SAP SE It's been a long time since developers have hand-codedeverything from scratch. I remember being an IT systems engineer at the HassoPlattner Institute in 2007 - things were very different than they are today.
Since then, the demand for professional developer talent has continued to growfaster than the world can educate them. In part to deal with this challenge, technology developers have increasingly composedsoftware by working with libraries and the like,rather than rewriting the same code over and over. Working this way saves time and gives more agility.
Today,the latest progression of this trend can be found in the low-code and no-code (LCNC) solutions for application development, extensibility services, experience management, and end-to-end process automation.
COVID-19is considered anaccelerant for digital process automation- it is, of course -butthe space was alreadyrapidly developing. LCNC solutions that empower more employees to digitize and automate their work offera pathway to greater enterprise resilience. Thepandemic brings the benefitsof such agilityinto stark contrast, further propelling adoption. Take robotic process automation (RPA)for example, where Gartner predicts '90% of large organizations globally will have adopted RPAin some form by 2022.'*
The goal of thesetechnologies is to allocate human resources more intelligently and to empower the end user - the professional developer as well as the citizen developer - to focus on more valuable work while takingcontrol of digitizing and automating their processes. LCNC is faster, more efficient, and frees up professional developer time for more complex activities, like security and big migration/integration projects. Most importantly, LCNC and automation technologybuild systemic resiliency and responsiveness into the daily functioning of a large organization, while fostering compliance and governance,with defined workflows and clear responsibilities.
[Link]Click to enlargeAs large companies aim to become more future-proof, they see LCNCand automation platforms as animmediate opportunity on the horizon. Gartner indicatesthat 'by 2023, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have adopted an LCAP as one of their strategic application platforms.'
Low-code application development platforms (LCAPs)mainly provide tools and services to easilyset up and configure processes and workflows, whereas automation platforms enable companies to easily automate recurring manual work. This beginswith the conversion of paper-based processes into digitized workflows then leadsto the seamless combination of digital workers with human-led processes.
With decades of processknowledgeacross industries and lines of business, SAP is well-positioned to provide the expertise and tooling needed by our customers to advance automation with LCNC digital transformation.
We arefirmly established with SAP Business Technology Platform(SAP BTP) and citizen automation products for Business Process Improvement such as SAP Workflow Management and SAP Intelligent RPA. Andwe have further extended our competitiveness with the recent acquisitionsofSignavioand AppGyver.
Signavio strengthens SAP'sability to keep the promise to support customers in their digital transformations by offeringa holisticapproach and technologyin the business process intelligence space. Signavioenhancesexisting capabilities andallowsus to provide standardized process KPIs, broad benchmarking data, process mining, customer journey mapping, user behavior mining, and customer experience analysis. We cangive users a complete view of every business processand recommend how to solve identified issuesanddrive change efficiently.
AppGyver is a pioneeringno-code development platformwith a strong developer community that complements both SAP's own as well as our partners'offerings for citizendevelopers.The cloud-based builder for creating web and mobile apps is extremely simple yet immensely powerful; users can visually craft logic flows of any complexity, access native device capabilities, and connect to SAP data and services (and any additionalthird-party APIs) viaOData and otherREST API integrations.
Furtherto that, SAP has alreadybeenpartnering with Mendixto offer a low-code development platform, streamliningand simplifying development for professional developers. Mendixand AppGyverenhance SAP BTPwith full flexibility and capabilities that allow business users to build web and mobile applications, from low-code tono-code.
With these additions to our strong portfolio, SAP BTP is in a unique position to helpmanycustomers implement digital transformation for end-to-end process automation. For example, Murphy Oil Corporationwas able to achieve significant productivity gains and improved forecast planning through different initiatives leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform, in particular SAP Workflow Management and SAP Intelligent RPA. Standardization resulted in better decision-making,and the use of more granular trend analysis resulted in a 25% reduction of G&A expenses.
Looking to the future, the landscape is changing but the demand for professional developers remains high and growing. Companies continueto evolveon their mission for greater speed and agility, with aparticulareye on their citizen developers as the next major agents for expanding digital capabilities. The breadth of the SAP technology portfolio, our process knowledge across all lines of business, and the high-value data running through SAP systems translate into solutions for our users and measurableoutcomesfor our customers.
As we create a unified, business-centric,and open platform with a marketplace for the Intelligent Enterprise, customers, partners, and cloud users can count on SAP for future-proofed resilience.
Juergen Mueller is CTO and a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE.
This story previously appeared on SAP Community.
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SAP SE published this content on 22 March 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 22 March 2021 12:22:00 UTC.
