Gartner: Emerging Technologies: The Future of Low Code
Published 12 July 2022 - ID G00754212 - 23 min read
By Mark Driver
Through 2027, low-code-enabled markets will face dramatic changes as they evolve through three distinct phases and products and services become key enablers of business composition. Product leaders must adapt to position themselves for evolving technology, market and product/service paradigms.
Overview
Key Findings
The low-code (LC) paradigm applies to many automation and application capabilities, which can cause software product leaders problems in identifying and prioritizing specific markets and developer profiles.
LC offerings are becoming more pervasive enablers of business outcomes as they are broadly adopted by diverse user personas and use cases.
Looking toward 2027, LC-enabled markets will evolve through three distinct phases: democratization, hyperautomation and composable business. Each of these phases will be defined by distinctive influences across technology, market and product/service characteristics.
Recommendations
Product leaders investing in emerging LC technologies should:
Embrace technology democratization among prospective LC customers by focusing on specialized opportunities within technology-empowered business units over “one size fits all” enterprisewide engagements.
Promote developer experience product investments that drive opportunities for the abstraction of complexity for business processes to support both less sophisticated users and future-state acceleration of decision automation.
Leverage the LC market evolution spectrum and opportunities to address competing priorities and market ambiguity by navigating critical conversations as product leaders through structured planning to determine key roadmap and go-to-market investments.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
By 2024, developers outside of formal IT departments will account for at least 80% of the user base for LC technology/tools, up from 60% in 2021.
By 2024, hyperautomation functionality will be the dominant competitive differentiator among LC development tools.
By 2027, at least 50% of LC technology investments will be directed at supporting packaged business capabilities (PBCs), up from 5% in 2021.
Analysis
Data Insights
LC-enabled solutions include capabilities such as metadata-driven and graphical programming design tools combined with high-level scripting to develop software logic capabilities consisting of user interfaces, business logic, workflow and data services. This technology is used to rapidly develop and deploy custom applications by abstracting the complexity (like design elements) and minimizing the volume of hand coding and other related aspects of the software development life cycle.
Today, the high interest in LC technology is driven by increasingly complex application architectures that have emerged to support digital business and cloud-native strategies. Specifically, digital business transformation is radically outpacing the capabilities and staffing of many traditional “pro code” strategy’s capabilities to change. Both IT organizations and external service providers struggle to keep up with the agility and diversity that digital solutions demand. Low code has emerged in the last five years as one potential tool in both enabling business transformation and scaling these initiatives cost-effectively over time.
Product leaders that support software solutions in markets where end users have a direct and integral role in the delivery and ongoing success of products must consider the impact of LC technologies. These technologies will be important tools to execute innovative approaches to business operations and customer engagement and competitive advantage over the coming years. LC technologies will have an increasingly integral role in creating and maintaining competitive advantages across many markets in the future.
LC-enabled solutions will evolve in the next five to eight years across three distinct phases. As a result, the focus and priorities among product leaders must evolve and adapt to meet changing customer demands from phase to phase. Looking across the LC evolution spectrum, including low code for IT democratization, hyperautomation and the composable enterprise, product leaders will face many pivotal decisions that are unique to each market phase. Examples include:
Redefining product offerings in response to shifting market boundaries driven from overlapping/shared features and functionality
Approaching digital marketplaces as long-term customer relationships and partnerships
Reimagining pricing and packaging strategies and prioritizing demanding architectural roadmap priorities in support of composable technology
Developing and/or evolving products that do not exist in the present day to take advantage of new technologies and architectures, including PBCs and application composition platforms (ACPs)
Equipping customers as impact stewards to govern and manage LC capabilities driving increasingly consequential use cases in support of business outcomes
This research will provide product leaders detailed analysis of the key phases associated with emerging technologies and trends for low code, along with understanding the opportunities presented across this high-priority market through 2028.
