In this article, you will learn about the main design decisions regarding Open Lowcode.
Open-Source
Most enterprise software actors make their customer captive. When an important proprietary solution is in place, it is too costly to switch, due to the amount of data that was created in the proprietary solution way. Cloud solutions make that even worse, as the customer is captive both for the software and the hardware.
Being captive is bad for both parties. Of course, customers get a poor service at a high price. But things are not ideal for the provider: complacency of a captive market will make the provider irrelevant for the next generation. Also, a business serving frustrated captive customers is not a pleasant place, and is unlikely to attract the best talents.
It is like forbidding your spouse to leave by taking his/her passport away. It is unlikely this will be a path to a happy couple, and will end up being an unpleasant experience for both of you.
Turn the problem in any direction, the only solution is open-source. And open-source is financially viable: there is enough money in enterprise software for the author of an open-source package to be the default provider of a number of services, and thus fund the development of the product.
Provide Technical bricks
Most enterprise software solutions provide a pre-defined business process. This makes sense in some situations, like accounting. But in many others, a company will want to innovate, and to build a solution especially adapted to its size, history, and culture.
Such as specific solution can be built to a very large extent by assembling pre-defined technical bricks that are agnostic to the business process (reports, workflow, data-model, security…). Open Lowcode provide such bricks.
In almost all situations where you need to build something special, it will be faster to assemble technical bricks to your need that try to adapt a pre-baked business process in a software package that will not allow easy extension.
A tool for developers
It is trendy to present graphical tools as a replacement for developers. Those graphical tools are great at first, and may be easy to sell to some company stakeholders. However, they lack many of the powerful features of real development: in practice, you will be blocked at some point to implement complex requirements, and even before that, you will be far less productive. Those complex bits are typically the ones offering a big part of the value of the software you develop.
Therefore, a good platform automatizes as much as possible, but still leaves you the choice to call a developer for the few complex bits here and there where you need specific business logic. Open Lowcode promise is to replace your 15 people team by a single developer. This is a better proposition than having 5 business analysts struggling with the graphical tool and being able in the end to implement only 90% of your requirements.