aPaaS Explainer
What is a high productivity aPaaS and why do you need one for your business? PRODUCTSREQUEST A DEMOWhat is an aPaaS?
HPaPaaS stands for high productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It describes software platforms used to design, deploy and run software apps, portals, and digital document solutions.
Encanvas goes a step further to reset the balance between IT and the business. It gives digital workers the tools they need to maximize their productivity, implement ideas to improve processes and work with data without coding or scripting.
Find out more
If you think the term HPaPaaS sounds a little techie and ridiculous for a genre of business software, we’d agree with you. But if you want to compare and contrast Encanvas to other (similar) tools then, according to the IT analyst firms, that’s the market we’re in.
An aPaaS platform gives your enterprise an efficient way of creating digital solutions that convert your customer value into shareholder returns more efficiently to boost growth and profits.
Creating digital solutions can be high-risk and costly without an aPaaS platform like Encanvas to optimize the design, deployment and operation of enterprise software solutions.
Digital documents for digital workers
Encanvas is unique in provisioning cloud spaces, portals, apps, and digital documents with a single aPaaS platform. Digital documents revolutionize digital workforce productivity and the ability of people to make data drive dcisions. Here are some examples:
MARKETING & CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE SOLUTIONS
Produce personalized rich media content that tracks user behaviors and can be easily published to a URL, web page, or as a stand-alone digital document for embedding into the metaverse. Do away with translation costs by using dynamic pages, where content changes according to visitor locations and the choices they make. Embed digital product showrooms and configurator experiences, to uniquely serve your customers better on mobile, web or digital TV.
TRAINING & DIGITAL COURSEWARE
Convert classroom training PowerPoint files into rich media and interactive training courses. Add video, charts, transitions, gamification, pre-tests and assessments to make your training content more engaging. Then, translate courses instantly into multiple languages to make content more accessible. Use integrated learner tracking tools to record course attendance, knowledge, interests, and performance.
AUTOMATION OF BUSINESS PROCESSES
Automate your business process workflows using rich workflow visualization tools to help organizations speed up the modeling of their workflows. This is the closest our rivals get to business model orchestration and solutions are somewhat similar.
REPORTS, DASHBOARDS & DATA ANALYSIS
Create digital dashboards and reports able to create a single view of the critical data landscapes of your business. Adapt dashboards and alert systems quickly, to keep up with your business strategy and improvement plans.
TRANSFORMATIVE APPS & DIGITAL SOLUTIONS
There are many new digital innovations entering the market. They include the metaverse, blockchain, and the Internet of Things. With digital documents, IT pros can cascade new innovations across the enterprise (and beyond). Get solutions to the edge of the enterprise without coding and be first to market with the latest innovations.
What features would you expect to see in an aPaaS platform?
There are some common features you would expect to see in a low or no code software development ecosystem. Vendors vary in their completeness of tooling and most will default back to ‘some scripting’ in order to complete complex projects. Encanvas has them all out of the box. Whats more, any improvements we make to our digital platform, our customer inherit for FREE.
DATA MANAGEMENT
NEAR-INSTANT ACCESSIBILITY
The ability to access virtually any form of system, data source and file format.
DATA CONNECTORS
Out-of-the-box connectors to the most popular forms of data sources.
DATA HARVESTING AND ROBOTICS
Tools to validate, extract, transform and load data from sources. Advanced systems like encanvas will also use voting systems to establish the best sources of data and quarantining systems to isolate ‘poor quality or incomplete data’ that needs to be reviewed by a human.
SUPPORT FOR PLUG-INS AND CODING IF YOU WANT TO
Features to embed third-party applications and components developed outside of the development framework.
DATA MASHUPS
This is where multi-sourcing, multi-threading and multi-linking comes in. When creating a new application, it’s likely you will need to consume data from other systems and sources, and bring it together in new ways. It will be necessary to maintain data connections with systems that drop if not used. Equally, it will be necessary to bring data together into new structures. These mashup capabilities must be comprehensive and easy to use.
