Mendix, a Siemens business and vendor of no-code/low-code application development for enterprises, announced on Tuesday the Mendix Spring ’19 Release, a major update to its low-code platform. This release equips makers of every skill level across an organization to pursue ambitious digital transformation initiatives, whether the next step is integrating the physical and digital worlds through the internet of things; migrating to SAP/4HANA; rolling out more valuable native mobile apps that delight users and boost engagement; leveraging the power of low-code/no-code visual models to power-up the entire talent pool of developers to build enterprise-scale applications, or moving to a multi-cloud environment.
The version ramps up the platform’s power and capabilities, enabling enterprises to catalyze their digital innovation agendas and advance their initiatives to bring the digital and physical worlds together.
With the Spring ’19 Release Mendix is launching a new and powerful “maker movement” to drive the digital future — expanding the universe of application “makers,” furthering the platform’s position in supporting enterprise-scale applications, and leveraging smart technology both in the creation of applications and their capabilities.
At the top of the features list in Mendix Spring ’19 Release are Studio and Studio Pro, Mendix’s no-code and low-code unified development environment; true native mobile development; exclusive low-code support for SAP HANA; support for any cloud strategy, public, private, or hybrid; and full Mendix integration with the Siemens MindSphere platform for the industrial internet of things, or IIoT.
The crisis-level shortage of developer talent greatly hinders application development and impacts efforts to digitize operations. Mendix empowers enterprises to unleash their full human capital resources to address this critical challenge.
New Mendix Studio is a visual, WYSIWYG tool that enables citizen developers from the business side — who are closest to the business challenges and objectives — to actively participate in the ideation and creation of applications. Mendix Studio Pro is a visual environment that gives professional developers advanced capabilities to create complex enterprise applications with complete control and flexibility, including the ability to customize code.
Together, Studio and Studio Pro provide a tremendously empowering unified platform that works bidirectionally and brings business and IT together to collaborate as never before to deliver the exact right apps the enterprise requires to increase revenue and optimize business outcomes.
User expectations of mobile apps keep rising alongside the capabilities of mobile devices and the promise of multi-experience apps. Mendix is the only low-code platform that enables developers of varying skill sets to deliver true consumer-grade native mobile apps with all the ease and efficiency of low-code development.
Built on the widely adopted React Native framework, Mendix mobile apps enable the native gestures, interactions, quick performance, and capabilities consumers expect from their mobile devices — and opens the door for developers to use AR and machine learning on the device to create smarter, context-aware, guided user experiences. And, with an “offline-first” approach, Mendix native mobile apps consistently deliver a superior experience, even when the connection is poor or nonexistent.
With the Spring ’19 Release, Mendix is a low-code platform that seamlessly integrates with SAP HANA. Now, enterprises can create both transactional and analytics applications that tap the speed and efficiency of SAP HANA to streamline business processes and pursue new opportunities to digitally engage with their employees and customers. Mendix empowers enterprises to rapidly deliver business-critical apps to the same data tier as the SAP core, complete with SAP HANA’s unprecedented performance, governance, security, and data analytics. And it expands the pool of human capital able to reap the benefits of SAP HANA for business innovation, by empowering both business-side and professional developers to create SAP HANA apps, including business experts contributing to the process as citizen developers.
With full Kubernetes integration and the introduction of Mendix Cloud Dedicated, which is a Mendix-managed instance of Mendix Cloud on the customer’s AWS account, Mendix now fully supports every cloud strategy — public, private, hybrid — and offers simple deployment to, and management of, any cloud, including IBM Cloud Private, RedHat OpenShift, AWS, Azure, and SAP Cloud Platform.
In collaboration with Siemens, Mendix revolutionizes application development for the “internet of things,” using low-code to connect the operational technology of industrial enterprises — where Siemens leads the market — with the insights and intelligence needed to optimize processes, maximize efficiency, and develop new business models to better serve customers.
In conjunction with Siemens MindSphere — the cloud-based, open IoT operating system — Mendix-built apps can translate lower-level data into useful analytics and predictive models driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence. With Mendix and MindSphere, “we’re providing capabilities unmatched by any other industrial IoT provider,” said Stephen Bashada, EVP of Siemens Cloud Application Services.
“We have three words for anybody who wants to create the digital future for their enterprise,” said Derek Roos, Mendix founder and CEO. “‘Go make it!’ Whether you’re a business analyst, marketing director, CIO, factory floor manager, CDO, architect, app dev manager, or expert developer, you can use the Mendix platform to create enterprise-grade applications that leverage all your existing resources, using whatever cloud fits your strategy, employing AI and smart technology, to reinvent your business and better serve your customers. It’s that big. It’s low-code without compromise. And it’s all possible with our Spring ’19 Release.”
Mendix Assist is the company’s second-generation AI engine and part of the company’s long-term AI strategy, trained to 95% accuracy. It is designed to harness the power of AI by shortening ramp-up time for citizen developers, increasing developer productivity, and improving application quality.
Now available for professional developers in Mendix Studio Pro, Mendix Assist acts as a virtual pair programmer, anticipating next steps, double-checking logic flows, calling out potential errors, and more. Mendix Assist for citizen developers — the industry’s first AI assistant, introduced last year — simplifies the learning process and acts as a virtual tutor to take new users step-by-step through the app creation process.
