According to NASSCOM, the global LC/NC Industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28.1% from 2021 to 2025. “The pandemic has changed the way enterprises operate, and this is evident in India as well. At present, Indian enterprises are looking to transform their business processes and make them fully digital. All manual interactions and paper-intensive processes need complete digitisation to ensure that the customer and employee experience remains at par. This leads to heavy investment in the adoption of low code-no code platforms. These could be low code application platforms, low code data science platforms, or low code cognitive platforms. These platforms reduce the go-to-market time by 70% and make it extremely convenient to absorb the ever-changing need of the market, thus leading the competition curve. Another reason for its growing adoption is it solves the problem of managing a huge workbench of skilled resources,” said Arvind Jha, senior vice president, software development, Newgen Software.
Indian LCNC market
In FY 2021, Indian IT service providers and startups generated over USD 400 million in revenue from LC/NC solutions, of which 70% came from global markets. The market is projected to grow to USD 4 billion by 2025, a NASSCOM study showed. According to Gartner, low-code application development will account for over 65% of application development activity by 2024.
India currently has 150 LC/NC players, the vast majority of which are bootstrapped startups. As much as 80% of LC/NC PoCs (Proof of Concepts) were parlayed to full-scale implementations. Hubbler, Appy Pie, and ToolJet are the leading platforms in this space.
Tata Consultancy Services won 24 LC/NC contracts in the third quarter of the current fiscal year. Infosys is also hiring talents to deliver on LC/NC solutions. “This is one space which will disrupt the IT service market and ensure a quick roll-out of new ideas with little budget,” said Ankit Patel, co-founder at Aadhyarupam Innovators LLP.
According to NASSCOM, companies have seen a 30-35% increase in ROI while using LC/NC platforms and up to a 75% reduction in development time and a 65% reduction in costs.
Impact on workforce
The popularity of low-code and no-code solutions has opened up new job roles:
- Coding experts to build LC/NC platforms
- Skilled professionals to enable platform integrations between legacy systems and LC/NC platforms
- Experts with specialised skills to manage LC/NC platforms
Global tech leaders such as Microsoft, Amazon, and ServiceNow and Indian firms like Infosys, Tech Mahindra, and HCL are betting big on LC/NC solutions.
Leading adopters
The LC/NC platforms are quickly gathering steam across the world. “Low code no-code platforms empower developers to create applications rapidly and even test and deploy the same using the connected CI/CD pipelines. Nowadays, even the global system integrators that work across industries adopt these platforms to meet customer expectations. Hence, it has applicability across industries and verticals,” said Arvind Jha.
As much as 90% of Indian LC/NC adopters are using homegrown platforms. The BFSI sector has led the way on account of their need for high-volume, customer-facing digital touchpoints. HDFC, SBI, Kotak, and ICICI are among the early adopters. Retail and SaaS product firms followed. SaaS product & services firms, expanding into overseas markets, were responsible for 10% -15% of revenue for Indian LCNC players.
“The key driver of these industries is customer delight. Also, the change in regulatory compliance is so frequent that it needs to respond in no time. Hence the applicability of low-code platforms is high compared to other industries,” said Arvind Jha.
Challenges
According to Arvind Jha, the major challenge is selecting the right platform. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all LC/NC platform yet. “On the one hand, there are low-code platforms that are specialised in the creation of light-weighted applications for personal or small group usage. On the other hand, there are professional low-code platforms that empower large enterprises to rapidly create complex business use cases which require hierarchical approvals and are highly document-centric. Businesses must look at the 2X2 matrix of department vs enterprise and internal vs customer use cases and try to fit the different platforms to their different needs,” he said.
Vetting LCAP platforms and investing in the most cost-effective solution, is the real pain point. “Analysing the solution thoroughly to differentiate between UI capabilities, data capabilities, process & workflow capabilities, business logic, integration, and other services would be critical to ensure that the right investments are taking place,” said Srividya Kannan, founder, Avaali Solutions.
Low-code and no-code technology solutions are here to stay, but businesses must consider the viability, value-add propositions, and price-points before picking an LC/NC solution. “This technology is expected to grow significantly due to the rapid rise in the demand for new applications and continued digital acceleration. It is estimated that low-code application platforms will be responsible for over 70% of application development activity by 2025,” said Srividya Kannan.