DATA GOVERNANCE AND SECURITY
Rich tooling to manage data confidentiality, integrity and accessibility.
DATABASE DESIGN AND DEPLOYMENT
Compomentry to specify and publish new data structures and databases.
APPLICATIONS LOGIC
NUMERICS AND FORMULA
Users will expect all the functionality of spreadsheet applications, including their ability to painlessly create formulas to manipulate, organize and make sense of numeric data.
RULES BASED DECISION ENGINE
Creating applications if-then logic and workflows without having to code.
APP DESIGN
DECLARATIVE NO-OR-LOW-CODE BUILDING BLOCKS
Development tooling to simplify applications creation by reducing or removing the number of coding tasks and simplifying assimilation of applications design and logic.
USER INTERFACE DESIGN
Simple tooling to create user interfaces.
SUPPORT FOR PLUG-INS AND CODING IF YOU WANT TO
Features to embed third-party applications and components developed outside of the development framework.
USER GROUPS AND PRIVILEGES
Most applications are used by multiple groups of users. Each group will place their own demands on the usability, value, and outputs of the application. Each will expect their own tailored view of the application, so they see only their perspective of app functionality.
HIDING AND FILTERING VIEWS
The ability to hide or filter data views to manage privileges and make it easier for users to make sense of data.
EMAIL WORKFLOWS AND APPROVALS
Many apps demand that email can be used to share information, approve decisions and escalate tasks.
SOCIAL TOOLING
Applications development building blocks to enable designers to incorporate social messaging and content sharing.
LOCATION AWARENESS, GEO-DATA & MAPPING
Features to add location awareness (i.e. geospatial information systems) and to create location-aware applications.
DESIGN MANAGEMENT PRODUCTIVITY TOOLING
Tools that aid the productivity of applications designers and support technicians to optimize the agility and return-on-investment of authored applications.
DASHBOARD AND REPORT WRITING
Designers and users will require self-service tooling to create and manage the sharing of reports. They will want to offer the means for recipients of reports to be able to share views and work collaboratively on content.
OPERATIONAL SYSTEM
ONE-CLICK WEB PUBLISHING
Simple deployment of applications designs to make them available to users.
CLOUD DEPLOYMENT AND SCALING
Applications should be deployed on a private cloud for ease of access by users and to facilitate rapid scaling of solutions, should demands or the number of users grow.
PLATFORM VERSION MANAGEMENT
Features to manage the relationship between platform and applications versions to keep the two in harmony at all times.
CROSS-PLATFORM AND BROWSER SUPPORT
The means to deploy applications for use on virtually any computing platform that uses web browsers to access apps, and support for all types and versions of web browser.
DATA GOVERNANCE AND SECURITY
Rich tooling to manage data confidentiality, integrity and accessibility.
ADMINISTRATOR PRODUCTIVITY TOOLING
Equipping a small number of technicians to support the operational management of a broad gamut of applications requires administrator cockpit controls that remove the need for coding or scripting.
How large is the market?
According to Gartner’s latest report on the aPaaS market is growing rapidly.
aPaaS software market (bn)
Within the PaaS market, aPaaS is the second-biggest sector at $3.0 billion in revenue in 2017 (source: Gartner “Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2014-2021, 4Q17 Update”).
Database aPaaS software market (bn)
Database PaaS ($3.1 billion for 2017) is a related and overlapping segment. Over such segments include:
MADPs ($1.3 billion for 2017)
BPM suites ($2.6 billion for 2017)
Integration PaaS ($1.1 billion for 2017)
%
Percentage of developers using Low-Code or No-Code aPaaS
According to IT analyst firm, Forrester, adoption of low-or-no code software development environments is on the rise reporting in their *latest survey of global developers, 23% reported using low-code platforms in 2018, and another 22% planned to do so within a year.
* The Forrester WaveTM: Low-Code Development Platforms For AD&D Professionals, Q1 2019
See how easy it is to create customer portals, single version of the truth reporting platforms, automation apps and digital documents