The latter would, in fact, necessitate additional spending on purchasing software tools to develop, test, and deploy the code, with constant upgrades needed to meet the growing needs of the company. It would require documentation to ensure business continuity even if the developers leave and new ones take their place.

Today, though, the answer may not be so straightforward. Some of the advantages of COTS – Commercial Off-the-Shelf software continue to hold true, but the tools for custom development have undergone a massive change. Some of the earlier limitations no longer exist or have become negligible. Advantages have gone up, pushing businesses to consider custom development with low code.

Cases in Point

One of Indium Software’s clients is a pioneer in precision healthcare with progressive research and development. To facilitate interactions between physicians and patients from across hospitals, research centers, universities, and advanced community sites, and to meet its specialized business requirements, the client wanted to develop proprietary technology for diagnosis. It partnered with Indium to turn its business requirements into live functionality.

Indium adopted Robust Application Development (RAD) to improve the reach of R&D in precision medicine. The Agile POD team focused on quality checks on the features developed for every sprint by an integrated quality assurance. This resulted in reduced technical debt and higher quality output on each build. Integrating the performance monitoring and testing throughout the project ensured efficiency,consistent and better database retrieval performance as part of the project.

In another use case, Indium Software proposed Mendix for the end-to-end development of a platform for a real estate aggregator. It allowed agent onboarding, messaging, chatting, and email communication. It also enabled property listing with pictures and customization of each search function for faster and more accurate discovery. Around 20,000 agents were quickly onboarded to deliver a strong digital experience for the users. The complete ecosystem was built on a microservice architecture to enable better scalability and reliability of software.

Why Opt for Low-Code Instead of COTS

COTS software is advantageous to businesses for several reasons.

• It is easily available.
• The costs are predictable. It is typically taken as annual licensing as there is very little customization possible, and this is a long-term cost after the implementation.
• It is ideal for businesses that need a simple, straightforward solution that fits their needs.
• Complex systems can be deployed quickly, and the solution could be up and running in a few days.
• The vendor takes care of support, updates, and patches. The update takes place in the background, with minimal or no disruption to the business.

However, one size does not fit all. For businesses requiring specific functionality or objectives, it may not be the best solution. Moreover, since the COTS software is developed for a wide range of applications, it may have features that are redundant for specific purposes. This can add to the costs and make it unwieldy. As the business grows and expands, its needs will also evolve, making this investment incompatible, difficult to integrate with new tools, and noncompliant.

Low-code development helps overcome many of these challenges and bestows many advantages. Some of these include:

• Low-code platforms such as Mendix enable adopting a visual approach to development. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows even technically unskilled business users to quickly develop features and applications that meet their needs better.
• It incorporates reusable components that shorten the development time. There is a large community of developers contributing to the component’s library (Marketplace), which is available for reuse. Indium’s marketplace components are prefixed with IndiuMX.
• The communication tools integrated with the development platform facilitate collaboration.
• These features also lower the cost of development, providing businesses with greater control over their product.
• It enables the creation of highly customized software that will help solve specific business problems.
• Low code integrates with the IT infrastructure easily. Its microservices approach also makes it flexible and scalable, allowing software to evolve along with the business.
• Mendix provides tools for the application development lifecycle, enabling streamlining of requirements management, project management, version control, testing, and deployment, amongst others.
• Developers can also use agile development practices and DevOps tools to shorten the development cycle and speed up the time to market.

For More Info, Kindly Check out Our Success Story

Indium Software for Low Code Development

Indium Software provides low-code development for facilitating innovation, experimentation, and faster delivery of enterprise-grade apps. Indium has built a team of Mendix experts who have more than 5 years of experience developing low-code solutions for businesses to achieve in months which earlier took years.

We enable the following:

• Empower businesses by setting up Mendix architecture and design to establish a robust architectural foundation
• Handpicked Mendix App Development experts assist in the development of web, mobile (hybrid & native), UI/UX solutions
• Our Mendix QA team assists in end-to-end testing using the Mendix test suite and shift-up QA model
• We are a Mendix Reseller Partner who can help with your licensing needs

We have more than two decades of experience in the development of cutting-edge software, application modernization, and data analytics. Our formidable strength in software development, DevOps, and low-code development is a winning combination aimed to launch you on your next trajectory of growth. To know more, visit Click Here

FAQ

The post Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Software vs. Low-Code Development appeared first on Indium.

Some of the considerations on deciding would be the cost and the time for implementation and development, as the case may be. Often, COTS wins because there are many industry-standard software available that reduce the burden on the IT teams and allow businesses to go live quickly, enabling them to focus on their core business areas.

