Digital transformation is one of the biggest buzzwords in business, but the reality is often less glamorous. Studies, including one from McKinsey, show that over 70% of these initiatives fail to meet their objectives. They don't crash and burn; they simply get stuck.
This isn't a surprise when you consider the four key challenges that hold businesses back:
- Overwhelmed IT Teams: Everyone wants a new app, but IT departments are thinly staffed and lack the bandwidth to manage requests from every corner of the company.
- Legacy Systems: These old, clunky systems are a constraint on innovation. They’re pushed to their limits until they break, creating a pain point for the entire organisation.
- Disparate Systems: Critical information is trapped in silos. Your marketing system doesn’t talk to your sales system, and your leave planning doesn’t connect to your work planning.
- Employee Resistance: Employees, who are "digitally savvy" in their personal lives, often resist adopting new tools at work, creating a major barrier to success.
So, how do you break free from these challenges?
The Power of Low-Code: Building Apps at the Speed of Business
Zoho Creator offers a powerful solution by putting the ability to build applications into the hands of more people. The vision is to "empower everyone to easily build powerful applications."
Zoho Creator does this by:
- Visual Application Building: Users build apps in a visual manner, and the platform automatically generates the code. This is all about "productivity through abstractions," where developers are freed from the monotonous "boilerplate" code that eats up 90% of their time.
- Build Once, Deploy Everywhere: An app built on Creator automatically works on all devices - web, mobile, and tablets - without any extra effort.
The demand for new applications is staggering. IDC predicts that over 500 million new custom apps will be needed by 2028 - more than all the apps built in the past 40 years combined. This is a demand that IT teams alone cannot meet.
Responsible AI: The Smart Way to Code
While AI tools like ChatGPT can write code at an incredible pace, which creates a significant drawback: they can generate "tons and tons of code," leading to what's called code bloat and technical debt. As Steve Jobs once said, "the best line of code is the one you never have to write." More code means more maintenance, more headaches, and hidden security vulnerabilities.
This is where "responsible AI" comes in. The future of development isn't about AI generating raw code; it's about the combination of AI + low-code.
In this model, the AI doesn't just create code - it understands the context. It gets the right tools and components from the low-code platform and assembles them. This gives you the speed of AI with the built-in guardrails of a platform. The apps are secure, scalable, and maintainable by design.
Beyond Creator: Zoho's Full Developer Suite
Zoho's developer tools extend far beyond Creator. Other notable solutions include:
- Zoho Catalyst: A pro-code cloud platform for heavy computing and custom solutions.
- Zoho Flow: An integration platform that connects over a thousand applications.
- Zoho RPA: A robotic process automation tool for streamlining high-volume, repetitive tasks.
- Zoho Q Engine: A unified test automation platform that writes test cases once and deploys them everywhere.
The overarching message is clear: Zoho is helping businesses overcome the hurdles of digital transformation. By combining the agility of low-code with a "responsible AI" approach, they are empowering organisations to build the apps they need, solve their biggest problems, and finally get their projects unstuck.