By Attila Ambrus, COO of Lowcono Inc.
Low-code is everywhere, and there is plenty of reasons why – businesses are flocking to these platforms at an exponential rate. Low-code business application development platforms offer unparalleled speed advantage in development and delivery of services; they make digital transformation of legacy business processes a simpler task by offering pre-built building blocks. They offer flexibility and a level of easiness that allows non-programmers to develop, deploy and even maintain their own application, within weeks or even days, instead of months.
What is a Single Platform Solution?
Most commonly businesses start with a few disparate, single-purpose cloud applications which are connected through “integrations”, often provided by another cloud service, acting as an intermediary between these platforms. When you look at these solutions, stitched together from multiple vendors, running in separate clouds, a well-designed common interface can make it seem like a single platform – but behind the interface the web of these standalone app is very convoluted, more expensive, much slower, and far less flexible than a truly all-purpose, enterprise-grade Single Platform Solution. If you have an army of applications charging monthly or annual fees, chances are you have these “integrated” standalone apps, and you are getting a subpar return for your money.
A single platform for multiple applications means that the platform is designed and built to be able to host all your applications, without any external “integrator”, it uses the same, shared data backend, provides the same, consistent user experience, using unified design language. The shared data backend can serve a wide range of business applications, reducing latency and complexity, strengthening security. To put it simply, an ERP, a CRM, an HR solution or sales and marketing applications will all look the same, will be working together seamlessly, using the same data sources.
Who needs a Single Platform Solution?
The answer is not complicated. Most businesses do not start with large funds invested into the company right away, having a perfect infrastructure with flawless business processes from the get-go is not even an option most of the time. Businesses are born as a result of problem solving, and they go through stages of evolution trying to reach their most efficient operational state.
Problems are solved using one application after another, sometimes different departments using different applications to solve the same problem. After a while this ends up as a pile of disparate applications, where the flow of information is often incidental, and communication between these apps is clunky and inefficient at best. The result of this “jungle of apps” is almost always more manual labor, more room for errors, or even data loss. Few things costs more for a modern-day enterprise than human labor, but incorrect data and making decisions based on that incorrect data can have far greater financial consequences.
“Will this work for us?”
This is a more common question than it sounds. A frequent request is from the leadership of small and medium size companies that “we know we have a problem; we know technology can solve it, but we do not even know how to explain what our actual problem is!”
If you are drowning in Excel sheets, if you have too many applications that your company runs on, and your business processes are cumbersome while you are paying high license fees, you need to look into a Single Platform Solution.
A single system suite is not a new concept in the marketplace. Big corporations have been utilizing these for years, but the price of entry was beyond the reach of small and medium-sized businesses.
As technology always improves, functionality gets better, and with the constant jumps in computing power per square inch these single platform solutions have become not just affordable to small and medium-sized businesses, but they are now the preferable solution, even by the price tag.
Do you want to learn more about low code and understand more of its benefits? Read What Is Low-Code and How Is it Still Not on Everybody’s Agenda?
What are the benefits?
Data is flowing constantly in any given business – it is the foundation of every decision-making process. This also means that information from multiple data sources are opportunities for the data to go to the wrong place, become corrupt or missing multiple places. Finding an error could happen weeks after the problem started, only when the issue comes to light, and damage is already done.
Running all your application along with all your information on a single, enterprise-grade platform eliminates the need for “integrations”, data exporting, importing, duplicate data entry, using multiple resources and authentications, both internally and externally. On a true single platform solution both internal users and your clients can access their data sources and use the information across all their applications, without any further “integrations”.
When your data flow is more reliable, you have a more efficient business. Businesses with single platform solutions can differentiate themselves and operate at a higher level than their competitors. Faster decision making, more adaptability to changes and overcoming obstacles faster are huge benefits of these single platform solutions.
Does your organization have too many applications that are too complicated to manage and cost too much to run each month? Are you in need for a single-platform solution? Reach out to us at Contact Us – Lowcono