Evolution Spectrum
Looking toward 2027, LC markets will evolve through three distinct phases, including low code for IT democratization, low code for hyperautomation and low code for business composition (see Figure 1). Each of these phases will be defined by distinctive influences across technology, market and product/service characteristics. At a high level, these include:
Democratization: On average, 41% of employees in an organization are business technologists — that is, employees who report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use. Low-code application platforms (LCAPs) empower diverse citizen developers and fusion teams to deliver innovation.
Hyperautomation: Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms. LCAPs have emerged as a key component of successful hyperautomation, with 13% of business technologists indicating LC development tools are among the three tools used the most (based on frequency and volume) to support automation initiatives over the past 12 months.
Composable business: Organizations are adopting application composition technologies that enable fusion teams to implement composable applications. LCAPs are one of the key technologies that drive greater composability of application services, functionality and capabilities.
Figure 1: Low-Code Evolution Spectrum
Phase 1: Low Code for IT Democratization
By 2024, developers outside of formal IT departments (citizen developers) will account for at least 80% of the user base for LC technology/tools, up from 60% in 2021.
This phase of low code focuses on continuing the trends in rapid application development (RAD) tooling/techniques that have been around for decades. But we should not discount modern low code as a “business as usual” approach to RAD. Instead, today’s LC technologies stand out from traditional RAD approaches by taking full advantage of modern IT infrastructure, such as mobile device profiles, cloud-native platforms and modern HTML clients.
Specifically, LC technologies focus on the abstraction and automation of underlying complexities within modern software design and construction. They do this to enable non-IT experts and part-time developers to deliver foundational (light to moderately complex) applications and business workflows independent of direct IT oversight. This is particularly impactful when we consider the extreme ratios of business technologists to IT staffing in most enterprises. Product leaders incorporating LC technology in their products/solutions should take care to acknowledge and support the increased role of business units in direct acquisition control and as influencers.
Technology Characteristics
This first phase of low code (beginning in approximately 2015) most directly distinguishes it from predecessor RAD techniques and technologies by building on a foundation of modern browsers, cloud, SaaS and mobile technology innovations.
LC technologies introduced here are heavily focused on cloud deployment and self-service subscription-based business models. While some vendors support both cloud and on-premises, it is cloud-native architecture’s elasticity, combined with very low total cost of acquisition, that enables business units to invest in low code with little or no centralized IT oversight. With that said, tools that look beyond simple personal productivity use cases and fully embrace the collaboration between central IT and business unit citizen developers are most successful over the long term.
Modern mobile devices (namely, tablets and smartphones) are also strong drivers to LC adoption among citizen developers. An explosion in the number and variety of devices used by knowledge workers has created an equally broad demand for access to business data and processes untethered from traditional desktop/web applications. In response, virtually all successful LC solutions offer mobile interface design and development targeted at nontechnical developers. And finally, modern HTML5-enabled browsers enable developers to deliver “no touch” application deployments without the traditional and significant compromises to the user interface “fidelity” and overall user experience (UX).
Market Characteristics
In this phase of the LC evolution, the primary user personas are citizen developers working outside of centralized IT groups. These LC “developers” typically focus on small projects — one to three developers building applications with one- to three-year life cycles. Professional IT development teams make up a relatively small percentage of the addressable market (less than 20%). They are also willing to consider LC approaches for small to midsize projects (one to five developers building applications with one- to five-year life cycles) where pro code (i.e., traditional languages such as Java, C# and Python) has proven overy complex and slow.
Typical LC solutions in this phase focus on small to moderately complex projects, with a targeted life cycle of three to five years deployed by small teams of two to four developers. However, a small subset of the market also supports larger and more complex projects. Signature characteristics include ease of use and “light touch” IT moderation to give LC developers freedom and flexibility, while avoiding the downside of shadow IT.
Product and Service Characteristics
Product leaders delivering LC solutions find a crowded market. Despite broad marketing claims, most LC tools have little competitive advantage over others. “Ability to execute” is the key driver for initial success. Those vendors able to stand out in this crowded market are able to scale and expand their business beyond tactical short-term customer engagements. However, the churn among technology providers remains high, with only a few providers capable of supporting long-term customer investments.
