The Rise of Low Code

Low-code platforms are on the rise. According to the 2019 Forrester report, the low-code market is expected to hit an annual growth rate of 40%. Spending on LCAPs (Low-Code Application Platforms) is expected to hit 21.2 Billion by 2022. 

The growing importance of Low-code is what prompted the introduction of the ‘Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms’ from leading research and advisory firm, Gartner.

Adding on to Forrester, Gartner’s research indicates that “by 2023, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have adopted an LCAP as one of their strategic application platforms.”

So with these key statistics in mind, it’s easy to see why being positioned as one of the key-players on the Gartner Magic Quadrant is a big deal.

Gartner Magic Quadrants

Gartner is well-known for its ‘quadrants’. A ‘Magic Quadrant’ is a culmination of research in a specific market that aims to give a broad angle view of the relative positions of the market’s key competitors.

For technology competitors, Gartner has four positions –

• Leaders – Execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.

• Visionaries – Understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute well.

• Niche Players – Focus successfully on a small segment, or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.

• Challengers – Execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

Gartner stress that the placing of businesses is not a direct endorsement. It is intended to help businesses who are doing their research into what providers they should work with. For instance, decision makers might find that the market leaders are not the right choice if they have a specific niche or budget.

Zoho’s LCAP

Zoho’s LCAP is Zoho Creator which has been on the market for around 14 years. The Indian tech giant says that their vision for Creator is to “reduce the complexity in app development, enabling different user personas to build applications of varying complexity efficiently.”  

Zoho Creator has seen large-scale growth and adoption. Customers are using it as a strategic solution for increasing their business agility, reducing costs and getting to market quicker.

The global pandemic has contributed in part to this. Businesses are looking to strengthen their operations. Creator empowers their legacy systems and find new ways to engage with customers and employees.

Visionary Status

In the full report which you can download from Zoho, Gartner explains some of the qualities that drove them to position Zoho as a Visionary. Some of the highlights from the report include Creator’s ability to offer a development experience that will appeal to both professional developers and ‘Citizen Developers’.

The report also speaks about Zoho’s marketing understanding. It cites the range of enterprise-level deployment options including multi-region, multi-cloud and on-premises deployments.

Gartner also cited innovative focus on the LCAP Market as another reason for Zoho’s position in the Magic Quadrant. Of the innovation’s mentioned in the report, AI was something that stood out as a key factor. Zoho’s extensive roadmap was also given recognition compared to other’s in the Quadrant.

The report also hints of some upcoming features that we can expect to see from the Creator team such as more collaborative development features, test automation suite and AI-Augmented application development support.

The full report analyses 18 different LCAP vendors including Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and AgilePoint – If you’re interested in reading the full report, you can get a copy from Zoho’s Website. 

Looking Forward

Zoho’s position as a visionary shows that they’re looking to the future – it shows that they’ve got a keen understanding of where things are headed and have positioned themselves to keep pace, or even innovate ahead of that change.

Zoho have a saying: “Put your head down and work hard. Results are bound to follow.”

They say that recognition from analysts like Gartner is always “a moment for happiness for us all” as it affords them a chance to give themselves a quick pat on the back before “continuing on our journey to be the best we can be.”

With such an extensive roadmap, Zoho has their work cut out for them. They have a lot of innovative features planned and it will be interesting to watch their progress as we see these features rolled out.

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