Businesses will be facing difficult challenges over the next three or four years, with a massively increased emphasis placed on software-based digital innovation, according to IDC.

The results of an extensive survey of hundreds of business professionals across the APAC region conducted by the research company show a disparity between the need for software innovation and the ability of organisations to deliver. That situation has been exacerbated by the events of 2020, which have forced many to learn to digitise and interact online — that includes customers and consumers who might have been slower to engage digitally with their favourite companies than before COVID.

There is a strong case for low-code in the “next normal,” that requires organisations to be quick to market with innovation, but in an environment of limited resources and increased expectations of excellence from customers. The digital economy in Asia faces a turning point: will your company be one to thrive and survive, or will the pace of innovation outstrip your capability to be agile and scale to new demands?

Pivot-points for the next four years

IDC predicts that by 2023, over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using cloud-native approaches, most of those targeted at industry-specific digital transformation use-cases. Government-backed figures from multiple countries in the region show how all economies will comprise a larger proportion of digitally based commerce. Innovation will be digital, and only high-performing digital producers will be among successful companies. How must businesses in the Asia-Pacific re-position themselves?

If the answers lie in software, surely increasing staff numbers of skilled IT developers is the answer? Unfortunately, skill shortages are on the increase, and high costs for those who are available will make this course of action only available to the best-funded institutions with deep pockets. For businesses in the main, leveraging internal stakeholders’ knowledge and experience via low-code development platforms will be the only way to thrive.

Thought-leadership

In a recent webinar (available on demand), Mr Linus Lai, Vice President for Software and Services research at IDC Asia/Pacific, and Mark Weaser, Vice President Asia Pacific at OutSystems laid out the ways around inherent problems of digital transformation such as:

– With developer numbers expected only to rise by a factor of 1.6 in the next five years, how can businesses hope to create more powerful, more numerous software solutions to business challenges?
– If monolithic projects and continuous development cycles have created roadblocks for smaller, more disruptive projects, how can the enterprise take a more agile approach to software development?
– IDC predicts that by 2025, nearly two-thirds of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code deployed daily, over 90% of new apps cloud-native, 80% of code externally sourced and 1.6 times more developers. How will your company be among them?

Between 33% and 50% of organisations in the APAC will be using low-code within the next month. Businesses that are not exploring and embracing this game-changing technology are in danger of becoming irrelevant among their more technically-fluent competition.

The business case for low-code has never been more pressing. Learn how to create the types of applications that customers expect, at the speeds required, with security and best-practice built into apps and the workflows that create them. After you have watched the webinar (available on demand), download The Business Case for Low Code Development from IDC, right here, an essential guide for businesses trying to address digital urgency and skill gaps.