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Legacy assets gain new life with low-code integrations
Legacy assets gain new life with low-code integrations BY LISA MORGAN
The maturity of an organization and rapid changes in technology have dovetailed to result in legacy assets that continue to drive value for some time. One of those technology advances has been in low-code/no-code solutions, which offer enterprises the ability to modernize their older applications through integrations. While old-school, hand-coded integrations with legacy systems are still necessary in some cases, low-code/nocode platforms tend to provide a variety of connectors out of the box. “There’s an important distinction between low-code tools and enterprise low-code tools,” said Jason Bloomberg, founder and president of industry analyst firm Intellyx. “The enterprise [platforms] have more sophisticated integration capabilities and more enterprise-centric security and regulatory compliance as well.” Enterprise low-code tools also enable developers to build custom connectors. In fact, building connectors is one of the main reasons developers still drop down into code when using a lowcode tool. “Even with one of the lower-end low-code products, if you want to integrate with something and the tool does-
n’t do it out of the box, you can do it with a traditional integration. You can build to the API or if there is no API, you could leverage a legacy integration tool to leverage the API and hand-code a connector so you can work in the nocode environment, but that’s a lot of trouble,” said Bloomberg. “It’s easier if the tool gives you a low-code way of doing that, but that’s difficult for the tool vendors to create.” Building a custom connector is fairly straightforward. However, legacy data integration can be a challenge given different data formats and contexts. It’s important to understand the metadata
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associated with the data schema, which some low-code/no-code tools do. “Some products on the market that are getting more sophisticated with that, using the UI to interpret what the metadata tell you about various integration challenges,” said Bloomberg. “In many cases, you have some sort of legacy application that has a database that supports it. You could bypass the application and send a SQL query to the database, but you often don’t want to because you lose the application’s business logic. When the application is maintaining consistency between tables, going directly to the database can cause problems.” Meanwhile, low-code/no-code development is extending out beyond applications to include robotics process automation (RPA), which makes sense since low-code/no-code is often used (particularly by business users) to improve workflows and processes.
Some of those workflows and processes involve legacy assets. “RPA tools are in large part glorified screen-scraping tools. They’re particularly useful where you have an application interface where there isn’t an API you can easily program to,” said Bloomberg. “You want to mimic what a user would do, which is a kind of screenscraping. Generally speaking, low-code players partner with the RPA players to offer this consolidated low-code environment that can essentially script interactions with legacy user interfaces.”
The impact on shadow IT On one hand, it could be argued that low-code/no-code platforms reduce shadow IT because line of business (LOB) users can build their own applications. While low-code/no-code may help reduce shadow IT, it won’t eliminate it
completely. For one thing, shadow IT dates back at least to the 1980’s. The modern workforce is more tech-savvy than its predecessors and as a result, today’s end users have definite opinions about user experiences. If they don’t like the tech available at work, they’ll find another solution, whether it’s devices, applications or low-code/nocode platforms. Also, because LOBs now tend to have their own IT budgets, they’re empowered to procure their own tech, including low-code/no-code platforms. The proliferation of low-code tools and subsequently low-code applications is often nowhere on IT’s radar until an issue arises, so in effect, IT lacks complete visibility into the enterprise’s application portfolio. In addition, a patchwork of low-code/no-code solutions could mean that different departments are duplicating development efforts, building func-
tionality or optimizing tasks and workflows that could be reusable, with or without modifications. Security issues can also arise. For example, a recent Oracle/KPMG study found that 93 percent of respondents are dealing with shadow IT. Half cited a lack of security controls and misconfigurations as common reasons for fraud and data exposures. Meanwhile, 26 percent said cloud services are their biggest cybersecurity challenge. Some organizations are attempting to manage risks and increase operational inefficiencies by taking a platform approach to self-service including lowcode/no-code development. That way, the appropriate enterprise controls are in place while end users or departmental IT have the freedom to build their own low-code/no-code applications. Fintech company NES Financial standardized on the OutSystems lowcode platform because it wanted an enterprise-class tool capable of supporting regulatory compliance. IT maintains control of enterprise data and then provides APIs that can be leveraged by departmental applications. “The big benefit of it is now all the shadow IT organizations use the same tools, so you get the same branding, styling and cross-utilization of capabilities that one department develops — tools, technologies, dashboards all sorts of things,” said Izak Joubert, CTO at NES Financial. “In the bigger scheme of things, low-code platforms probably mitigate risk and actually enhance our capability to deliver on the vision… whereas more point solutions in my estimation probably hurt an organization in terms of shadow IT because it’s not well-controlled. There’s no one that centrally looks after the company and prevents people from running with scissors.” Large enterprises have increasingly adopted a hub-and-spoke IT model so there is a center of excellence and dedicated, department-specific IT or software development resources. That way, departments get what they need while the core enterprise assets remain protected and managed by a central function. Centralized governance is necessary to ensure security, compliance,
Is low-code/no-code conducive to CI/CD? Organizations are maturing from Agile to DevOps and CI/CD with the goal of releasing higher quality software faster. However, the need for speed has not necessarily been reflected in a shift from hand-coding to low-code development. “DevOps has always been focused on this hand-coding mentality,” said Jason Bloomberg, founder and president of industry analyst firm Intellyx. “It’s increasingly difficult to do DevOps without low-code because the hand-coding is the bottleneck.” As with all other tools, low-code/no-code platforms are adding machine learning and AI capabilities to increase coding efficiency, but they still aren’t capable of handling every nuance enterprise application development and delivery entails. Generally speaking, organizations are happy to talk about their CI/CD efforts or their low-code/no-code development efforts, but it’s a rare occurrence for organizations to talk about both simultaneously, at least for now. “A lot of times the tools to continuously deliver are built into the product. But those tools become inefficient when you try to do something that the tool isn’t expressly designed to do,” said Justin Rodenbostel, VP of delivery at digital transformation agency SPR. “As long as you can run it on the command line, you can automate it and you can schedule it to run continuously or based on some
