Gartner, one of the world’s leading research and advisory firms, has named Mendix a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP). What exactly is this quadrant, and how did Mendix earn this recognition? Read on to find out.

Founded by Gideon Gartner, a patriarch of the IT industry, the Gartner Group has become one of the world’s foremost authorities on technology and digital transformation.

Specializing in advising tech companies and developing tools that enable faster, smarter decision-making, Gartner publishes one of the most eagerly awaited resources for technology executives and marketing leaders every year: the Magic Quadrant.

There are Magic Quadrants for a wide range of IT business segments. Across these quadrants, Gartner highlights the strengths and areas for improvement of the market’s most active and respected companies. Other organizations can use these insights to refine their internal processes and recognize their own competitive advantages.

Companies featured in a Magic Quadrant are classified into four categories:

1- Leaders: the most technologically advanced companies, setting the rules and trends within their segment;

2- Challengers: companies that embrace what’s new and handle innovation with ease, but hold only a portion of the market;

3- Visionaries: companies with strong research and development efforts that have yet to make major technological changes to their infrastructure;

4- Niche Players: companies that focus on specific characteristics of a market and deliver the fundamentals with the technologies they have.

In the 2021 Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar report, Gartner stated that LCAP (Low-Code Application Platform) would be one of the most widely adopted technologies in the coming years.

Now, in one of its most recent studies, published on December 31, 2022, Gartner named Mendix — TrueChange’s partner in Brazil — a Leader in the Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP) quadrant, the very technology it flagged as a trend back in 2021.

Low-code is fundamental to enterprise digital transformation. In this post, you’ll learn more about the technology and why it matters to Gartner, how the quadrants work, and why Mendix became a Leader in the Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP) Magic Quadrant.

Gartner: A Global Reference in Technology

For years, Gartner has been the market’s go-to reference for innovation and technology. Its studies and reports are followed worldwide, serving as a north star for technology executives and marketing leaders looking to sharpen and improve their strategies.

Gartner was founded in 1970 by entrepreneur Gideon Gartner and today counts thousands of consultants operating across multiple countries, bringing new solutions to the IT market.

The Magic Quadrant is just one of Gartner’s offerings, spotlighting the strongest and most relevant companies in their respective segments. Other Gartner publications are equally essential to the tech market, including the Cool Vendors report and the Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar.

How Gartner’s Magic Quadrants Work

What makes the Gartner Magic Quadrant so compelling is precisely its simple premise. It is presented graphically, visually mapping which companies qualify as Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players in the IT sector — based on each company’s ability to execute and its completeness of vision.

To assess a company’s ability to execute on its commitments, Gartner considers seven core criteria:

  • Marketing execution: the creativity, quality, and effectiveness with which the company communicates with its customers;
  • Customer experience: user satisfaction with the company’s products and services;
  • Products and services: the level of differentiation of the offerings;
  • Internal operations: the ability to run operations that achieve goals and objectives;
  • Market responsiveness: the company’s capacity to adapt to different market scenarios and situations;
  • Viability: the potential to cover all project and operational costs while ensuring financial sustainability;
  • Sales and pricing: the aptitude for setting prices and finding effective sales strategies.

As for a company’s completeness of vision, Gartner weighs the following points:

  • Market understanding: the ability to grasp customers’ real needs and offer solutions that truly address them;
  • Offering strategy: the strategic approach the company uses to develop and distribute its products and services;
  • Industry strategy: the aptitude for meeting the needs of specific market niches;
  • Marketing strategy: the effectiveness of marketing efforts in presenting products and services and engaging customers, both offline and online;
  • Sales strategy: the practices adopted by the sales team to attract and retain customers;
  • Geographic strategy: the company’s ability to reach and serve the needs of multiple geographic regions;
  • Digital transformation and innovation: the level of agile thinking and investment capacity for creating competitive advantages;
  • Business model: the effectiveness of the business proposition in dominating its segment.

Reaching the Leaders quadrant is the ultimate goal of virtually every IT company. After all, that position signals that the company has become a benchmark in its segment — and that its playbook can inform the strategies of other major brands.

Understanding the Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar

The Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar is a report that maps the 23 leading technology movements driving digital transformation today and poised to fuel new disruptive shifts in the future.

In the 2021 Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar report, several technologies stood out:

  • Low-Code Application Platform (LCAP);
  • Deep Learning;
  • Cloud AI (Artificial Intelligence);
  • Edge AI.

The latter three technologies will become increasingly fundamental to building advanced virtual assistants capable of acting as virtual billing agents or even virtual drivers in cars. Their impact will be substantial across industries, organizations, and consumer interactions.

Alongside LCAP, these technologies identified by Gartner align with three important themes in digital transformation:

  • Interfaces and experiences: technologies fundamentally changing the way we interact with the world;
  • Business enablers: technologies that impact companies by changing practices, processes, methods, models, or functions;
  • Productivity revolution: the convergence of multiple technologies and trends that help organizations classify, predict, and solve problems faster, more accurately, and at greater scale than humans can.

