At Experieco, we have been working closely with some of our clients for two decades; building and maintaining business critical technologies including customer-facing applications. This has given us unparalleled access to not only understand their technology requirements, but the business decisions and desired outcomes that the technology enables.
It has also meant that we get insights into the decision-making and evaluation process for new technologies and the limitations of some technology decisions. Traditionally there have been two main paths a typical enterprise will take; custom development or ‘off-the shelf’ products. When helping our clients, the same pain points would always come up:
Off-the-shelf Products. Also known as SaaS products, these products are typically perfect for smaller organisations that can meld their processes to fit the product. SMBs also benefit from reasonable pricing and with short activation periods can realise value quickly. However, this does not translate to larger businesses that have mature processes and their own unique way of doing things that are often behind competitive advantage or differentiation. Our clients have found adoption of SaaS products to be slow and painful, not as feature rich as they had thought, and require heavy customisation (beyond typical configuration) that tends to drag on and on and cost more and more. Think of the frog in boiling water.
Custom Development. At the other end of the spectrum is custom development. As a services business that has specialised in custom development for many years, we sympathise with the pain points our customers feel. Whilst great for one off applications (complex or simple) our clients have found that custom development can be expensive, and it can take a long time to realise value.
These common pain points of speed, cost and lack of flexibility drove Experieco to explore if there was a better and faster way to deliver value for our clients. Thus Appnivity was born.
Appnivity is an Experieco developed low-code platform that allows us to rapidly co-develop web and mobile applications for our clients, allowing easy cloning and utilising clean UI standards to ensure beautiful front-end applications. The low-code development environment meant that we could sit down with our clients and develop pages and features in short workshop sessions instead of long requirements-gathering phases and disappearing off to develop custom code.
Appnivity met our clients’ needs; fast development at a reasonable price. Very quickly both Experieco and our client base were asking more and more of the Appnivity platform and we quickly outgrew the base architecture of the product.
Experieco was at a crossroad. Re-architect Appnivity, or see what else was out there? Working with some key clients, we began to evaluate the global enterprise low-code market, reviewing Gartner and Forrester assessments as well as talking to other low-code service business and clients. In 2018, we made the choice to stop new feature development on Appnivity and to become an implementation partner for OutSystems, which is a global leader in rapid application development.
A feature rich platform, OutSystems is perfect for enterprise organisations that have a growing backlog and multiple application requirements that may extend from customer-facing apps to process automation or core systems. Adoption of this technology has allowed us to leverage the decades of development experience with our clients and deliver value quickly, at a fraction of the cost, allowing us to stay focused on support our clients’ business goals and helping them transition their organisation to a truly digitally focused business.
Contact Experieco to find out how OutSystems can help transform your business. Email info@experieco.com or call +64 9 376 9547