In this phase of the technology evolution, product leaders should:
Continue LC development priorities by:
Simplifying developer experience by focusing on fundamental ease-of-use capabilities that empower non-IT experts to deliver data-centric application (CRUD; see Note 1) functionality
Targeting LC infusion into markets with high levels of end-user activity
Expand LC development priorities by:
Focusing on mobile and nontraditional device support as part of a multiexperience solution strategy
Increasing support for process and workflow integration
Extending support for teams and developer collaboration
Adding developer and operations governance capabilities
Innovate in preparation for the next phase of LC evolution by:
Introducing artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented features and capabilities
Focusing more heavily on application security challenges
More deeply integrating LC solutions into broader DevOps processes
Ensuring value and ROI can be measured
Phase 2: Low Code for Hyperautomation
By 2024, hyperautomation functionality will be the dominant competitive differentiator among LC development tools.
This phase of low code extends the core functionality of the previous phase by significantly expanding on hyperautomation features and capabilities. Hyperautomation refers to an “effective combination of complementary sets of tools that can integrate functional and process silos to automate and augment business processes.” Toward this end, LC-enabled technology becomes a key success factor in making hyperautomation strategies achievable among a wide spectrum of organizations. Achieving hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms (see Note 2). Among them, LC technology stands at the center of these efforts insofar as LC-enabled features are either:
Positioned as stand-alone development environments (e.g., LCAP, multiexperience development platform, etc.); or
Integrated into the UX capabilities of tools such as robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA) and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) platforms
Technology Characteristics
This phase of low code is enabled in large part by machine learning and AI techniques to transform how software logic is developed, managed, consumed and shared. Signature characteristics include the expansion of capability adoption by less technical users, while delivering increasing efficiency to all users.
The scope of automation supported by LC tools and technology falls into three levels:
Task-level automation — Automation of a task within a larger process; for example, data extraction or digitization of records. This is the level of automation most widely associated with LC technology in Phase 1.
Process-level automation — Automation of a process composed of various subtasks, for example, customer product or service request management. While a small set of “advanced” LC solutions supported this level of automation in Phase 1, it is this phase that fully embraces and drives process-level automation among LC solutions. By 2024, this will be a “must have” feature of LC tools in order to stay competitive.
Process orchestration — Automation of multiple processes to execute a larger workflow; for example, pharmacovigilance.
Phase 1 LC solutions focused nearly exclusively on basic task-level automation. This phase expands support for hyperautomation by heavily embracing more advanced process-level automation. A small subset of advanced solutions also supports early (if somewhat limited) features targeted at process orchestration as well.
Market Characteristics
In this phase, the customer base for LC tools and technology expands beyond individual citizen developers and data scientists into collaborative fusion teams. These are multidisciplinary teams that blend technology or analytics and business domain expertise, and share accountability for business and technology outcomes. Instead of organizing work by functions or technologies, fusion teams are typically organized by the cross-cutting business capabilities, business outcomes or customer outcomes they support. Fusion teams do not have a prescribed reporting structure, nor do they have required levels from the IT function.
In this phase, fusion teams expand and extend the role of low code from small short-lived projects into larger, more complex, and more business-critical and multitechnology supporting roles. Low code increasingly becomes a “connective tissue” that allows fusion teams to take direct control and ownership over increasingly complex process-level automation and process orchestration challenges.
Product and Service Characteristics
In this phase, product leaders delivering LC solutions find a consolidating market. The rapid growth of Phase 1 will now contract as the weaker players lose traction and are unable to compete against tighter market competition. The short-term and tactical investments that dominated Phase 1 will evolve as potential customers see low code becoming increasingly entangled in longer-term mission-critical digital business strategies.