The Importance of LCAP in the Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar

Alongside Deep Learning, Cloud AI (Artificial Intelligence), and Edge AI, the report also highlighted Low-Code Application Platform (LCAP) as one of the key trends for the years ahead.

According to Gartner, “the impact potential of low-code is very high because the technology can be applied across virtually every segment and nearly every application.”

The rings represent the range — the estimated number of years it will take for the technology or trend to move from early adopter to majority adoption.

The size and color of the emerging technology — or trend radar signal — represent the technology’s significance. In other words, how substantial the impact of the technology or trend will be on existing products and markets.

As the image shows, LCAP appears in the Gartner Emerging Technologies and Trends Impact Radar as a business-enabling technology, with an estimated adoption window ranging from now through the next year.

Understanding the Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP) Magic Quadrant

According to Gartner, an Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform (LCAP) is “an application platform used to develop and deploy custom applications by abstracting and minimizing or replacing the coding required in development.”

Being featured in the Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform Magic Quadrant means the company genuinely delivers technology that reduces the amount of manual coding and increases code reuse. In other words, it meets requirements such as:

  • Low-code capabilities for developing a complete application;
  • Support for application development (comprising user interfaces, business logic, workflow, and data services);
  • Simplified application testing, deployment, and management.

Beyond these capabilities, it also offers optional features to users, such as:

  • Support for event-driven architecture;
  • Business process automation and management;
  • Front-end user experiences beyond the web user interface (UI);
  • Custom API generation for creating business services;
  • Management of large-scale distributed development teams;
  • On-premises and multicloud support;
  • Support for AI-augmented development;
  • Citizen developer support;
  • Catalog support for components, connectors, and templates.

The characteristics of an Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform (LCAP) also include:

  • API access to enterprise and third-party cloud services;
  • Service-level agreements (SLAs);
  • Availability and scalability of developed applications;
  • Vendor-provided technical support and training;
  • Usage monitoring;
  • Disaster recovery;
  • Security;
  • Support for high performance.

How Mendix Became a Leader in the Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP) Quadrant

Alongside Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and OutSystems, Mendix entered the Magic Quadrant for enterprise low-code application platforms.

What made Mendix a Leader in the quadrant, according to Gartner itself, is its completeness of vision. The technology offers combined support for citizen and professional developers, along with a library of composable assets for different business verticals.

The platform also delivers multicloud support, on-premises deployments, and multiexperience development.

A significant share of Mendix’s operations takes place in Europe, though its headquarters is in the US, with a strong presence in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region as well. Its customers span the globe, across business models of all niches and sizes — with manufacturing, finance, and professional services as its core sectors.

In Brazil, TrueChange is the platform’s leading market player, ranking as the No. 1 Siemens partner in Latin America for Mendix solutions.

According to Gartner, the strengths that set Mendix apart as one of the quadrant’s Leaders are:

  • Mendix continues to deliver advanced enterprise low-code capabilities that benefit new use cases, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and digital twins;
  • Mendix scored highly on most core capabilities, especially UX design, integration support, and governance;
  • Mendix also provides flexible deployment options, multicloud support, and a release strategy with multi-version compatibility;
  • Mendix further invests in support for additional regions and self-service capabilities, and remains focused on application development security and governance.

The Growth of the LCAP and Low-Code Markets

According to Gartner, the worldwide market for low-code development technologies is projected to total US$26.9 billion in 2023, an increase of 19.6% over 2022. The firm expects initiatives leveraging low-code development technologies to meet growing application demand to be the primary driver accelerating the use of low-code capabilities through 2026.

Gartner also believes that the high cost of hiring technology professionals and the growing hybrid workforce will contribute to the adoption of low-code technologies.

Accelerating Transformation Drives Application Delivery

The acceleration of digital transformation is pressuring IT leaders to dramatically increase application delivery speed and time to value.

Rising demand for custom systems has given rise to developers outside corporate IT ecosystems, which in turn has fueled increased low-code adoption.

Gartner estimates that by 2026, developers outside formal IT departments will account for at least 80% of the user base for low-code tools — and that by 2025, half of all new low-code customers will come from business buyers outside the IT organization.

SaaS and Hyperautomation Will Drive Low-Code Adoption

All major software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors currently offer capabilities that incorporate low-code development technologies.

As SaaS grows in popularity and these vendors’ platforms see broader adoption, the low-code market will experience proportional growth in Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP) and process automation tools.

Beyond that, business leaders want to create and execute their own ideas to drive more automation across their business applications and workflows.

In the long run, as companies embrace the principles of digital transformation, they will turn to low-code technologies that support application innovation and integration.

Companies today know they need to transform digitally to stay competitive — but they aren’t always sure which tools to use.

Low-code enables developers to work more efficiently by reusing components, delivering new user experiences faster. It also empowers business experts to build their own applications, freeing IT departments to focus on infrastructure development and other complex tasks.

The ability to build and deploy applications quickly and efficiently can change everything. Schedule a meeting with our team and take the first step toward your business’s digital transformation with an Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform (LCAP)!