Power

No code, no problem? AWS wants to sell you a world of prefab software

The cloud giant entered the so-called "no code" market this week, another sign that more companies want tools that let their business experts bypass the IT department.

Amazon Honeycode

Amazon Honeycode allows users to create web and mobile business applications without having to hassle the IT department.

Image: Amazon

The world needs more "good enough" software.

As big companies outside the tech industry rush toward digital transformation — which is often just well-marketed business FOMO — they no longer need to be convinced that they should use modern software throughout every aspect of their business. It's clear, however, that a lot of those companies don't have the time, money or expertise required to compete with top-tier software development organizations.

Enter "no code" and "low code" development tools. The two categories are often conflated, and they shouldn't be: They describe distinct software development workflows and require different levels of expertise. Low-code tools generally require the user to understand the basics of programming languages, while no-code tools are accessible to anyone with a mouse and a browser; you could even think of Minecraft as a no-code development tool. But both achieve the task of making it easier for people to build software.

AWS shook up this market in a big way Wednesday when it launched Amazon Honeycode, a no-code development tool modeled after perhaps the most widely used business tool: the spreadsheet. Amazon Honeycode allows users to create web and mobile business applications without having to hassle the IT department, and joins several similar tools already available from cloud rivals Microsoft and Google.

Software created with these tools won't rival what tech giants are cranking out from software development teams with three-comma budgets. But for an increasingly large number of companies, that's fine: They just need something that looks decent, works reliably, and doesn't cost millions of dollars to build and maintain.

And the number of companies reaching that conclusion seems likely to accelerate if economic weakness persists on the back of a surge in new cases of COVID-19 heading into 2021. These companies have no choice but to modernize their software, but now they don't have to break the bank to do so.

"The way you do development has just changed," said Charles Lamana, corporate vice president, citizen applications platform at Microsoft. "The way a large enterprise should think about enterprise application development is fundamentally different."

What's code?

No-code development tools, which is how you can describe Amazon Honeycode, are designed to be used by what marketing departments like to call "power users" of enterprise software. These people are not developers, but they can do amazing things with spreadsheets and know the business tactics and goals of their company far better than the IT department.

Many no-code tools involve dragging and dropping preset templates, combining them to create logic trees that can handle essential business tasks such as processing invoices. Others interpret existing corporate data and present it in an easier-to-understand user interface that's accessible to the bosses.

A surprisingly large number of businesses still run a lot of their core business processes in spreadsheets shared across teams and departments. That works, to a certain extent, but can be confusing and almost hostile to anyone but the owner of that spreadsheet.

Amazon Honeycode Amazon Honeycode is a new no-code development tool modeled after perhaps the most widely used business tool: the spreadsheet.Image: Amazon

No-code tools like Amazon Honeycode and Google AppSheet can take data trapped in spreadsheets and present it the form of an app, with a friendly user interface designed around modern user experience protocols. Without having to write a single line of code, business users creating those apps can customize the presentation of that data, add other important data sources, and create rules to automatically generate actions based on that data.

Customers in industries that are "business-process centric" are very interested in no-code tools, said Amit Zavery, vice president/general manager and head of platform for Google Cloud. That includes companies in the insurance industry, who have a lot of representatives in the field gathering data that needs to sync with complicated custom back-end systems, or companies where inventory management is the lifeblood of their business.

"They have a lot of analysts or business users or citizen developers, but they don't have huge IT shops," Zavery said. "For them, this is a much more natural way of getting things done, instead of waiting for six months or 12 months for somebody else to build it for them."

A little code goes a long way

Low-code tools are a little different, because some understanding of professional coding is still required to produce an app. But in reality, business users can get the app 80% or so of the way there, with professional developers stepping in to complete the last steps.

Microsoft's Lamana argues that these kinds of more powerful tools, such as Microsoft's Power Apps, are needed when building applications that might be used by thousands of employees inside a company or potentially the general public.

"We have customers with an app built with no developers and no coders but still using our low-code capabilities that have 40,000 to 50,000 monthly active users inside of a company," Lamana said. "That's an app you're going to be hard-pressed to build in a pure no-code solution."

This is the eventual promise of the low-code market, said Mike Hughes, senior director of product marketing for Outsystems, where, he said, "low-code platforms are used to create mission-critical applications." Outsystems has customers who have tried to build key business applications with dozens of developers in sophisticated programming languages only to fail and find that low-code tools are cheaper and easier to use, he said.

Another benefit of low-code tools is that they free up developers, adding coding expertise where needed to low-code apps but otherwise focusing on their company's trickiest and most important projects.

These types of tools are not new: Tech vendors have been pushing this vision for decades, dating back to the days of Visual Basic and PowerBuilder. They worked well in the preweb era, but a lot of companies and developers have increasingly shrugged at those sorts of low-code tools because they can't handle the complexity that software now requires. A lot of software developers would rather just build it themselves than depending on a template, Google's Zavery said.

But as economic circumstances change and companies can no longer afford as many expensive developers as they could in a boom market, even software developers might be forced to do more with less.

Cracking the code

With AWS deciding to finally enter this market, after years of signals and preliminary development projects, all three major cloud vendors have now committed to helping software developers of every standard.

No-code tools like AppSheet, which Google acquired earlier this year, tend to enter an organization at the team or department level, which is how a lot of enterprise software has been purchased over the last decade. Low-code tools like Microsoft's Power Apps tend to be sold into an organization's IT department, as part of a broader package of software.

Amazon Honeycode represents new territory for AWS. Rank-and-file developers were most responsible for AWS' early growth, spinning up "rogue IT" applications on cloud servers when they couldn't get stodgy CIOs to give them company resources for skunkworks projects. But no-code tools are typically purchased by marketing managers, or finance wizards, and those people are not as familiar with AWS.

"This will be an interesting test for AWS as they have struggled to sell anything to anyone beyond hard core developers and infrastructure engineers," said Charles Fitzgerald, an angel investor and former Microsoft executive.

The march of technology has always involved layers of abstraction, sweeping away obstacles and making computer programming more accessible. If AWS can spread its magic beyond the developers that made it rich, software might finally be ready for its prefab moment.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep Reading Show less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep Reading Show less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep Reading Show less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep Reading Show less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep Reading Show less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins