that many enterprises have begun to select relevant products explicitly, but the mainstream of market demand characteristics has not begun to change qualitatively. We can draw this conclusion from the number of projects with “low code” and “no code” in the software project bidding announcement.
(2) The barren market of small and medium-sized enterprises. This means that it is difficult for our products to start from the cornerstone market of small and medium-sized enterprises and develop upward. In other words, the bottom and middle of the pyramid of this market lack the ability to use and pay. Therefore, even CADP like Mingdao cloud is unlikely to be sold to small and medium-sized enterprises in large quantities, let alone expensive and difficult to use LCAP. To win the trust of large customers, our products can only be directly applied, which brings great challenges to product roadmap design, feature iteration planning and R & D process management. It means that most products need to adhere to three to four years of continuous iteration in a difficult living environment in order to have the basic maturity of serving large enterprises.
(3) Poor product openness and difficult integration. Gartner mentioned the fragmentation of applications and ecology. In fact, fragmentation itself is not a problem. The problem is that each product should be easy to integrate. There are many more enterprise software products in the North American market than in the Chinese market, but they do much better in product development. Almost any mature software product has a perfect public API. Application manufacturers absolutely dare not set barriers in interface services. This open problem also restricts the development of LCAP and CADP products, because once our products are used to solve in-depth enterprise business problems, we have to integrate with other systems. Although the proportion of integration cost is not high, it is a front-end cost. The customer cannot advance the implementation of the application itself before completing the integration verification.
Gartner’s competitive landscape report does not give the market share and ranking of specific manufacturers. However, from the perspective of the distribution of nominated manufacturers, Gartner still habitually lists international products as major manufacturers, accounting for an unreasonable proportion of space. In the sample manufacturer’s file listed at the end of the report, I’m sorry I don’t see any CADP products. This is not commensurate with the actual application popularity of CADP products in customers.
3. Customer segmentation
The Gartner report also mentioned the ways and use cases for enterprises with different IT maturity to apply LCAP. In brief, Gartner believes that enterprises with high it maturity tend to use LCAP to serve internal business units, and will also work with vendor to build vertical industry capabilities; For medium maturity enterprises, it departments or business departments purchase LCAP / CADP products to support internal professional and citizen developers, and work with external consulting companies and service providers to realize the complementarity of technical capabilities and business domain knowledge; The low maturity enterprises are mostly purchased by business departments to support internal citizen developers or rely on external ISVs to provide services. The products of CADP and cloud computing manufacturers focus more on serving customers in this sector.
This method of describing market segmentation based on customer IT capability maturity is not accurate. Although it teams of large enterprises with development ability tend to give priority to platform products with low code categories, citizen development and the integration of it teams and business teams are the demands of all enterprises. Therefore, I think the valuable market segmentation standard should not start from the enterprise’s IT maturity, but from the nature of customers’ needs.
Gartner report also lists the common application scenarios of LCAP products:
(1) Custom business application. It includes building business function applications or customizing on the basis of Oracle / SAP and other suites.
(2) Business workflow automation. Such applications generally require integration with existing applications, reading and writing data, and building various business processes that are automatically triggered or manually involved, such as document approval, process task management, case tracking and other scenarios.
(3) Industry digital solutions. Integrate business application and process management requirements to create an overall solution around the needs of a specific industry. For example, manufacturing management (EMS), Internet of things (IOT), supply chain (SCM), product life cycle management (PLM), construction and property management.
(4) Form and office automation (form / OA application). Meet the needs of citizen developers to quickly build a collaborative work management system, complete the necessary data integration and create statistical reports.
These four scenarios are indeed the backbone needs of our field, and they are even the core construction content of most enterprises’ digitization today. All of these data belong to the field of business application management. Whether complex or simple, their essence is CRUD (addition, deletion, modification and query of relational data). For this category, the best way to meet the needs is fully model driven CADP. It not only provides higher implementation efficiency, but also enables business experts to start or participate directly. Although all cadps have a common problem – the interaction interface is standardized and has no degree of freedom, the standardized interaction does not seem to be a disadvantage for the middle and back office enterprise applications. Especially for those demand scenarios with many forms, long fields and complex processes, if the model driven method is not used, it will take several times to dozens of times to build a complete front and back-end logic.