In this phase of the technology evolution, product leaders should:
Continue LC development priorities by:
Abstracting and simplifying process engineering and decision engineering activities
Focusing on fundamental ease-of-use capabilities, which is a defining characteristic of the genre
Targeting LC infusion into markets with high levels of end-user activity
Supporting different developer personas (professional and citizen developers) and fusion teams to collaboratively build applications
Supporting a multiexperience UX solution strategy
Expand LC development priorities by:
Adding reporting and monitoring for insights and performance analytics
Increasing support for and process and workflow integration by supporting process-level automation and process orchestration capabilities, and in advanced cases, decision automation
Extending AI-augmented features and capabilities
Extending integration into broader DevOps processes
Innovate in preparation for the next phase of LC evolution by:
Supporting emerging application composition technologies and trends (see the next phase)
Phase 3: Low Code for Business Composition
By 2027, at least 50% of LC technology investments will be directed at supporting PBCs, up from less than 5% in 2021.
This phase of low code extends the core functionality of the previous two phases by focusing on support of the “composable enterprise.” It does this by being the principal mechanism for the assembly and combination of PBCs. This maximizes the ability to build, assemble and reassemble business capabilities at the point when a business leader or user needs to make a decision, rapidly seize market opportunities, and respond to disruption and threats while being resilient. Its purpose is to enable agility and resilience in the face of unexpected and unprecedented events.
Technology Characteristics
This LC phase is enabled by broad industry adoption of composable business strategies — a concept where leaders can quickly build new business capabilities by assembling digital assets in an organization that is architected for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.
Composable business has three key characteristics (see Top 2022 Tech Provider Trend: Composable Business):
Composable thinking comes from a belief that anything is composable. It leads to a culture that emphasizes the assembly and reassembly of components as the fastest, most flexible path to outcomes. It is built on a system that enables anyone (employee, customer, partner) to compose, not only consume or contribute.
Composable business architecture is a framework to maximize the ability to build, assemble and reassemble different business elements for the digital era. Business elements that can be composed include products, services, responses, experiences and organizations. The scope of the framework spans customer engagement, ecosystem partnerships and all operations.
Composable technologies are digital assets packaged as discrete components that deliver independent, clear and complete business value. The assets are thus designed as building blocks for assembly and reassembly of business processes and application experience.
LC technology has a clear and symbiotic relationship with all three aspects of the composable business. LC technologies are built on cloud, AI, APIs and visual building blocks in much the same way PBCs are. In this phase, low code becomes the preferred “orchestration platform” that pulls discrete PBCs together into next-generation business solutions.
Market Characteristics
In this phase, the customer base for LC tools and technology continues to focus on non-IT resources. But new priorities on PBCs will bring the scope of low code full circle to IT teams as well. Fusion teams will work closely with IT (and external-sourced PBCs) to support the full life cycle of next-generation composable solutions. LC technology will play a role in the development of PBCs, but its use will strongly focus on the integration and orchestration of PCBs through advanced process orchestration capabilities.
Product and Service Characteristics
Product leaders delivering LC solutions in this phase will find new expansion opportunities. The market contraction of the previous phase will now see a trend toward “specialization” as LC technology providers seek out differentiated positions in vertical markets and industry segments. LC investments have now become integral to long-term and mission-critical composable business strategies.
In this phase of the technology evolution, product leaders should:
Continue LC development priorities by:
Focusing on fundamental ease-of-use capabilities, which is a defining characteristic of the genre
Targeting LC infusion into markets with high levels of end-user activity
Supporting teams to collaboratively build applications
Supporting multiexperience UX solution strategies
Supporting automation and process orchestration capabilities
Supporting AI-augmented features and capabilities
Expand LC development priorities by:
Enabling catalog curation and expansion, including across ecosystems
Extending API and data services to support PCB artifacts
Extending AI to enable intelligent PCB automation and discovery
Extending smart contracts to enable PCB orchestration
Market Opportunities
Through 2027, market opportunities will increasingly require product leaders to prioritize product/service roadmap investments that are less evolutionary and increasingly revolutionary as key paradigm shifts expand from democratization to hyperautomation and business composition. Misprioritization of near-term and long-term roadmap investments will become a defining cause of failure for providers that find themselves with eroding market relevance and significance over the coming years. In particular, product leaders must understand and address the long-term demands for composable and automated LC capabilities in the present as they look to maximize their long-term success.