However, if the effort to tailor the COTS product to suit your need seems too much, then some businesses may opt for custom development. This will require a lot of coordination with the development teams right from the requirements gathering stage to testing and deployment, but it may well seem worth the effort.

But after the initial euphoria of going live quickly with COTS or with a solution that seems like an ideal fit, you may start seeing the limitations of these options that start curtailing your growth. Especially in today’s world of digital transformation, being stuck with a bulky solution that impedes agility and keeping pace with the competition is difficult and may well result in loss of revenues and deceleration.

Low-code is a viable and fast-becoming-popular solution that overcomes many of the limitations of COTS and custom-building. Just read on to find out how.

COTS – The Hurdles

COTS offers businesses many advantages such as cost-efficiency, high reliability, good customer support and documentation, incorporating best practices, and is highly customizable.

However, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages in today’s dynamic world of constant change and globalization. These include:

Rigidity: Businesses need an agile solution where features can be added quickly and modularly. COTS makes this difficult due to the complex architecture that makes it rigid. This makes adding features a slow process, delaying transformation and innovation.

Niche Skill Requirement: Customization also requires developers with technical knowledge. There is not only a dearth of skills but there is also a cost attached that can be a deterrent.

Complex Integration: Integrating COTS applications can be challenging due to their coming with separate databases with complex data models and customized Application Programming Interface (API) sets.

Low Differentiation: Since customization is an arduous task in COTS, differentiating from the competition becomes difficult and challenging. Upgrading the product with a customized feature may also not be possible in the future.

Not Agile at Scale: Due to the absence of a mature continuous delivery capability of most COTS products, you will find delivering agile projects to scale difficult.

Custom Development – The Limitations

Custom development may sound like the best alternative to COTS as it provides you with the choice to build what is best for your businesses, whenever you need it. However, it has its own flip side, which includes:

High Cost of Development: Allocation of funds is critical for the success of a custom development project as it requires a dedicated team, continuous delivery pipelines, scalable application architecture, etc. It requires an equally steep operational budget too, which can be a drain on your resources. If there are any errors or bottlenecks in the architecture that require rectification, this can add to the costs.

Time to Develop: From requirements gathering to build, test and deployment can be a long journey that not only requires time but also the involvement of your key resources to ensure you get what you need.

Documentation Challenges: Often, documentation gets a go by in custom-built projects due to a lack of resources. This leads to what is called a “developer lock-in” where some of the developers become irreplaceable.

Low Code That Delivers

Low-code is getting adopted by businesses for application development due to rapid development and a configuration-first approach. According to one market research report,  the global low-code development platform is expected to grow rapidly at 31.1% CAGR between 2020 and 2030, its revenues going up from $10.3 billion in 2019 to $187.0 billion by 2030.

According to one Deloitte blog, low-code is no longer only an “interesting” technology but a “must-have” technology for businesses that want to retain their competitive advantage.

The advantages that low-code provides include:

Building Blocks: As the name of this development approach suggests, it does not need code development but instead allows users access to graphical models and pre-built application components that they can utilize to create functional applications. As a result, business users can rapidly develop even complex applications without the need for proficient coders.

Prototyping: With prototyping of fully functional applications, developers can leverage the rapid Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development model well suited for agile development, delivering business value iteratively and quickly using a risk-based approach to deliver customer value.

Simple Architecture: As the functionality forms the basis of the code, it uses a simple architecture to develop applications that are easy and cost-effective to maintain. Being microservices oriented, they are easier to scale, rework and enable fast visual API modeling.

Low-Code PaaS: As it is available as Platform as a Service (PaaS), it reduces operational costs.

Responsive Multi-Channel Applications: The applications developed in low-code can be used/accessed from different devices such as computers, mobiles, and tablets seamlessly, thereby reducing the customization effort for each.

Pre-Canned Functionality: The applications store offers several free and priced vendor and 3rd party “pre-canned” functionality that low code developers can use by dragging and dropping for their projects.

Dashboards and Analytics: Users can also assess the health of the platform and the applications by viewing the operations dashboards.

Mature Continuous Delivery: One of the key requirements today is a continuous delivery pipeline, which is possible with low-code development, enabling agile development in the truest sense.

These features enable you to develop differentiated offerings to retain and strengthen the competitive advantage. Furthermore, low-code also provides flexibility, scalability, facilitates business-IT collaboration, and lowers the total cost of ownership.

So, really, whatever your context, low-code development can fit in very well giving you a cost, time, and resource-effective solution.

Indium is a Mendix low-code development partner that can help you become agile and responsive to the market trends by developing solutions best suited to your needs quickly. Our team of technology and domain experts works in close collaboration with our customers to maximize their development efforts to accelerate growth.

To know more, contact us now:

The post Low-code vs. COTS: What works better in your context? appeared first on Indium.