But in fact, in addition to these scenarios, there are other requirements that may be more suitable for LCAP products. These are foreground applications and industry field applications that require high degree of freedom of front-end interaction. The former refers to the applications that need to be provided to consumers. Developers hope to fully control the interface elements and even reflect their own brand style. The latter refers to field service applications for specific industries, which may allow employees to complete a series of operations in a very limited time and space, including the possible use of special equipment, the use of special capabilities of mobile devices, etc. These two kinds of demands will make CADP products feel difficult. Several products of major cloud computing manufacturers all choose the way of low code construction, allowing developers to draw or drag out the front-end interface, and even have the ability to directly connect wechat applet upload, which meets this kind of demand.
Comparing these two demand scenarios, which one has greater demand in the Chinese market? Purely from the perspective of demand quantity, there may be no standard for victory or defeat, but from the perspective of value content of demand, crud scenario is much higher. This may be why only these four scenarios are described in the Gartner report.
Subdivide customer needs into these two categories of scenarios, which is more conducive to us to see the value and applicable scenarios of LCAP / CADP products. Moreover, it is obvious that these two needs exist for both large and small enterprises. There is no law and trend that large enterprises should have low code and small enterprises should have no code.
4. Competitive challenges
Mingdao cloud chose the direction of apaas when it began its business transformation several years ago. After several years of development, this field is receiving unprecedented attention. Customer demand and purchase intention are also growing rapidly. However, while growing, we also feel a systematic resistance. These resistances are not directly related to the low code and zero code market, but generally exist in China’s enterprise software industry.
At the end of the report, Gartner provides some competitive suggestions for manufacturers to overcome the challenges. I think it’s all about the main points.
(1) We should support both professional developers and citizen developers.
This is indeed the key value of the whole LCAP business. If we can’t bring in citizen developers, all we do is develop efficiency tools. Objectively speaking, for real professional developers, low code is not necessarily more efficient than Pro code. Therefore, even LCAP in canvas mode should reduce the product threshold so that non developers can quickly understand and start. After meeting the development needs of citizens, CADP products should also continue to extend their product capabilities and provide “local code capabilities” through functions and scripting languages, so that developers do not have to switch to complete code development because of a few corner cases. In the past two years, Gartner has put great emphasis on the integration of it and business teams. In my opinion, the simplest and direct description is “let business experts lead application implementation and technical experts lead application deepening”. In this regard, the Gartner report also mentioned the combination goal of software technology and operation technology.
(2) Meet the characteristics of regional demand, establish a platform ecology and adapt to the Chinese market.
This is obviously for international manufacturers. But domestic products have not done well enough. The obstacles to market promotion mentioned above include this major resistance. It deserves the priority of practitioners in our whole market. Instead of waiting for the development improvement of other application products, it is better to take the lead in making their own LCAP / CADP products open enough and be able to standardize the routine data and application integration work.
(3) Strengthen the partnership ecology by optimizing mutually beneficial relations.
I always believe that both LCAP and CADP must focus on the capacity-building of general products. The product should not and does not need to have specific industry attributes. Similarly, I don’t think it is necessary for ISVs from all walks of life to develop basic products such as apaas. Therefore, the path of mutually beneficial cooperation lies here. ISV can build vertical solutions on existing platform products. This solution can be reused by multiple customers or customized for specific large customers on demand. In this value-added partnership, customers, platform products and vertical service providers win-win.
From: Ren Xianghui, founder of Mingdao cloud. Read more: Gartner: the global low code development technology market will reach US $13.8 billion in 2021. Gartner: the growth rate of global overall equipment shipments in 2015 was revised to – 1.0%. Gartner & IDC: Q3 global PC shipments fell by nearly 10% in 2015. Haibi Research Institute: Research Report on China’s low code / no code market in 2021 (with download) status of 2021 low code: looking back on the past, Looking forward to the future, 2019-2021 global low code development technology revenue (with original data sheet) Gartner: six steps to build a successful digital business Gartner: Top 10 strategic technology trends in 2016 Gartner: eight technology trends shaping the future under the acceleration of the epidemic Gartner: global PC shipments reached 72.6 million units in Q4 in 2016, down 3.7% Gartner: data in China is approaching the peak of speculation Gartner: Top 10 Internet of things startups in 2015 Gartner: the technology industry ushered in a new wave of mergers and acquisitions 2022 Gartner: Apple shipped 51.9925 million IOS devices in Q1 2017 Gartner: global PC sales in Q3 in 2016 were about 68.95 million, down 5.7% year-on-year
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