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CIO Applications Weekly Brief
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Zudy®: The No-Code Visionary
In a time when enterprise mobility has evolved from a niche to a way of life, a Gartner study reveals the current demand for business applications is growing five times faster than the development capacity of internal IT organizations. The current application development methods are expensive and difficult to scale. In a world dictated by on-demand experiences, legacy systems create long production cycles and by the time an application is finally ready for release, it is already outdated.
With an eye on the hyper-changing relationship between business and IT, the innovators at Zudy realized early on that technology-agnostic platforms would be the future of enterprise app development. In the late 90s, the founders developed a platform that easily integrated with several operating systems, but the solution had limitations because it only worked with SQL Server. “Since most large enterprises use many different databases to run their infrastructure, we wanted to build a solution that can function across all data sources, devices, and operating systems,” explains Kennedy. Combining over 30 years of experience in platform development with some trials and tribulations, Vinyl was born.
Break Free from Curly Brackets
Today, Vinyl is turning digital transformation upside down by empowering subject matter experts and IT to build value instead of code. A complete end-to-end development platform, Vinyl allows users to build, test, deploy, and maintain applications that run on any device, mobile or web, and access any data source.
We want to make IT an innovation engine again
With smart APIs that interface with back-end systems, the platform works seamlessly across cloud-based systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, along with legacy systems and on-premise relational database management systems like SQL, Oracle, IBM, and SAP HANA. Using Zudy’s powerful, declarative point-and-click development environment, enterprises can dramatically increase the number of new applications developed from an average of three per year to more than fifty, at a fraction of the cost using traditional IT coding methods.
Vinyl’s core architecture encompasses three layers— design, business logic, and data access. These layers are key to the platform’s flexibility. While the design layer gives users complete control over an application’s design, panels, and controls, Vinyl’s business engine automates all business processes and user-defined workflows in minutes. With Vinyl’s business logic environment, users can even rewrite complex formulas and macros with no coding. Lastly, using the platform’s data access layer, users can securely read and modify data without moving data from existing enterprise systems.
One of Vinyl’s most distinctive features allows users to perform cross-platform CRUD operations. CRUD is an acronym for create, read, update, and delete, the four actions you can perform with data. “Most application development platforms move enterprise data into a proprietary database. We can perform all CRUD functionalities without moving any data,” says Kennedy. Vinyl enables cross-platform CRUD across multiple data sources and displays data through dashboards or reports in minutes without affecting source systems. Vinyl works across all business processes, and it is the solution of choice for wide-ranging industries, including manufacturing, retail, environmental management, pharma, and many more.
Hand Coding Is a Thing of the Past
In one case, Zudy helped a large U.S. enterprise that was not only facing delays in its application development project but was also overshooting its budget by $5 million. As a last resort to speed production and end the backlog, the company partnered with Zudy. Although the task at hand was difficult, the first iteration of a minimally viable application was completed within only two days. Vinyl easily integrated with the company’s existing architecture which included ERP systems, SAP solutions, home-grown applications, and a DB2 database.The solution was fully customized for the company with upgraded functionality, features, and capabilities.
While previously the company was developing one application per year, Zudy radically changed the landscape, enabling the company to build more than 24 applications in a year.
“Our biggest pushback always comes from IT departments that believe hand coding enables better flexibility and granularity,” says Kennedy. In one such instance, Vinyl was turned down by a company for not having a debugger. Zudy clearly answered this challenge with one fact: There is no code to debug. “While we are not rejecting the benefits of hand coding, our mission is to foster the next big leap which is no-code,” Kennedy adds. Companies of all sizes entrust their programmers to develop a robust technology framework, but often crucial ideas are lost in translation. Zudy bridges the gap between business and IT by helping enterprises reimagine and re-engineer their business, creating new revenue models and new business models in a fraction of the time IT currently spends to build just one application. “We have learned that trying to win the hearts and minds of IT is the wrong strategy. You have to go directly to the heart of the business and make significant improvements,” says Kennedy.
Keeping Innovation in the Foreground
Since one of the main objectives of every company is to create new business models and revenue streams, Zudy’s goal is to solve core business problems by quickly automating processes. The company offers a host of engagement and training models for customers. Zudy’s training methods outshine regular approaches because the company trains clients on how to think differently. “We want to make IT an innovation engine again. With our guidance, companies can build robust, intuitive, and flexible applications in a truly comprehensive way in no time,” says Kennedy. To keep their customers on the cutting edge of innovation, Zudy releases a new version of Vinyl with product enhancements every six weeks. Even more important, the Vinyl product roadmap is dictated by their customers. Recently Zudy’s product roadmap improved the scalability of their solutions with multiple app server support.
"Complex enterprise IT landscapes demand a powerful application development platform like Vinyl"
Clearly, Zudy is ahead of its time with its state-of-the-art no-code platform—spearheading the future of application development. “Having a dream is not enough. It is about your willingness and determination to execute that dream. Our vision is to reinvent the way the world develops applications, one customer at a time,” concludes Kennedy.
