Zoho Corporation has announced the latest version of its low-code offering, Zoho Creator. The new version addresses the need for an easy-to-use platform that enables business users (or citizen developers) to create powerful business applications, while empowering the IT teams to place sufficient guardrails and govern usage, ensuring security and compliance.
Organizations currently face soaring demand for new business software. However, the existing low-code platforms are either easy-to-use, but lack the sophistication needed to develop scalable, enterprise-ready end-to-end applications or offer the capabilities to build complex solutions, but need users to have an intricate understanding of the application development process.
“The bulk of low-code application development, from customization to automation, can be handled today by users with moderate technical knowledge. Where we see a gap, especially for the mid-market and enterprise, is between building and deployment,” said Bharath Kumar B, Head of Marketing and Customer Experience, Zoho Creator. “Currently there isn’t a low-code solution on the market that allows both business users and IT to truly build end to end business solutions. With this update, Zoho’s Creator platform combines application development, business intelligence and analytics, integrations, and process automation into one single platform while simultaneously enabling IT teams to effortlessly manage ongoing challenges of security, compliance, and governance. Now, organizations can leverage a unified solution for all of their low-code needs, extending the ability to innovate to every employee.”
The new version of Zoho Creator platform empowers business users to easily build scalable low-code solutions which include apps, integrations, analytics, and process automation without costly and time-consuming training demanded by complex platforms. It enables 10X faster deployment than any other solution on the market. Additionally, it equips IT stakeholders with deeper controls around governance and management, without compromising on automation, data-driven insights, interoperability, customization, and the ability to affect revenue and growth. The platform allows IT and business users to work in tandem to create and deploy apps that are highly customizable and are built to auto-scale, in order to suit the business needs. This allows organizations to focus on solving business problems and pursue new opportunities.
The three areas of innovation of the new Creator platform, and the key capabilities under those innovations are:
Expand App Building to Solution Building
Unified Solution Builder – Create, integrate, analyze, and manage custom business solutions at scale from a single dashboard. Seamlessly switch between different elements, with deep interoperability, and in-built guardrails for IT teams to drive enterprise-wide citizen development programs.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Zoho’s intelligent AI assistant (Zia) now enables developers to import data from anywhere, cleanse and transform with one click, build data models, and automatically detect data relationships via Smart Import. AI tasks such as predictive analytics, keyword extraction, sentiment analysis, OCR, and object detection are built into the drag-and-drop user interface for easy deployment.
Business Process Blueprinting – This intuitive drag-and-drop builder graphically constructs an online replica of a business process by specifying each step, assigning responsibilities across stakeholders, and automating actions based on pre-set conditions. Users can now identify bottlenecks and have clarity to facilitate scalability for evolving business needs.
Enhanced Serverless Functions – Developers can now write, store, and execute reusable code blocks in Zoho Creator Platform using Deluge, Java, or Node.js. These encourage IT and business teams to work together and build scalable and easily maintainable enterprise-ready apps faster.
Build a Connected Ecosystem of Solutions for a Seamless Experience
Unified Data Modeling (UDM) – Unchecked data points, varied data formats, and evolving app landscapes add layers of difficult-to-solve complexities to data integration, resulting in sub-optimal business results. Universal cloud modeling is now included to help developers establish secure data transfer by automating data integration protocols with unified data architecture and over 600+ plug-and-play connectors to make data integration easier for users.
Integration Status Dashboard – Users have complete visibility on how well each integration operates with the new Integration Status Dashboard. Status Dashboard provides key findings on recent executions, success and failure stats, and top connections facilitating early error detection and resolution to enable organizations to discover errors and resolve them quicker.
Embedded BI and Analytics Engine – An industry-first, full-fledged business intelligence and analytics engine is now included in the Zoho Creator Platform, enabling users to derive business insights from the data residing in their applications without worrying about bringing another subscription into the fold. High-end BI functionalities like predictive analytics, data alerts, what-if analysis, data blending, and conversational analytics are all now supported on the low-code platform.
Increased Control for IT with End-to-End Application Development Lifecycle Management (ADLM)
Environments – Developers can now launch solutions in different environments of choice—development, staging (testing), or production—with a single click based on the readiness of the solution. This allows users to add features continuously or make changes without disturbing the existing app in production. The environments also support role-based access to help business users simulate user-specific experience validation.
Centralized Governance – To help IT manage low-code development, features such as granular role-based access controls, comprehensive audit trails and backup options, application Integrated Development Environment (IDE), dashboards to view and manage users, billing dashboard, personalization options such as localization, branding customization, and more, are now available in the low-code platform.
Integrated Communication and Collaboration – Often, citizen developers get stuck in the build phase with minor obstacles, especially when new to the platform. In order to enhance communication and collaboration, integrated communication enables messaging, sending files, sharing screens, and the ability to make audio and video calls.
Zoho Creator Platform pricing starts at ₹1,000 per month per user. The platform also offers a 15 day free trial.
