Last Monday, Mendix was named a Leader in Gartner’s MADP Magic Quadrant, a significant move from its position as a Visionary in the 2016 Magic Quadrant.
This year’s Magic Quadrant includes some important criteria for what constitutes a Mobile Application Development Platform. Not only are MADPs required to deliver critical development features for creating mobile apps, but they must also be open enough to support third-party front-end tooling, to address a diverse set of use cases across enterprises, and support the app development lifecycle.
We believe our recognition as a Leader was based on our platform’s alignment with the needs of the evolving MADP market, from supporting multi-channel approaches to leveraging emerging technologies to design smart user experiences.” – Johan den Haan, CTO at Mendix
The report highlights some important differentiated Mendix capabilities, including:
- Running on the open-source Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service
- Enabling a high productivity development solution for a continuum of users, from business analysts to professional developers, using web- and desktop-based modeling tools
- Built-in lifecycle management tools, supporting agile development
Additional to the above, there are several factors that make implementing Mendix a transformative decision for our customers:
- Core to the vision of Mendix is the concept of Business and IT collaboration. Visual Modeling creates a shared language between Business and IT teams, extending the benefits of an agile development process and resulting in applications that truly solve for business value.
- The Mendix Mobile Backend Services (MBS) runtime architecture, thanks in part to Cloud Foundry, combines the benefits of rapid mobile app development with a backend robustness normally expected from high control application platforms. This enables our customers to exploit the productivity advantages of the Mendix platform without sacrificing scalability and governance.
- Built-in support, via connectors to services like IBM Watson from the Mendix App Store, enable model-driven developers to create intelligent, proactive, contextual applications. These services can be integrated seamlessly using visual models, harnessing the power of cutting-edge services without the need for skilled resources.
The mission behind our platform is to allow customers to take ideas for improving and transforming their business from initial ideation to large-scale production, in the minimum length of time.” – Gordon van Huizen, VP Platform Strategy at Mendix
There’s also clearly been market movement toward application platforms that support development across form factors. After the initial emergence of mobile devices, mobile-specific tools emerged, enabling mobile-specific teams to build applications for users both inside and outside of their organizations. More recently, Application Platforms as a Service (aPaaS) with great mobile support have emerged as the premier approach for not just mobile, but multi-channel development. We believe this movement from pure Mobile Application Development Platforms to aPaaS solutions like Mendix is attributable to multiple benefits, including:
- Mobile Support: Additional to support for a broad range of form factors, Mendix supports the creation of complex mobile applications with a rich nativelike UI, offline support, utilization of native device features, and more, coupled with the capability to deploy to any infrastructure.
- Multi-channel Support: Mendix enables enterprises to manage a full array of not just mobile, but multi- and omni-channel applications, sharing UI, logic, and integration layers, creating substantial time to value benefits.
- Model-driven Development: Using visual tools, Mendix developers can create robust, full-stack mobile and multi-channel applications 6x faster than traditional code, with 70% fewer resources.
- Full Lifecycle Support: More than just providing tools for development, Mendix provides a comprehensive, integrated set of tools and platform services for the entire application lifecycle, from ideation and development through deployment and operation. These tools and services are “pluggable”, integrating easily with enterprise-standard ALM tools, extending or augmenting existing development practices.
While some pure Mobile Application Development Platforms may have features that provide one or a selection of the benefits above, only aPaaS platforms like Mendix have shown the capability to orchestrate these benefits together, without sacrificing support for richly-designed, robust mobile applications. Support for post-app services, a key consideration in this year’s MADP Magic Quadrant, firmly positions Mendix as a vendor with the vision to support cutting-edge digital experiences beyond traditional form factors.
We at Mendix are thrilled to have been recognized as a leader in the 2017 MADP Magic Quadrant. It’s not only a testament to the hard work of our employees at Mendix, but the innovative work our customers do every day, creating real business value by building digitally transformative applications.