Every industry is pushing ahead with digital transformation, but traditional software development carries great uncertainty and adds many pitfalls to the process: the handoff between requirements and development, fast-changing business needs, differences in developers' skills, the choice of technology, and more. The result is software that does not match expectations and costs that keep rising.
What is a low-code development platform?
Software development has always kept evolving. From machine code to assembly language, to object-oriented and functional high-level languages, the core of software development has been a search for what stays constant amid constant change. The constant core has moved from basic binary to language code, advancing step by step, while the cost of learning and the difficulty of use have kept falling. As software is applied ever more widely and becomes a basic need like water and air, technical systems emerge that make applications easier to implement. A set of approaches — componentization, frameworks and structure — grew out of combining technology with real applications. The low-code development platform was born from this thinking: build these methods into a platform software system, then develop applications on top of it. That is what a low-code development platform is. It greatly reduces the risk of software development, raises its efficiency, lowers the investment it needs and makes applications more flexible.
Gartner predicted that by 2024, 65% of applications would be built with low-code, and that low-code would drive almost two-thirds of application development within three years. Accelerating digital business puts great pressure on IT leaders to deliver applications and value much faster. Rising demand for custom software to support digital transformation has given rise to developers outside IT, which in turn has fuelled the growth of low-code. Gartner's research shows that on average 41% of employees outside IT or business technology customize or build data or technology solutions, and it predicted that by the end of 2025, half of all new low-code customers would be business buyers outside IT. These predictions show that low-code development is the direction of travel and will become a foundational capability for digital applications.
The platform solves the hardest parts, so the business is easy to build
tsan.ai's work on low-code development grew out of its own challenges with software delivery speed and how long software stays fit for purpose. TideCMS, launched in the company's early days, focused on flexible data resource management. Unlike traditional Chinese CMS vendors, which mainly served web content management (WCM), TideCMS was an early pioneer of cross-industry data management, used to build multimedia content management, data asset management, meteorological data management, sports data management and other applications. As these applications grew, the company built up a set of core business components — data management, workflow management, workbench management, mobile work apps and more — and in 2019 launched a tenant management system for cloud services, supporting tenant-based licensing, billing and metering. In 2020 it officially launched the tsanCenter low-code development platform and, on top of it, application solutions for digital media, digital culture and tourism, digital villages, digital sports and the industrial internet.
That same year tsanCenter was put to full use in the market. The digital media solution was used to build provincial media cloud service platforms in Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Heilongjiang, Fujian and elsewhere, supporting media production, organization and publishing across each province. In a short time a single provincial platform came to serve more than a hundred media organizations with different business needs — very hard to achieve with a traditional software model. With tsanCenter, personalized data structures, workflows, work interfaces and statistics views can be built for different users, all configured in a visual interface by implementation staff according to user needs, or by users themselves.
Going forward, tsan.ai will keep building on the tsanCenter low-code development platform, developing more industry solutions and integrating more intelligent capabilities. It will offer one-stop support through every stage of a user's digital journey — from start-up to development and growth.