Figure 2 provides an overview of LC market opportunities.
Figure 2: Low-Code Market Opportunities
Opportunities in Phase 1: Low Code for IT Democratization
The overall LC development technologies space is expected to reach $29 billion in revenue by 2025 (with a compound annual growth rate [CAGR] of more than 20%). Specifically, the LCAP segment is projected to expand from $4.45 billion to $14.38 billion between 2020 and 2025, with a CAGR of 26.4%. RAD buying centers will see market growth driven by demand for traditional RAD market use cases; however, there are multiple new opportunities that product leaders should also consider. In particular, the combination of SaaS-based subscription models based on modern cloud infrastructure opens broad sales channels that go well beyond the buying centers of traditional RAD tools.
As digital strategy and innovation continue to transform organizations, there has been a shift in the delivery of digital leadership and responsibility both outside the IT organization and distributed across the organization. In many organizations, technology acquisition and management decisions are now driven from business units and rank-and-file employees outside the IT organization. Taken together, these trends leave a lasting impact on IT organizations, with business technologists spread throughout enterprises playing key roles in balancing autonomy and control between business units and centralized IT. As business technologists play a larger role in LC technology selection and usage previously assumed by trained technical staff, they will create a demand for new types of technology products (or evolving existing ones).
Product leaders must also contend with a very large market expansion of LC-related solutions. For example, today Gartner is tracking no less than 600 vendors that self-identify as supporting “low-code capabilities.” In order to stand out from the crowded markets, product leaders should push beyond the tactical traditional use of preceding RAD tools and incorporate their LC solutions deeper into client digital business transformation strategies. This means focusing not only on ease-of-use capabilities but also collaboration between business unit developers and core IT support.
Opportunities in Phase 2: Low Code for Hyperautomation
Product leaders will see key opportunities through reimagining the user interface and delivering effective LC experiences across enterprise user personas. In the hyperautomation phase, we will see AI capabilities of LC technology significantly expand as product leaders reimagine product interfaces and user experiences. Product leaders will make significant architectural investments in this phase, focusing on LC-driven process-level automation. By 2024, this will be a “must have'’ feature of LC tools in order to stay competitive.
Toward this end, LC technology will play a leading role in RPA and intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS) solutions. Low code will be deeply entrenched in:
RPA platforms that automate human tasks for applications that do not have integration interfaces
iBPMSs that integrate a set of technologies that design, orchestrate and automate end-to-end processes
iPaaS solutions that come with ready-to-use workflows and templates for various applications that can be easily configured to integrate applications seamlessly
Together, RPA, iBPMSs and iPaaS provide a robust toolbox of technologies that enable hyperautomation, and all three markets will rely heavily on LC technology to simplify and bring their capabilities to business-led fusion teams.
Opportunities in Phase 3: Low Code for Business Composition
The traditional model of packaged applications will prove insufficient for the pace of delivery or fit to requirements that customers need (see Future of Applications: Delivering the Composable Enterprise). Business composition expands the definition of the developer beyond the vendor’s development team. In composable business, leaders can quickly build new business capabilities by assembling digital assets in an organization that is architected for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.
As organizations embrace the concept of “composable enterprise,” they will invest in LC technologies that focus on supporting innovation and integration in their applications by reassembling capabilities as needs change across the enterprise. The composable enterprise requires organizations to have agility in application development by better reuse of existing PBCs to create new user experiences for new workflows and processes as required. Some of these processes will assist in business digitization and hyperautomation, and others will support new business innovations. Some will be purely tactical and exist for a short period, such as during business reorganization or mergers, and others will be strategic to address new ways of working and optimizing business processes through DigitalOps initiatives.
