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Quick Base is one of a group of up-and-coming IT companies riding a rising wave of interest: It makes a low-code platform for business-application developers. It has lots of company, too; companies competing in this space include Appian, Webalo, Dell Boomi, Pega Systems, Google, Telerik, K2, Appery.io and several others.
It’s probably too early to expect a shakeout in this growing sector, but know that larger companies are watching this very closely for possible acquisitions.
Aside from the congestion in the low-code market, Quick Base on Nov. 8 revealed the results of its third annual report on the state of business app builders, who don’t necessarily work in IT departments. Building on the previous two studies, the 2017 report encompassed about 1,000 Quick Base and other platform users and looks at the impact their apps are having within their organizations and what key challenges they seek to solve with no-code programming tools.
No- and low-code development signifies software that’s complicated under the hood yet has a user interface simple enough for line-of-business employees to modify and use. With low-code development, non-IT folks can build and customize standard business applications and make them directly relevant to the business they do every day–at their desks or on location somewhere else. Drop-down menus and wizards used in an intuitive fashion are the keys to low-code. Changes are made in real time so that results can happen in real time.
It’s All About Speed in Development and Fixing Bugs
It’s all about automation and DevOps approaches, speed in getting the products out into the market and equal speed in fixing them if there’s a bug–and there always are.
You can download the full Quick Base report here. In the meantime, we bring you some of the highlights below.
“State of Business Apps 2017: The Future of Problem Solving” illustrates the differences between citizen developers using no-code offerings and how they impact their organizations along with traditional software developers.
Interestingly, the survey found that 40 percent of Quick Base builders are women, a significantly higher percentage than is typically reported for traditional programming roles. A recent Accenture report estimates that only 24 percent of U.S. computing jobs now are held by women.
A second key finding is that using no-code tools is helping respondents advance careers and secure promotions. Sixty-four percent of Quick Base builders reported receiving public recognition for the value they were creating within their organizations.
Eighteen percent of respondents note that they received a promotion as a direct result of their use of Quick Base; 17 percent took their skills to new job roles at new companies or grew within their current one, illustrating that no-code tools can be easily transferable from position to position.
Key Findings in the 2017 Report
Additional findings include:
- Productivity and efficiency are the key adoption drivers. Quick Base builders create no-code apps primarily because these apps better fit their needs than other market solutions (68 percent) and so they can make changes more quickly to apps as their workload and requirements change (61 percent).
- No-code app builders working with other company stakeholders reduces security concerns. While security concerns (along with executive buy-in) were ranked as the top concern of using no-code, almost half of no-code builders said that IT was fully supportive of their efforts (47 percent); 17 percent even reported that business departments and IT were working better together as a direct result of building no-code apps.
- No-code tools appeal to a range of age demographics. The survey also points to a broad variety of age groups turning to no-code development to solve their pressing business problems. Forty-three percent of Quick Base builders are members of Gen X (age 37-52), forty-three percent are Millennials (age 18-36), and Baby Boomers (age 53–71) represented 14 percent of no-code builders.
The research for was compiled from two separate surveys. First, a May-June 2017 survey of 231 Quick Base customers in connection with the Quick Base EMPOWER 2017 user conference, with a margin of error of 5 percent.
The second was conducted in partnership with DZone and ConStat in April-May 2017, surveying 782 users and builders of traditional and low-code application development platforms and solutions, with a margin of error of 5 percent.
Based in Cambridge, Mass., and a former division of Intuit, Quick Base has a 6,000-plus customer base of app-enabled businesses that spans all industries and company sizes that includes more than half of the Fortune 100.
For more information, see this blog post and graphic.