Consider the brands you feel most connected to. You’re likely thinking of big names like Apple, Nintendo, Samsung, Amazon, Sony and Nike. Now consider the ways you interact with these brands on a daily basis.
Our interactions with brands happen on an array of physical devices, such as our phone, television and smart watch. These physical devices serve up a bunch of digital experience flavours, such as mobile and web applications, music or video. The experiences we have with these devices and their media contributes to our perception of these brands.
In a competitive consumer market, brands must make continuous modernisation a priority. Market trends (and your users) wait for no one. And a single bad experience can be costly. Poor quality mobile apps are common offenders. This is why CTOs, who are responsible for maintaining the technology underpinning their brand’s digital presence, are looking for solutions. Solutions that can streamline their job of managing experiences across multiple platforms.
Multiexperience development platforms (MXDPs) enable organisations to rapidly scale their applications across a range of platforms and devices. Organisations can use MXDPs to create a single application, which they can then responsively deploy on a range of devices. This greatly simplifies digital transformation efforts and gives brands more control over their digital experiences.
So what are MXDPs and where did they come from?
MXDPs: The new MADPs
Gartner describes MXDPs as the new generation of mobile app development platforms (MADPs). It’s no longer enough for development platforms to simply support mobile and web application development. Consumers want a complete experience.
MADPs enable development for mobile, web, desktop web and mobile apps. As a minimum, they must support at least one more “experience”, which can include chats, wearables and augmented reality. Consumers’ desire for more has caused the evolution of MXDPs, which as the name suggests, support multiple experiences.
MXDPs are a type of low code framework, or app building tool. This type of technology has a long history, but has gained massive traction more recently. Principally because this approach to digital transformation comes with massive market advantages when the underlying technology aligns with organisations goals.
Here are the top five reasons CTOs are moving to MXDPs to create and support a plethora of digital user experiences.
1: MXDPs create internal operational efficiencies
Would you rather use several different programs to accomplish your day-to-day tasks, or one system that integrates all you need in one space?
Using a range of programs can slow down process, as it can be harder for systems to “talk” to each other, if they are in fact compatible at all. By streamlining your processes, you can speed things up and keep all your information in one, easy to access space.
This line of thinking applies in nearly all contexts, including software development. Your CTO and developers can become much more productive with the right set of tools.
MXDPs allow organisations to host a large number of their internal operations in one space. With everything in an interconnected system, processes can be streamlined. MXDPs enable organisations to create faster, more efficient operations for developing and delivering digital experiences and applications.
2: MXDPs enable digital transformation
Organisational requirements have moved beyond the simple development of mobile or web apps; development platform vendors needed to expand their value proposition. Market evolution and platform expansion resulted in the demand for and emergence of multi experience development platforms to enable digital transformation and facilitate a streamlined development system for a range of experience, including chat, voice, augmented reality and wearables.
Microservice applications allow organisations to update all target applications with a simple change to the model. This is digital transformation, simplified.
3: MXDPs reduce time to market for mobile apps
With superior internal operations and update process, MXDPs reduce time to market. This is a massive boon to digital transformation efforts.
MXDPs offer a range of front-end development tools and back-end services that enable rapid, scalable development of targeted and ambient user experiences across devices and channels.
MXDPs can improve development time by as much as ten times, thanks to reusable code and streamlined design processes. With faster releases, feedback cycles can be shortened. This enables your organisation to create and hone your digital experiences.
4: MXDPs eliminate shadow IT
If you were to create a list of all the software and applications used within your organisation, from the common universal ones down to the niche favourites of individuals in your team, you would likely be overwhelmed by just how many systems are given access to your data.
With all, or most, of your applications feeding out of one platform (your MXDP), you can get a bird’s eye view of your software landscape. This can help eliminate shadow IT, which is a potential security risk many organisations struggle with.
Not only does a MXDP give your CTO more oversight over your software landscape, but it also gives your employees fewer excuses to engage in shadow IT to begin with.
5: MXDPs give you better control over actual deployment
Previously, it may have taken about a week to conduct a single deploy to a cloud services provider such as Amazon Web Services. With the right MXDP, information can be sent directly to your AWS account. Plus, some platforms, such as Codebots, will also build a full distributed environment on your behalf. Providing further efficiencies by streamlining your continuous deployment processes.
Choosing your multi experience development platform
When evaluating a software service provider, it’s essential you assess the whole package on offer. All MXDP’s will probably fall somewhere on the spectrum of low-code to no-code.
In a nutshell, low-code helps developers be more productive and no-code helps non-developers become developers. Both low-code and no-code app development platforms have their place, and they share many of the same advantages.
The core selling feature for both of these products is harnessing technology to make things easier for humans. In the case of low-code, MXDP, the biggest winner is CTOs, who gain massive advantages tackling core challenges for their role.
Written by Eban Escott
Founder of Codebots
Dr Eban Escott received his Doctorate from UQ (2013) in Model-Driven Engineering and his Masters from QUT (2004) in Artificial Intelligence. He is an advocate of using models as first class artefacts in software engineering and creating not just technologies, but methodologies that enhance the quality of life for software engineers.