data integrity, etc. At the same time, centralized governance should not interfere with user experience, particularly if citizen developers are creating applications. If the user experience becomes awkward, sluggish or unresponsive, users will be inclined to find another alternative. “If you can get in the ideal world where you have a big enough organizations with these departmental IT organizations and you train them up to use the same low-code platform to develop their applications, now you have a relatively well-controlled processing place for a shadow IT organization because IT can still protect the data and implement corporate policies and you only expose those APIs in a controlled fashion to the shadow IT organizations,” said Joubert. The big benefit of it is all the shadow IT organizations [through-
hook. Doing the same thing with low-code/no-code tools is totally dependent on the capabilities of the individual tool, so you’re coupling your CI/CD capabilities with the low-code/no-code tools that you’re using whereas in the custom dev world, those two things can be totally separate. You can use the same CD tools to deploy everything or you can have everything use their own CI/CD tool. There’s a limitless number of combinations there.” In many cases, low-code/no-code tools are being used at small companies that have few, if any, development resources. Generally speaking, they’re not doing DevOps or CI/CD. They’re just happy building custom applications quickly without development resources or with very limited resources. “When things become too complicated or when you need to grow out of the low-code/no-code solution and replace it with something custom, that’s when [low-code/no-code] tools lose their value proposition extremely quickly,” said Rosenbostel. “If you have a complex environment to deploy to, you’re going to run into roadblocks. If you have heavy regulatory constraints, SEC or the Department of Energy, you’re going to run into big problems. Anytime you have to do something out of the ordinary, buyer beware.” z — Lisa Morgan
out the enterprise] use the same tool set so you get consistency in branding, functionality, styling [and] cross-utilization of capabilities that one department develops.”
Low-code/no-code as shadow IT On the other hand, it can also be argued that low-code/no-code tools are a form of shadow IT because LOBs are circumventing IT when they procure such tools. Going around IT is the very definition of shadow IT. “In the no-code space, the risk of exacerbating shadow IT is greater [than low-code] because the no-code space is a next-generation of tool like Access and Lotus Notes where users could build applications and the IT organization wasn’t aware of them, and couldn’t ensure they were secure. They might be redundant applications so there are all
these shadow IT issues,” said Intellyx’s Bloomberg. “A lot of these tools are trying to be proactive so you can build applications but someone will put governance in that will allow IT to manage the quality of the applications or ensure that security policies are being enforced.” Whether low-code/no-code tools eliminate or exacerbate shadow IT has less to do with the tools and more to do with the way companies operate. An important aspect of that is the relationship between IT and lines of business – whether they’re in the habit of working in partnership or whether IT is seen as a bottleneck or obstacle to what LOBs want to achieve. Another factor is marketing. No-code tools in particular are often touted as requiring no IT involvement, which may not be the case, especially when connecting to legacy systems and data sources.
Why family businesses choose low-code/no-code
BY LISA MORGAN
The typical family-owned business tends not to be known for its software development prowess. Instead, it tends to be known for serving a specific customer need such as manufacturing embroidered patches or distributing food supplies. Such are the core competencies of embroidered patch manufacturer A-B Emblem and food service distributor Flanagan Foodservice. Both companies are using low-code/no-code tools to modernize their businesses.
Flanagan Foodservice wants flexibility Flanagan Foodservice is the largest family-owned company in Canada. It distributes food items to restaurants, hotels, institutions and care homes in Ontario. Flanagan used the WaveMaker low-code platform to develop an ecommerce application that replaces what it had built previously using the Oracle platform. Oracle remains the go-to database, but the company wanted a solution that enables application development in the browser that’s
deployed to the browser. “In some cases, what you see is not what you get. We were also trying to decouple ourselves from certain homogeneous-type environments so we could connect to multiple back-end databases,” said Jerry Braga, senior programmer analyst at Flanagan Foodservice. Had Oracle offered the capabilities it does today, Flanagan might have kept its application development on the Oracle platform rather than moving to lowcode. At the time, the Flanagan development team felt constrained by Oracle’s capabilities and wanted greater flexibility moving forward. “Every application needs its own business logic that has to be integrated into it, but for a pure front-facing thing, [low-code] was the quickest way to give us the most current type of user experience without having to do a lot of plumbing,” said Braga. The development team lacked significant experience with Angular, CSS and HTML, but according to Braga they didn’t need it. Using the low-code platform they were able to take advan-
tage of those technologies without having to learn them first. Interestingly, the more they used the low-code platform, the better they understood the underlying technologies. Braga said another attractive benefit was the ability to build an application once and deploy it to different devices including tablets and phones. Developers are still needed to code the minor percentage of functionality that the low-code platform does not provide. Of the 10 people Flanagan has in IT, three are developers. Flanagan’s ecommerce application design is more like a wrapper because the business logic still resides in the database, like the original application. The business logic could have been extracted from the database but developers didn’t want to reengineer the application architecture. “Later, if we want to move the database platform to another vendor, then we’ll revisit how we replace the things that are being called directly in the database,” said Braga. For now, Flanagan’s development team is content with
the low-code application’s performance, availability and scalability.
