New functions of the Mendix platform will enable the 250,000 members of the Mendix Maker Community to assemble and expand solutions with building blocks. In addition, users will be able to create and market such building blocks themselves.

Derek Roos, CEO and co-founder of Mendix, describes the vision of Mendix as follows: "The line between consumption and development is becoming increasingly blurred. Increased collaboration between low-code makers and low-code consumers opens up new business opportunities and enables the commercialization of new digital capabilities and the corresponding data. By leveraging and enhancing the power of the Mendix digital solutions ecosystem, there is nothing stopping our low-code makers from innovating and driving the next wave of business acceleration in today's connected economy."

The Industry Clouds

Derek Roos, CEO at Mendix: "Rigid, prescriptive SaaS applications are a thing of the past."

© Mendix

One announcement Roos made at Mendix World was the expansion of its all-in-one low-code platform to include Industry Clouds, which are designed to bring together best practices, reusable templates, industry partners, customers and a vibrant developer community for each key industry.

Customers, implementation partners and industry experts can share approaches, best practices and successes to create an industry-focused low-code community. Starting with Mendix for Manufacturing Industries and Mendix for Financial Services, each cloud includes a set of curated building blocks and components specifically tailored to the challenges of that industry - connectors to data sources and data systems, APIs, app services, workflows, templates and adaptive solutions.

Roos also unveiled several specific new solution templates at Mendix World. These can be extended and personalized to create customer experiences that are aligned with each company's brand and unique selling points. For the needs of the manufacturing industry, these include solution templates for Smart Warehousing, Predictive Maintenance and Smart Workforce Planning.

"Adaptive solutions for the manufacturing industry enable our customers to realize value across the entire digital lifecycle of business processes," says Raffaello Lepratti, Vice President at Mendix for Manufacturing Industries. "Typically, these efforts span areas as diverse as engineering, operations, field service, factory automation, and customer and supplier teams. The adaptive solutions enable customers to maximize the value of their respective core investments across domains without high maintenance costs or specialized expertise."

Investments in the platform

Mendix World Industry

© Mendix

Mendix is also announcing the addition of an AppServices Framework and the Solutions Platform to its platform.

AppServices - which allow the assembly of software solutions - are designed to reduce the pressure on software development. To this end, Roos announced new AppServices for automated document processing, cognitive/AI services and messaging. For companies that want to offer their own services as capabilities in the Mendix Marketplace, the AppServices Framework will provide the deployment, measurement, billing and security required for seamless and secure commercialization. In this way, the commercial exchange between enterprise customers and low-code developers is to be promoted.

There will also be a Solutions Platform for companies that want to offer adaptive solutions within the Mendix ecosystem. In addition to integrated measurement and billing, the Solutions Platform also offers intellectual property protection, expandability and maintainability. Interestingly, solutions offered through this platform can be customized by the partner or customer who purchases them without compromising the underlying intellectual property. In conjunction with AppServices, this allows developers to assemble, customize and extend solutions to meet their individual business needs.

The end for prescriptive SaaS solutions?

Roos assumes that the model-based abstraction of Mendix, the new type of collaboration between business experts and IT specialists and optimized cloud provisioning will already accelerate software provision by a factor of ten or more. He therefore sees the future of software generation in low-code development with adaptive best-of-breed building blocks and solutions: "With scalable and adaptive solutions that can be quickly assembled from reusable components, we believe that rigid, prescriptive SaaS applications are a thing of the past," says Roos. "The shift to a digital-first orientation requires highly personalized experiences for both customers and employees. Rigid off-the-shelf software will not meet customer and team member expectations and will not deliver real business value."