Mendix Drives Economic Value for Large Companies Amid Software Developer Shortage, Strong Rise in Business Demand for Applications: Report

By AIT News Desk On Aug 14, 2020

Leading Research Firm Uses Real-Life Customer Experiences to Show That Low-Code is a Low-Risk, High-Advantage Proposition with Multimillion-Dollar Business Benefits

Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in low-code application development for the enterprise, announced the availability of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester on behalf of Mendix that demonstrates the real-world value of the Mendix low-code platform. The Total Economic Impact (TEI) of The Mendix Low-Code Application Development Platform study created by Forrester in June 2020 shows that an enterprise’s investment in the Mendix platform yielded total quantified benefits of $20.52 million over three years. That included $8.1 million in application delivery savings, $6 million in operational efficiencies from applications developed using the Mendix low-code platform, $3.3 million from accelerated time to market for new products and services, and $3.1 million in incremental revenue from improved customer engagement.

“The adoption of the Mendix platform widened the available talent pool of software developers, accelerated outcomes, fostered better business and IT collaboration, and automated tedious plumbing and infrastructure tasks required in traditional application development,” Forrester wrote. “As a result, firms experienced application delivery savings, operational efficiency, and business lift from the introduction of new products and improvements to customer engagement.”

This report comes at a pivotal moment in which companies across all sectors are struggling with digital transformation. The historic shortage of developer talent is now colliding with the growing demand for software by major enterprises seeking to meet rapidly changing needs.

Many companies are turning to low-code to bridge the gap and accelerate application creation. Low-code’s graphical interface and model-driven logic allow people who have no or limited coding experience to play an active role in developing applications. It also enables business and IT collaboration to ensure the applications deliver the tailored results businesses need. But IT leaders may not support low-code because they don’t realize that this technology is actually enterprise ready, and they may worry that it will reduce their power and prestige.

“The TEI study illustrates that low-code is no flight of fancy technology,” said Derek Roos, co-founder and CEO of Mendix. “The Mendix low-code platform profoundly impacts the way organizations work. Companies have been using Mendix for years to drive significant business results – and other organizations can realize the benefits of low-code, too.”

The TEI Study is Based on a Proven Framework and Experiences of Actual Customers

Forrester, a leading global research advisory firm, reached these conclusions using its TEI framework and methodology, which has been employed in studies with thousands of leading companies over more than a decade. The multi-step TEI research consisted of these steps:

Speaking with Mendix stakeholders and Forrester subject matter experts to gather data about the Mendix platform
Interviewing four Mendix customers to obtain data on costs, benefits and risks involved with their deployments
Constructing a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed customers
Modeling the impact of the Mendix platform

Mendix customers interviewed for the Forrester effort included two North American businesses – an insurance company and a real estate broker – which have been using the Mendix platform for 60 months and 102 months, respectively. The companies have 12,000 and 26,000 users of the applications created on the Mendix platform. The report also included two EMEA customers – a utility, with 48 months of Mendix platform experience and 26,000 application users, and an insurance company with 26 months of Mendix experience and 5,700 users on applications the client created with Mendix.

Forrester used the data from the four customers to create a composite organization to illustrate the quantifiable benefits and cost savings that can be achieved with Mendix. The composite organization – a North America-based multinational B2B and B2C company with operations in Europe and Asia and 15,000 users of applications created with the Mendix low-code platform – was struggling to meet the software demands of its business units at a reasonable cost.

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The Research Shows That Mendix Delivers Significant Application Delivery Savings

Like many businesses today, the composite organization had relied on traditional programming languages, frameworks, and legacy systems, and required manual data verification and integration prior to adopting Mendix. As a result, it suffered from error-laden and poor-quality data entry, high costs, and lengthy lead times. However, Mendix enabled the organization to increase development productivity, decrease personnel costs, and reduce application operations costs.

This was possible due to a broad range of Mendix features and functionality. As Forrester noted, the Mendix visual modeling reduces reliance on traditional programming “speeding development by six to 10 times.” The Mendix low-code platform also enables technical and nontechnical developers to collaborate, which Forrester explained enlarges “the pool of talent able to participate in application development.” Forrester added that the “real-time involvement of business process domain experts” supported by Mendix is valuable in “reducing rework.”

“The robust, complete Mendix platform enables organizations to solve problems by enabling blended teams to collaborate, driving efficiencies and doing more in less time,” said Roos. “Enterprises can bring their digital solutions to market faster, realizing an improved ROI at a faster pace, as well.”

Addressing this point, the vice president of software development at the real estate broker interviewed for the TEI report explained his company’s experience, saying: “The ability to develop new products quickly with Mendix has changed our business. For example, most projects in our organization can take up to two years with traditional development. Now, we got our first iteration done within six months, and the second iteration done within four months. We can get so much out to our customers faster, and we get quick feedback from them. The speed-to-market has improved our relationship with our customers.”

Businesses That Use Mendix Also Benefit from Greater Innovation and Profitability

The Mendix low-code platform is also ideal for situations in which an individual or organization is not certain at the outset of a project just exactly what the application should look like. Traditional development makes experimentation incredibly expensive and slow. But Mendix enables developers to iterate quickly to deliver the right answers, experiences, and products faster. This accelerated time-to-market helps organizations grow their revenue and profits.

Forrester said contributors to accelerated speed-to-market and incremental revenue include:

Testing and learning on new ideas, using speed-to-market benefits to lower the cost of failure, enabling the composite organization to “fail fast” and outpace competition with new products, services, and business models
A higher frequency of low-cost experiments with emerging technologies like conversational interfaces, AI, and IoT, leading to differentiated product and service experiences
Reduction of time and effort expended by skills development teams needed to achieve goals on time
Creating an innovation culture that attracts top talent and moving IT from a cost center to a revenue-driving enabler

The insurance company’s development operations lead that Forrester interviewed for the TEI report commented: “Prior to our investment in Mendix, we outsourced some application development and experienced very long lead times. It was difficult to change our minds mid-project. It often took multiple years to build an application, and by that time, the business changed its focus, or the products changed, or the market changed, or all of the above changed. It was a very frustrating experience before Mendix.”

Roos added, “Low-code is a paradigm shift. But with Mendix, it’s a low-risk change that yields real business results. We would like to thank Forrester, and our customers that participated in the TEI effort to tell their low-code success stories, for helping to illustrate the economic value of Mendix.”

To learn more about low-code, attend Mendix World: Version 2.0, the world’s largest virtual low-code conference ever. This event will kick off Sept. 1 and is free of charge for all attendees. Mendix World: Version 2.0 will feature more than 60 sessions, including more than 20 by customers, and cover the gamut of low-code application development topics from strategy to practical, hands-on platform training.