BFSI, Healthcare, Retail & HR are Top App users

WaveMaker is the low code app development platform from Pramati Technologies. Deepak Anupalli, Head of Product at WaveMaker in a dialogue with PC Quest discusses Indian App market and how WaveMaker is making progress.

How is app development business fairing in India?

While Wavemaker can be used to build greenfield applications, the opportunity for the platform is in modernizing applications and architectures in enterprises (brownfield). While we are not an alternative to core programming tools, our RAD paradigm fits in nicely in fast business programming environments that rely on APIs and connectors to quickly assemble tactical applications.

The motivation to use Wavemaker for enterprises is to move into a microservices-based architecture and adopt DevOps automation for continuous delivery of containers. We see an opportunity for Wavemaker in in-house IT of enterprises, system integrators who maybe piecing together solutions, and those looking for a data-driven prototyping toolset.

How does Low Code App Development help in the higher productivity of an enterprise?

Low code platforms offer a full-stack visual development and complete application management capabilities. They enable enterprises to quickly build, test and run enterprise-grade mobile and web applications with very minimal code. Enterprises can freely experiment and innovate with almost half the risk footprint with traditional methods. Because applications built using low code platforms are modular by default, cost of an application change/ enhancement is negligible.

Open standards-based stacks, give low code platforms the openness that 4GLs lacked and they can be used for a wide range of requirements ranging from simple automation of paper-based processes to creating new systems ground-up. Applications built using low code aren’t a compromise, they are robust, secure and can be a seamless extension of existing data sources and legacy systems.

Pre-built connectors offered out-of-the-box makes applications easily extensible and helpfully leverage the power of distributed economy. Built-in DevOps and container management capabilities help low code platforms deploy applications into and between any existing infrastructure efficiently and economically.

What are the verticals that are mostly into app development?

Almost all verticals have a software enterprise or startup serving it. BFSI and Healthcare continue to be the heavy adopters, while consumer tech is fast moving (but not sustaining). Wavemaker sees opportunities in BFSI, healthcare, retail, and HR, in India, where modernization is blooming.

What are the highlights in terms of Business of WaveMaker?

WaveMaker enables enterprises to modernize their existing applications and systems with our Rapid Studio and HyScale platforms, accelerating the migration and modernization efforts in moving to the latest technology stacks, hence transforming enterprises to digital rapidly. A lot of enterprises are going through tough transformation challenges with legacy platforms like AS/400, VB.NET, Lotus Notes etc.

There is no direct migration path from these systems and modernization approach taken by WaveMaker, leverages re-use of existing systems such as Databases, SOAP web services, API wrappers created from existing codebase, cutting short the time to modernize. We have been working with some of the large enterprises who are transitioning from legacy systems, where WaveMaker Rapid platform takes the centre stage in the modernization efforts and Professional services teams help in completing the implementation.

We have seen substantial growth in the last year in terms of customer acquisition, where we have transitioned from acquiring medium enterprise to large enterprise customers. Also, we expanded our market reach from Americas to Europe, Middle East & APAC. We have seen big players like Microsoft, Oracle, Google trying to enter the High Productivity aPaaS or Low-code segments, in a move to capture the enterprise legacy modernization and digital transformation trends. With WaveMaker’s strong technical capabilities combined with a service-enabled approach to modernization, puts us in the league to play a larger market role.

How is WaveMaker unique than other platforms and what are its USPs?

Like mentioned earlier, for WaveMaker the opportunity is with large enterprise use cases where customization is the key because everyone’s reality is unique. Unlike most low code players, we are not generalizing and choking markets with complex feature sets. In our belief, that’s going the ERP or the BMP way all over again - forcing the business to work the way software wants it. It isn’t healthy, especially today when software is supposed to go where business needs it most and not the other way around.

Having said that, we have engineered WaveMaker to be on par with our competition in terms of technical features. Additionally, WaveMaker Rapid is architected to be flexible at many levels, having the ability to customize the product for OEM and re-branded versions of Rapid. The component extension model adopted by Rapid through prefabs enables us to build a component library for customer’s industry-specific use cases. This keeps the balance to enhance the product independently and still customize it for industry-specific requirements.

Additionally, WaveMaker’s professional services bring to the table IT service expertise in emerging technologies like Cloud, BigData, Mobile and Analytics. This is important because most low code platforms today are standalone product ventures, that can only go as far as it is engineered to go, whereas with WaveMaker and it’s accompanying services enterprises get to accelerate efforts and customize/scale at will using our offshore IT services teams. This is a win-win for enterprises and us because, with WaveMaker, enterprise projects aren’t limited scope like pure platform play and aren’t unlimited cost like pure services play. It’s a healthy midway that actually works.

How many customers are there in India? How you do you tap into customers?

We have always been a global player, naturally, the US was a strong adopter of new technology. WaveMaker has had significant wins in North America last year and early this year. This year, we have begun campaigning in the India market. Our reputation among Indian BFSI as one the industry’s premium middleware server vendor only helps as we already have a couple of large installations for our middleware servers such as ICICI Bank, but typically, we expect the sales cycles to be longer in India. In our experience, the key to win in India is to have a good trench strategy. Expect roadshows this year.

Please update on the developments at WaveMaker, product expansion plans etc.

WaveMaker Rapid is aimed to provide Angular 5.0 support by Q2 2018 and also poised to migrate several thousands of applications built using Angular 1.x to 5.0 with the new release. This migration is completely undertaken by the platform itself and that’s a big advantage using WaveMaker.

With an increase in large enterprise adoption, WaveMaker Rapid is enhanced to support features such as security audit trials, data protection, multi-tier data validation, offline-data support for large datasets etc.

WaveMaker HyScale is enhanced to take advantage of integrations with content management systems like Kubernetes, OpenShift etc. and enable a layered approach for DevOps modernization separating the stack, artefacts & configuration into layers for better management.