A-B Emblem ditches management by spreadsheets Management by spreadsheets is an unwieldy process. Yet, some organizations still do it. One of them used to be A-B Emblem, which produces embroidered patches for NASA, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and thousands of other organizations. A-B Emblem used the Kintone low-code/no-code platform to create its own supply chain management system and to digitize some of its businesses processes. Leading low-code/no-code development is compliance officer Heather Johnson, who originally joined the company as an IT intern. Since then, A-B Emblem has outsourced most of its IT services and Johnson moved into her compliance officer role, which now includes low-code/no-code development for the entire company. “Even with my degree in computer IT, I was not familiar with low-code,” said Johnson. “I helped our purchasing manager with a very specific problem. That’s how I became introduced to the low-code/nocode movement.” A self-professed “software junkie,” Johnson had a habit of downloading software that she tried to break. Eventually, she Jerry Braga stumbled upon the lowcode/no-code platform, which she tried on a trial basis. Within the 30-day trial period, she was able to build the supply chain solution. The solution was implemented after signing the contract with the low-code/no-code vendor. Johnson later trained A-B Emblem suppliers on its use. Now, Johnson is in the process of building a custom low-code ERP solution. Since a formal IT function no longer exists in the company, application developers tend to be citizen developers. Both A-B Emblem and Flanagan Foodservice have required the assistance of their respective low-code/no-
code vendors to meet their goals since neither company has significant inhouse developer resources. Flanagan needs help coding what can’t be done with the platform; A-B Emblem needs application development experience it lacks. Johnson said A-B Emblem’s vendor has helped expand the scope of low-code/no-code use cases. For example, the Microsoft Excel-based order system was replaced with a custom low-code application. “Our entire quoting system was in Excel forms originally with a sick amount of DBA code. It was a beast,” said Johnson. “When we started putting things in [the low-code/no-code platform] we found that we had all these extra check points because we didn’t trust the system we’d built [in Excel]. Instead of having thousands of rows in one database, [we had] thousands of databases in one row, which is ludicrous and they weren’t even connected.” A-B Emblem maintains very little stock on-hand because most customer orders are very small one-time orders that can be unprofitable. The low-code approach has enabled the company to adopt a Vista Print-type ordering model in which customers can upload designs and order as many patches as they need. Within the company, low-code/no-code development has enabled the rapid implementation of application features and enhancements. According to Johnson, most requests can be handled on the spot in a matter of minutes as opposed to days or weeks. The business process improvements enabled by low-code mean fewer humans are required to do the same amount of work. However, as a familyowned business, A-B Emblem may be more sensitive to the personal impact of change on its employees, so it has made a point of moving the displaced workers into new roles. “One of the things I’m adamant about is not to forget the people element of this,” said Johnson. z
Low-code/no-code isn’t perfect It’s important to understand the capabilities and limitations of a lowcode/no-code platform before adopting it. While business users and developers can accomplish a lot using such tools, traditional development expertise is typically necessary to deal with customizations. “Low-code/no-code can be customized only to some extent and legacy systems written with code, libraries and APIs much more than often have complex business rules that are hard to port to no-code platforms,” said Sebastian Dolber, CEO and founder of software development service provider Astor Software. “Another big limitation/red flag with these new platforms is vendor lock-in. Once you develop your app, it’s almost impossible to move to another platform/provider.” Although there are low-code/no-code tools aimed specifically at professional developers, web developers and LOB users, the vendors are actively looking to address other markets. That means the high-end tools providers are offering (or may plan to offer) simpler tools for web developers and/or LOB users. Meanwhile, no-code (simpler to use) tool providers are targeting web developers and/or professional developers. While low-code/no-code tools aren’t perfect, they help enable faster time to market. Moreover, with digital transformation, software requirements are outpacing the capabilities of traditional software teams because there just aren’t enough programmers to handle all the work. Low-code/no-code tools are seen as a solution to the problem, but it’s important to approach democratized application development in a sound manner that manages potential risks while enabling new opportunities. Generally speaking, low-code/no-code development must be supplemented with traditional coding expertise to achieve its goals. Moving forward, developers may find themselves under pressure to utilize low-code tools if hand-coded software development is viewed as a bottleneck to delivering business value. z