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Application Builder Guide for the Future

Change is the only Constant! Maintaining competitive differentiation with exponentially growing Technology requires continuous innovation. The time between identifying a business need and delivering the required IT solution needs to become hours and days rather than months and years.

The Need for a New Framework

Time has become the new currency, so the emphasis here is on the need for a framework that facilitates Organizations – irrespective of their size and resources – to quickly churn up business solutions for the demanding business landscape.  It is equally essential for the solution to adapt to the changing needs of the business with minimal or no development. Such a framework can function the way it is meant to be if and only if it has the flexibility to create and maintain a pluggable microservices-enabled enterprise solution.

The Solution

Supply Chain space is evolving per customer mindset where organizations need powerful Demand Forecasting & Replenishment, Warehouse Management, Order Management, Store Management, Point of Sale, and Transportation systems to meet the same–day customer mindsets. No single solution vendor today has top tier products to cover the supply chain needs, and buying all the best of the breed does not cut as the product is not specialized for each business circumstances. Organizations are often obligated to choose between the SaaS for cost savings and On-Premise for functionality.

A potential solution to this situation is an application builder that allows organizations to develop business–specific features in a composable enterprise ecosystem. Implementing “Best of the Breed” vendor solution for certain areas [like WMS, TMS] and developing highly innovative composable solutions for heavily customizable modules (like forecasting and replenishment) by leveraging the metadata and AI features is one of the viable options. It is feasible only through Application Builders Platform. It goes without mentioning that the “Best of the Breed” vendor solution should be composed of pluggable micro-services rather than being a monolith to achieve the required agility.

Thus, the need of the hour is for an Application Builder which embraces API-based architecture and delivers business functions using micro-services along with AI-enabled self-learning capabilities to evolve according to the changes in the ecosystem. The trend is to move away from heavily customized On-Prem solutions towards ‘Low Code Low Maintenance’ and to get into ‘No SQL – Low Code – No Maintenance’ based architecture.  In simple terms, the framework should allow the business to configure or ‘Compose’ the way applications should behave.

No Code No Maintenance Application Builder Framework

Today there are multiple vendors who claim to be ‘Low Code – Low Maintenance,’ but hardly any vendors offer a No Code No Maintenance Application Builder framework. To wrap up, below would be the recipe to select the application builder platform that addresses the above–discussed challenges:

A Container Orchestration Architecture to house all the following components and to enable scaling as per the business requirements. Do check if your application builder leverages Kubernetes, Docker, AWS EC2, or similar technologies.
A way to automate Application Deployment, Configuration Management, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery [CI/CD]. Do check if your application builder leverages Verenia CPQ, Salesforce CPQ, Ansible, Chef, Terraform, Jenkins, or competitive technologies.
A NoSQL database that can store and retrieve Objects as documents rather than a traditional Relational Database. Do check if your application builder leverages MongoDB, DynamoDB, RavenDB, MarkLogic, or parallel technologies.
A powerful UI capable of handling dynamic views while developing a single page application. Do check if your application builder leverages React, Vue, AngularJS, or identical technologies.

A durable and scalable Workflow engine that can execute business processes and offers Modeler/Designer to edit BPMN models. Do check if your application builder leverages Tibco Active Matrix, KissFlow, Appian, or comparable technologies.