LC technologies are already solving the composable enterprise requirements through built-in integration features, RAD, and enablement of citizen and business unit developers. In addition, emerging LC technologies for BPA are enabling the development of new business processes in an efficient manner. Meanwhile, vendors are advancing their runtime capabilities to remove possible IT objections around scalability, while quality and security are generally considered as sufficient to excellent for most mainstream LC vendors.
Recommendations
As product leaders look to exploit market opportunities across LC-enabled markets, they must balance the near-term and long-term prioritization of technology, market and product/service considerations. LC product and service providers play a vital role in the future of digital business as enterprises increasingly embrace a composable business architecture. As product leaders navigate the journey ahead, they should consider the following recommendations across each phase.
Phase 1: Low Code for Democratization
Establish cross-role strategic planning efforts to explore, evaluate and assess the long-term implications for the evolution of LC-enabled markets relative to present-day product and service offerings.
Embrace technology democratization among prospective LC customers by focusing on more contextual opportunities within technology-empowered business units over “one size fits all” enterprisewide engagements.
Adjust go-to-market strategies to address a broader range of involved parties and decision makers that focus on value scenarios that go well beyond traditional technology categories.
Expect customers to be “digitally native” and much more educated and invested in their LC technology usage.
Prepare for a shift to shorter-term tactical commitments as business units are more willing to reevaluate and exploit flexible technology and service provider relationships more frequently than traditional centralized enterprise IT buyers.
Identify what types of LC products, services and features will suit the needs and behaviors of new business constituents by adjusting offerings at the product portfolio level and within the roadmap of individual products and services.
Phase 2: Low Code for Hyperautomation
Accelerate LC-enabled product capabilities, packaged as building blocks for application assembly, using agile and DevOps techniques, rather than traditional methods.
Target the combination of fusion business and IT teams — so that they have shared accountability for LC outcomes.
Promote UX product investments that drive opportunities for the abstraction of complexity business processes to support both less sophisticated users and future-state acceleration of decision automation.
Establish a long-term strategy for relative to digital marketplaces — addressing go-to-market, pricing/packaging and customer relationship implications.
Incorporate industry- and function-specific context-awareness capabilities as a differentiator into core platforms for insight delivery, analysis and model development.
Accelerate partner and ecosystem relationships and strategies where core capabilities become a vital part of your long-term “whole product” product and service strategy.
Invest in developing or partnering with providers of productized ACPs as analytics fabrics.
Phase 3: Low Code for Business Composition
Prioritize the introduction of composable technology offerings as you transition from monolithic products, pricing and packaging toward PBCs.
Realign LC product capabilities by focusing on the ability to deliver composable PBCs, not monolithic solutions.
Deliver capability-aligned pricing and packaging models to market over traditional whole product pricing/packaging options.
Increase competitiveness by enabling your customers to embrace composable business through strengthened modularity, orchestration, autonomy and discovery in your LC products and services.
Adjust your product and service roadmap to improve LC composability over the long run. This should be based on analysis of types of composability needs your clients can be expected to have and any emerging competitors.
Complement your products and services with business and technology offerings from partners that are compostable in nature and that allow for easy dynamic integration for your clients.
Evidence
Forecast Analysis: Low-Code Development Technologies
Note 1
The applications referred to here have light logic complexity that focus on creating, retrieving, updating and deleting (CRUD) data records.
Note 2
This list includes but is not limited to AI, machine learning, event-driven software architecture, RPA, iPaaS, iBPMS, low-code/no-code, packaged software and other types of decision, process and/or task automation tools.
Acronym Key and Glossary Terms
ACP
application composition platform
AI
artificial intelligence
BPA
business process automation
CAGR
compound annual growth rate
CRUD
create, retrieve, update and delete
iBPMS
intelligent business process management suite
iPaaS
integration platform as a service
LC
low code
LCAP
low-code application platform
PBC
packaged business capability
RAD
rapid application development
RPA
robotic process automation
UX
user experience