With scarce IT resources, organizations are increasingly struggling to deliver innovations to keep up with evolving market requirements. End-users without coding experience but with a deep understanding of business problems – often called citizen developers – need to be able to develop applications and processes independently and with agility. We’re excited to now add SAP AppGyver as a true no-code pioneer to our existing portfolio for citizen developers. On top of that, we’re introducing a low-code perspective to SAP Business Application Studio to elevate the user experience for professional and citizen developers. With these two major products, SAP covers a unified enterprise developer continuum that enables both professional developers and citizen developers to bring productivity to the next level.
Companies all over the world have already set the stage for a broader scope of people doing work in what has traditionally been the developer realm. Gartner, Inc. estimates that "by 2024, 80% of technology, products and services will be built by those who are not technology professionals." This trend will bring up the number of nontraditional competitors to “one-third of technology providers.”*
Several dimensions make it difficult for organizations to remain agile, innovative, and competitive and to accelerate citizen development as an additional source of innovation and delivery. One of the things we’ve learned again since last year with the COVID-19 pandemic is that business requirements are constantly changing and evolving. Deloitte says that “the pandemic is accelerating cloud demand, with 59% of enterprises expecting cloud exceed plans due to COVID-19.”**
Speed in implementing these changes is and will always be key to staying ahead of the competition. At the same time, IT landscapes get more complex, with companies having to maintain a growing number of tools and services. As a result, it will be more difficult to transform and adapt these applications.
We also see that companies need to make changes despite limited development resources. In the future, organizations must manage increasing transformation investments with fewer resources.
Higher productivity but less coding
SAP today has several powerful and well-regarded development tools for professional developers. If we want to achieve higher enterprise resilience for our customers, however, we need to give more people without development expertise access to these products.
For citizen developers, it is difficult to be productive in a traditional development environment. Our goal is to enhance and simplify their user experience so that their contributions will become as impactful as those of professional developers. We see low-code/no-code as the key enabler for opening the door to a much broader swath of people, including those without development experience.
To do this, we offer a unified developer experience that allows the entire continuum of developers – from professional developers to citizen developers – to drive change in organizations.
Developer continuum with professional developer and citizen developer
To cover their substantial business needs, we empower our customers to build processes, applications, and user portals more flexibly with a set of low-code/no-code solutions on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), such as SAP Workflow Management, SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, SAP Business Application Studio, SAP Work Zone, SAPUI5, SAP Launchpad, and now SAP AppGyver.
SAP AppGyver enables powerful no-code application composition
Customers will need to implement more lightweight tooling for application development to strategically respond to the volatile markets. With the acquisition of AppGyver, we complement our existing application development capabilities for citizen developers with a purely no-code approach. SAP AppGyver, as it was rebranded, brings in mobile and web app development capabilities that allow our customers to build highly sophisticated standalone applications or extensions without writing a single line of code. Its intuitive no-code user experience and drag-and-drop, one-click functionalities make it approachable and usable for non-technical users — a significant innovation.
SAP AppGyver succeeded in the no-code application development market as only a few companies have done before. More than 300,000 users already leverage its platform to build, extend, and integrate applications to be faster and more productive. Citizen developers have access to the immense expertise of tens of thousands of users in the SAP AppGyver Community for support or validating ideas and innovations. Powered by “Composer Pro” application platform, more than 85,000 mission-critical apps have already been built for various uses cases without a single line of code.
WYSIWYG mobile/web UI builder
Visual Logic
SAP Business Application Studio enables low-code application development
Having looked at the impressive value SAP AppGyver provides to citizen developers, our customers tell us that their professional developers also want to accelerate their time to business outcomes with an enhanced development experience. With SAP Business Application Studio’s low-code perspective, we deliver a simplified application development journey also to the technical user. SAP Business Application Studio provides full-stack SAP application and BPT extension development with minimal coding effort. At the same time, professional developers can fall back in their familiar pro-developer environment. This approach allows to champion change across the business, i.e., professional developers can support citizen developers whenever they are needed without changing the development environment.
Together with SAP AppGyver’s no-code approach, SAP Business Application Studio completes the unified developer experience for professional developers and citizen developers. With it, both types of users can boost productivity at enterprise scale while reducing their development cost. At the same time, it maximizes the value of existing investments through the usage of simplified SAP Integrations. With our repository of pre-built content, professional and citizen developers alike can access expertise and best practices to drive outcomes confidently and quickly.
Application development for different personas with SAP AppGyver and SAP Business Application Studio
Low-code/no-code for higher enterprise resilience
We will certainly see more demand for simple development tools in the future. Companies are in the midst of major digital transformation initiatives, especially with the recent global supply chain changes and new ways of delivering services to customers. As digital transformation advances, we will find even more complex IT landscapes with many more services and tools that will require more development effort to maintain. Companies will further adopt low-code/no-code solutions for application development and process automation, as well as for other areas of enterprise IT.
The more people we enable to respond to these challenges, the better we can prepare for these changes. With the launch of SAP AppGyver, accompanied by a new low-code perspective for SAP Business Application Studio, the citizen developer footprint continues to grow at SAP, heralding our entrance into the next generation of enterprise application development— one using a purely no-code approach. Our tools will continue to evolve to further drive the democratization of development.
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*Gartner Press Release, “Gartner Says the Majority of Technology Products and Services Will Be Built by Professionals Outside...”, June 14, 2021. GARTNER is the trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc., and/or its affiliates and has been used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
**"Maximizing the Impact of Technology Investments in the New Normal,” CIO Insider, Deloitte, 03 February, 2021, Khalid Kark, Jagjeet, Gill, and Tim Smith.
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