Techaisle Blog

Coding is not everyone's inclination, yet there is a need to rapidly automate new workflows, generate new insights from scattered datasets, drive competitive advantage, improve customer interactions and make operational improvements. Low-code/no-code platforms such as Quickbase, Airtable, Microsoft Power platform, and Salesforce Lightning aim to equip and empower business users to be self-sufficient and agile to achieve their business objectives. But Zoho Creator Platform is different. It effortlessly enables both business and IT users to pursue their individual interests and is very well suited for the SMB and midmarket segments. It replaces the band-aiding of work processes with a permanent yet elastic fix to improve organizational efficiency. Business users can spin up applications. If IT needs to add additional complexity, the IT team can develop that through custom capabilities. Developers can write, store, and execute reusable code blocks in the Zoho Creator Platform using Deluge or Java or Node.js. These functions encourage IT and business teams to work together to build scalable and easily maintainable enterprise-ready apps faster. Developers can now launch solutions in different environments of choice—development, staging, or production, with a single click based on the application's readiness.

Most people associate Low-code with spreadsheet replacement, email replacement, automating, and digitizing them. Instead, the Zoho Creator Platform aims to help recreate processes to leverage everything a local platform can do in mobile, analytics, and governance.

Zoho Creator was introduced 15 years ago as an online database. Its latest version, Zoho Creator Platform, announced on March 3, 2022, aims to empower everyone to build applications solutions with a unified platform quickly. Specifically in the SMB and midmarket firms, IT is overloaded and has less time to codify new processes and modernize existing ones. Regardless, most organizations do not have well-defined business processes and want flexibility.

Techaisle latest research US SMB & Midmarket Orchestration, Automation & Integration trends shows that roughly two-thirds of midmarket firms are using or planning to use hybrid cloud and nearly 90% of midmarket firms using/planning to use hybrid consider orchestration tools to be “critical” or “very important”.

In today’s multi-platform world, orchestration, automation and integration are non-optional components of a functioning IT environment. The number of possible connections between systems and data sources expand logarithmically with each new platform; as IT workloads migrate (or are born) in new cloud, hosted, virtual or conventional systems, IT managers need to establish processes for connecting, balancing and optimizing systems that aren’t bottlenecked by requirements for operator intervention.

Despite the clear and immediate requirement for orchestration, automation and integration, there is little current and reliable data available on adoption and usage trends, especially within the small and midmarket business segment. To address this gap, Techaisle conducted a survey of 1,076 US-based SMBs, quota sampled to ensure statistically-reliable representation for two small business segments (20-49 and 50-99) and three midmarket segments (100-249, 250-499, 500-999). By applying attitudinal segmentation within each e-size category, capturing information on current cloud and digitalization status and probing for orchestration and automation plans and activities, Techaisle is able to deliver a unique perspective on the current state and directions of orchestration and automation within the US SMB & Midmarket.

Research presented in the report, which addresses the general topic of IT orchestration, is focused on three major issues:

• Cloud workload orchestration: orchestrating workloads and associated processes across hybrid environments
• Cloud application/data orchestration and integration: SMB requirements for services supporting hybrid business applications/processes
• Supplier requirements, gaps and opportunities: market feedback and Techaisle evaluation of the offerings that will position suppliers as orchestration leaders in the SMB segment

Highlights from the findings presented in this report include:

The channel industry examined by Techaisle’s 2018 SMB & midmarket channel research survey (separate studies conducted in the US and Worldwide) is very different from the community that existed a decade ago. Once a staid domain in which technologists provided IT infrastructure support to local customers, the channel is being reshaped by five key issues: cloud, and its wrenching effect on all aspects of the channel business structure; managed services efficiencies, especially vs. the pending opportunity associated with digital transformation; increasingly-complex data center technologies; integration demands that are expanding in multiple directions; and the need to sell on and deliver to business rather than technical outcomes. Let us discuss four key questions arising out of the research that is of interest to IT vendors and distributors.

Question 1. What are the top channel trends?

The channel is being reshaped by five key issues:

1. cloud, and its wrenching effect on all aspects of the channel business structure;
2. managed services efficiencies, especially vs. the pending opportunity associated with digital transformation;
3. increasingly-complex data center technologies;
4. orchestration & integration demands that are expanding in multiple directions; and
5. the need to sell on and deliver to business rather than technical outcomes

A lot has been written about cloud so let us discuss the other four areas and the remaining three questions.