Low-code platforms are gaining prominence each day with the advancement in digitization. Gartner predicts that by 2024, these low code platforms will account for 65 percent of all application development. Developers and enterprises are switching to low-code development platforms for a variety of reasons.
These platforms have significant advantages over traditional development tools and allow for the rapid production of rich, enterprise-grade programs. With the increasing demand for digital solutions, low-code platforms are gaining traction like never before. The benefits they provide result in significant cost reductions and assist businesses in sticking to their budgets.
It is amazing that how low-code development tools can serve a variety of business domains. Because low-code platforms are still evolving, there’s a significant chance you’ll see them improve in the future, offering many additional advantages over standard development platforms.
Hence, the race of advancement has already started, and many companies are leading the way with their innovations. ClickPaaS is one of the prominent names in that list which offers updated services around the entire life cycle of application design, development, deployment, and maintenance.
In the following interview, Cypress Hu, the Founder of ClickPaaS shares valuable insights into the company’s journey since inception, the current industry scenario, and his vision on the future of the company.
Please brief our audience about ClickPaaS, its values, and how it is positioned as a leading player in the software development space.
ClickPaaS is a low-code application platform provider based on domain model designer and is committed to helping more and more middle and large-sized enterprise customers, consulting firms, SaaS enterprises build critical applications and complex core systems in a faster, easier-to-be-iterated, and lower-cost way.
ClickPaaS empowers partners to rapidly design vertical industry solutions and to meet business digital demands.
Meanwhile, ClickPaaS built collaboration with United Nations Industrial Development Organization (Shanghai) and offered them a commonweal project.
ClickPaaS adopted domain model-driven technology in the product that is composed of the domain model, data model, UI/UX, flow management, integration model, business intelligence, and instance management. In 2021, ClickPaaS has received a Series B Plus funding led by Sequoia Capital and co-invested by BAI, SIG, Future Capital, and 5Y Capital. Also, more than 20 industry prizes were obtained in last year.
What other solutions does your company offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
ClickPaaS has various tier1 clients and offered solutions and services primarily to public sector, international logistics, construction, banking, manufacturing, and energy industries.
Take a customer from the banking industry as an example, ClickPaaS and our partner PWC developed a risk management and control system—an internal clients rating management system—to connect with internal banking systems, set rating standards, and reduce financing risk.
This system consists mainly of customer master data management, transaction record management, customer rating management, rule management, etc., which meets customized requirements as well as the regulation from the government and helps realize digital transformation for banking customers.
Cross-border logistics is also one of our focused industries. We build an enterprise MSDI digital marketing platform for our customer and help them establish customer-centered marketing organizational structure and process, enhance the collaborative work of all departments, carry out detailed management of the sales process, realize orderly tracking and monitoring, and provide a complete set of inquiry and quotation system.
Share your opinion on how modern technologies have transformed the low code development solutions niche, and what more could be expected in the near future?
Microservice, container, cloud-native, and open-source technology have made low code development solutions more stable, flexible, agile, and super automatic. And cloud computing technology has entered the mature stage providing a solid basic foundation for LCAP development.
Since 5G technology has been deployed in the world, a large number of new IOT application scenarios will be blooming. More cutting-edge technology, like AI, multi-experience, hyper-automation, and data fabric, is going to be combined with low-code technology as a new generation composable platform so that low-code development solutions could offer a better user experience and realize more complicated scenarios.
As some reports showed, more and more enterprises will adopt LCAP for their digital transformation in the future because of its convenience and low cost.
Considering the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on global economies, what were the challenges that knocked at your company’s doors and how did you pivot from those challenges?
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot of things and many enterprises shut down because of that. As an IT start-up, ClickPaaS gained more opportunities rather than challenges, though employees have to work from home for a period. By switching to online work model, ClickPaaS team built a global pandemic management system for a state-owned enterprise with worldwide coverage within one week helping control the virus infection risk successfully.
By the end of 2021, the system has covered 47 country offices, 64 overseas projects, and 18,000 staffs. In addition, ClickPaaS offered an enterprise operation management system for a Shanghai municipal governmental to have an economic eagle-eye of those large enterprises registered in Shanghai. Then the government is able to proactively provide corresponding supporting solutions and help for those companies in trouble based on the information collected in the system. So basically, ClickPaaS opened up more markets during 2020.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs aspiring to venture into the low code development solutions space?
In my opinion, low code development technology is a very hot topic right now. Since Forrester proposed the concept of low-code and no-code in 2014, many companies have entered this niche market. Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Mendix, etc. have gained huge success in the global market, and ClickPaaS also grasped the opportunity starting from China market.
Although some authoritative reports pointed demands of purchasing low-code application platforms will dramatically increase, this market is becoming more competitive. In the future, low-code technology is probably integrated with other emerging technologies.
So, I would suggest if entrepreneurs would like to venture into this space, they should consider their differentiation compared to other vendors and consider how they can utilize emerging technology to improve current low-code productivity. What’s more, remember to be brave, be responsible, and not be afraid of failure once you decide to do that!
How do you envision scaling ClickPaaS’ operations and offerings in 2022 and beyond?
From the perspective of industry, we will keep focusing on our targeted vertical industries, provide more professional industrial solutions and components for our customers, and improve the ecosystem with our partners.
We have established a new cooperation with some companies in the 2021 ClickPaaS ecological conference we call it ClickDream Conference to enable partner to build dreams, and we welcome more and more organizations to join our ecosystem in the future.
We are considering a few emerging technologies to make breakthroughs, enhance user experience, and satisfy more customer requirements. In 2021, we made an important improvement in the underlying technology and published a platform called Grid Pro which could deal with million transaction rows with zero latency. A data flow automation platform was published as well. Next year, a professional design platform with a new UI/UX called Designer Pro is in the plan, which enables designers to customize the system interface.
From the perspective of marketing, we aim to build a complete branding system to raise brand awareness and image globally. Besides the domestic market, we also plan to enter overseas markets. Although the competitiveness is intense, there are still lots of global demands.
About the Leader
Cypress Hu worked as an IT architecture consultant in Oracle and a senior consultant in IT Convergence before he started ClickPaaS. During that time period, Cypress has served more than 20 key customers in China and delivered more than 40 digital transformation projects for international enterprises so that he has profound experience in IT architecture and application development.
In 2015, Cypress came back to China from USA and built up a team to start ClickPaaS. With his many years of IT experience and a global perspective, the startup team chose to research and develop low-code application platform to offer alternative for those products from international vendors, like Oracle and SAP.
In the beginning, customers from China purchased Oracle or SAP for two reasons. The first was the best practice behind. And the other reason was that they bought them as a development platform because of their stability.
However, currently, these vendors could not meet various customized and changeable demands in time and in budget anymore. Moreover, localization or homemade solution is a quite common and basic need for Chinese customers.
Therefore, ClickPaaS received orders from some angel customers, survived in the market, and finally served many tier-one customers with correct strategies and decisions from Cypress and his management team.
Besides, Cypress is also dedicated to setting the eco-system with partners to enable them to improve business.