HFS Horizons: Low-Code Services, 2023

As the workforce becomes more digitally fluent and re-imagines the demands of software-based solutions, scopes requirements, designs solutions, and delivers products, the need for custom software is expanding. IT departments and their services partners use visual tools to design, create, and implement software to deliver business outcomes.

The shift from traditional pro-code to low-code development as the primary means for developing back- or front-office software allows software engineering and application development teams to collaborate more effectively, understand business needs, and (finally) deliver at the speed the business needs. In fact, the changes low-code brings allow leading firms to break out of linear software development; DevSecOps teams can now function as clusters of teams rather than as independent cogs in the corporate IT flywheel.

Low-code services from leading players offer dedicated tools, frameworks, and solutions, improving how companies deliver the experience of high-quality software to employees, stakeholders, and customers. Yet many IT services and software engineers limit the impact of low-code by tucking it into their existing DevSecOps practices.

For this report, HFS looked for IT services firms with well-developed, discrete low-code practice areas focusing on the speed, value, and deep capabilities they and their partner ecosystem can bring to enterprise customers. The HFS Horizons: Low-Code Services, 2023 report dives into 12 IT services and advisory firms that have articulated a clear vision of how they are using and deploying low-code solutions:

• Horizon 1: Services firms bringing low-code practices in Horizon 1 exhibit the capability to support enterprise software engineering and applications teams to deliver game-changing software development and modernization. The capabilities speed development, integration, and tool delivery so businesses can adapt to changing customer and market trends. The services firms deliver on the promise of Agile methodologies to engage the business and accelerate the delivery of tools aligned to outcomes.
• Horizon 2: Services firms providing low-code practices in Horizon 2 help their customers break down the functional silos between the back, middle, and front offices. Their customers and partners help push IT closer to the business. They have an increasingly technology-savvy workforce that uses low-code to co-create solutions for better business and customer experiences.
• Horizon 3: Services firms with low-code capabilities in Horizon 3 collaborate with their customers to re-image the role of software developers and how they co-innovate across the business and with their ecosystem of providers, partners, and customers. These firms educate the market on new software development lifecycle models and bring skills and capabilities that combine outcomes, experiences, and innovation using low-code to enable a software-development-driven renaissance.

To be successful, the firms in this report proved through their capabilities, partnerships, and customers that they invest in their capabilities to help customers use low-code as the game changer it is. Their work across the software development lifecycle, willingness to support training and business readiness, and use of teams inside and outside IT to co-imagine, co-create, and co-refine have led to low-code being a game-changing technology that brings software development closer to the end user.

HFS Horizons: Low-Code Services, 2023

Note: All service providers within a Horizon are listed alphabetically.
Source: HFS Research, 2023

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