Quickbase Receives Highest Score in Citizen Development Use Case in Gartner's 2019 Critical Capabilities Report

There is something different in the air.

When I first started at Quickbase a few years ago, citizen development was often met with skepticism with questions like: Is it real? Who would use it? Do you even need it?

The answer is yes: Yes, it is real. All types of enterprises use it. And yes, you need it. In fact, the market demands it.

Customers, businesses and organizations of all sizes, particularly the enterprise, are struggling with how to drive greater responsiveness and innovation to customer needs and market demands in a world of very constrained resources and expertise.

The reality is that customers have never been more demanding, the market has never been more competitive, and it has never been more difficult to get the software development talent and capabilities in organizations that you need.

That is true for everybody.

As a result, there is a large and growing gap between the demands that the marketplace puts on organizations to innovate and serve customers better, and the supply of technical talent and innovation capabilities they must supply. Off-the-shelf applications are no longer cutting it.

As this mismatch grows, the rise of low-code platforms and the urgency of citizen development within enterprises has never been clearer. It is time for IT leaders to embrace citizen development in order to move ahead.

We believe that Gartner, a leading research and advisory company for IT, is highlighting the importance of citizen development in giving businesses a competitive advantage with their Critical Capabilities report that has a specific use case designated for Citizen Development.

At Quickbase, we have worked tirelessly to equip citizen developers throughout a variety of industries with the tools needed to perfect their business’s unique processes. Because of this, we are excited to announce that Quickbase received the highest score for the Citizen Development Use Case in Gartner’s 2019 Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms.

Quickbase received the highest score of 4.08 out of 5 out of the 19 vendors assessed for the Citizen Development use case, with high scores in no-code development (4.5 out of 5) and enterprise worthiness (4.0 out of 5).

No-code development was assessed by how platforms supported development with a no-code approach, while enterprise worthiness looked at how the platforms supported aspects like governance, security and regulatory compliance.

Quickbase was also recognized in November as Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Enterprise Low-Code Application.

We believe that receiving the highest score from Gartner in any capacity is an accomplishment, but even more in the Citizen Development use case as it reinforces the idea that citizen development is a key process that can help elevate users and businesses.

Gartner noted in their report that the low-code application platforms market is becoming increasingly competitive as these platforms “continue to grow in capability and maturity, addressing more enterprise use cases and providing rapid application delivery with fewer skills to the advantage of businesses everywhere.” ¹

Looking Ahead

2020 is going to be a year we make bold bets on innovation.

When I think about what is important for us, it’s going to be about better building of applications and solutions, better governance, better connections and better visualizations.

Better building

I expect we will take big steps on this year to make it easier and better to build in Quickbase.

In 2020 we will have a set of consumer grade UI capabilities for major areas of our product. Additionally, because nearly a third of our users are developers of some sort, we also want to have modern, easy to use experience for people who want to use API and the tools and techniques they know as developers.

Better governance

We want to ensure we provide users with the ability to control and manage applications within an organization. Once you have all these citizens developing software in your organization, how do you control it?

To assist we this, in late 2019, we introduced Sandbox which is an exciting innovation for us because it’s really the first and only integrated enterprise grade Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) capability built for citizen developers.

It’s nice to have Version 1, which set the foundation, but there is a lot of innovation to continue to do in the coming year to improve governance and controls.

Better connections

We acquired Cloudpipes last summer which provides drag and drop citizen development capabilities for Quickbase users to automate workflows and integrate Quickbase into their entire ecosystem of software tools with a growing library of intuitive pre-built integration channels.

In 2020 we hope to be able to take it a step further and connect to large scale enterprise systems like SAP or Oracle. Those big systems are central to how organizations work but are very expensive and difficult for users to access and manipulate important data.

Having Quickbase be able to connect into those systems easily is going to provide a great deal of opportunity and potential for customers to unlock that data and drive at the speed of innovation that they are going to need.

Better visualizations

We are working to deliver better visualizations in terms of reports and dashboards. We want to bring all this work that people are doing together to verify the information in a flexible and easy to view way that our users and executives at those companies will want to see.

Our Vision

We want to provide a powerful platform that is easy to use and doesn’t require you to be a software developer.

Our vision is one that I’m very excited about because it draws a broader set of people, is more empowering to more of the workforce, and creates an opportunity for more people to create value in their lives and day-to-day jobs rather than needing to become a software developer to create the same value.

I love that vision. And I love that this evaluation makes us strong on the citizen development front because it reinforces that our vision is being recognized in the marketplace.

¹ Gartner, “Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms,” By Paul Vincent, Yefim Natis, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark Driver, Jason Wong, 17 October 2019

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