UPDATED 18:20 EDT / JANUARY 21 2021

CLOUD

The era of the citizen developer is dawning, says Google Cloud’s Amit Zavery

Interest in low-code no-code application development continues to grow, and major enterprise companies are positioning for a central role in what is turning into a promising business.

Gartner has predicted that in two years, more than 50% of medium-sized to large enterprises will have adopted some form of a low-code/no-code platform. Expansion of new tools and offerings in this space will likely have a twofold impact. It will make app development easier, especially in the no-code arena, and foster the growth of citizen developers who will feel more empowered once much of the heavy lifting has been removed.

“We’re getting to a phase now where the platforms have gotten much stronger and better, where you can do very good, productive applications without having to write a single line of code,” said Amit Zavery (pictured), vice president, general manager and head of platform at Google Cloud. “With no-code platforms, you are now expanding the user community. You are giving this capability to more users than low-code tools could provide.”

Zavery spoke with Paul Gillin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during theCUBE on Cloud event. They discussed the differences between low-code and no-code, why previous attempts to simplify coding tools failed to expand the developer community and how the market fits with Google’s competitive strategy in cloud.

Faster app development

The low-code/no-code movement began to gather steam approximately seven years ago when Forrester Research noted the rise of development platforms that focused on simplicity and ease of use. With a minimum of hand coding and up-front investment, business applications could be developed more rapidly.

The distinction between the two forms of coding evolved from the computing proficiency of technologists who had some skills or, in other cases, no training at all.

“Low-code is really focused toward semi-professional developers or IT in many cases, or developers who want to reduce the time required to start building an application,” Zavery explained. “If you are a semi-professional or a developer, you can use low-code to improve your productivity and not start from scratch. No-code is used for folks who are not interested in learning about coding; they don’t have any experience in it and still want to be productive and build applications.”

Earlier attempts to build programming tools that would simplify the coding process were effective but ultimately unsuccessful in broadening the developer ranks.

“If you look at forms and PLC, it abstracted out the technology and made it easier, but it was not very clear who they were targeting,” Zavery said. “They never expanded the universe of users.”

Google’s approach is to position low-code/no-code as an opportunity to leverage the portfolio of solutions offered by Google Cloud. Construction reports, equipment maintenance tracking, or even a pre-surgery checklist are just a few of the functions that can be enabled using a low-code/no-code approach.

“It’s not a tool; it’s a platform. That’s the big difference,” Zavery noted. “What we have done and what we continue to do is bring the power of the cloud platform with it. You’re not missing out on scalability, performance or security, and even compliance and governance are built in.”

As attractive as low-code/no-code solutions can be, the tools are not at a place where entire functional websites can be conjured into existence using the tools provided by Google and others.

“It’s not a solution for everything,” Zavery said. “If you want to build a full end-to-end e-commerce site, I would not use a no-code platform for it.”

However, the opportunity to draw an expanding class of developers into the cloud platform tent is too hard for Google to pass up. Capitalizing on the citizen developer movement could improve Google’s overall competitive position against AWS and Microsoft, although Zavery claims to not be preoccupied with his company’s market share.

“The cloud business is probably big enough for a lot of vendors,” Zavery said. “We’re not too worried about the rankings. We’re worried really making sure we’re delivering value to our customers. We want to make sure we have an end-to-end offering for all of the different use cases customers require, and no-code is one of the parts we want to deliver.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE on Cloud event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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