Taking no-code into the Enterprize — our experience

Photo by Sasha Kaunas on Unsplash — Enterprize

We’ve been building no-code applications professionally for 2 years as MomentumGroup.tech. After a long career in a large organization, I was looking for an escape from a 16-year career of youthful enthusiasm tamped down by red tape and my perception at the time of indecision.

Luckily for me, I stumbled upon an exciting and otherwise invisible world of entrepreneurship and innovation, free from the constraints of as many as nine levels of management, able to make decisions free from hierarchy and get things done.

In this exciting new world, I’ve taken the skills acquired in the enterprise world and I’ve built a team who has delivered over 30 projects from scheduling systems, customer relationship management tools, content management systems, and digital subscription products. Some small, others very large and complex.

But perhaps the most satisfying, and admittedly the best paying projects we have worked on, have actually been for clients selling their software to enterprise organizations. As it turns out, the clients of Momentum who are able to sell to enterprize have larger budgets, because in many cases they have better business models.

Enterprise organizations are defined as having 1,000–5,000 employees, depending on where in the world you are located. They typically have higher expectations in terms of security, certification, and professionalism than small-medium businesses. They are big targets and their reputations are on the line if they make a poor choice of IT vendor (as we have seen with recent hacking scandals in Australia!) They are very risk-aware and require systems to be stable, supported, and auditable.

Which types of products can be built?

One way you can categorize no-code tools is between those designed with enterprise in mind and those without. The ones with enterprise in mind typically start with an annual license fee of $50,000 or higher. Examples are Outsystems and Unqorked (two vendors I’ve spoken to) and I’m sure all of their competitors.

Then you have the others designed for consumers, for example, Bubble.io — the tool we specialize in. Bubble is sold at a much lower price point, but offers many of the same functionalities, sans some of the important certifications (e.g. SOC2, ISO27001) and abilities to export code and deploy the applications created on dedicated, enterprise-friendly virtual infrastructure.

All of these tools enable you to build websites, web applications, mobile applications, enterprise resource planning, and analytics platforms — to name a few use cases.

Could enterprise companies use tools like Bubble to build real, production applications?

This is the question at the heart of this article. When I started working with Bubble several years ago, it was a new platform promising to make web application development easier and quicker. This makes Bubble a perfect choice for Startups building any kind of web application. Why pay 3–4x as much and wait longer to test your ideas? Very good question, and one that has driven entrepreneurs towards Bubble en masse.

Well — 2 years in, and I would say the answer is a resounding Yes! This being said, I will prequalify the Yes with “it depends” on your use cases, and whether Enterprize companies are comfortable that your solution fits within their framework.

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The underlying technology is strong and robust, but like many things, it comes down to perception and your ability to comprehend risks and propose ways to manage them.

Team composition

As we’ve built larger and larger projects on Bubble, we’ve moved from teams of 1 designer and 1–2 developers to having Product Managers, Project Managers, Technical Architects, Devs, UXUI Designers, and QA Engineers. While Bubble is the toolset we use, we’ve been building out our methodology for rapid product building which is less about specific tools and more about getting to a reliable solution quickly.

Use cases we have deployed into Enterprize organizations

Here is a high-level profile of three products we have built that are then sold to enterprize clients:

• A reporting platform to help Corporations record and collate related activities with expected governance standards, according to a specific methodology.
• A booking and communication platform to help companies improve employee well-being, by pairing employees with guides who are available for voice and video calls on demand.
• A rehabilitation platform where injured workers can participate in a virtual program to improve their psychology.

Process

In each case, we have supported the client to respond to the vendor security assessment of each of their clients. We have provided information about our security practices, and also limited access to production databases to a limited number of onshore senior developers in specific geographical locations.

What about use cases that are not suitable?

As Bubble specialists, we are awaiting pending improvements to Bubble’s underlying platform that will support increasing compliance with IT standards expected by enterprise companies. This being said, we are also investigating other low-cost stacks that create the possibility of bringing the benefits of no-code or low-code software to the enterprise.

Next steps

If you have an Enterprise use case and you’re looking for a no-code system that doesn’t cost $50,000+ in annual licensing fees, please visit momentumgroup.tech or be in touch at [hello@momentumgroup.tech](mailto: hello@momentumgroup.tech).

Looking to learn and build a career in Bubble? Join our for a 8-week intensive Bubble Bootcamp at Momentum Academy