Prodly: A Holistic Platform for Low-code Application Development

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Prodly

Max Rudman, CEO, Prodly Max Rudman, CEO

It’s a no brainer that the low-code/no-code approach to application development would continue to gain more traction, given its potential in facilitating the active involvement of non-technical domain experts in app development. However, adopting a lowcode approach that aligns with the typical four-step development process—build, test, release, analyze—is no easy task, especially given the intricacies and nuances pertaining to environments like Salesforce. Rolling out updates, customizations, or features can be a timeconsuming affair which can cost businesses their edge in the market. Businesses need an agile and holistic low-code “mechanism” that streamlines application development, deployment and change management. Enter Prodly!


Founded in 2014, Prodly helps companies configure and continuously improve business applications faster and more reliably. With the vision to take the complexity out of managing business software, Prodly empowers nontechnical users to configure applications with the same governance of traditional code development. The end result? Low-code applications can be reliably managed by low-code stakeholders.


The company’s AppOps platform automates the full lifecycle of low-code app development on the Salesforce platform, enabling admins and others maintaining declarative changes to eliminate hours of tedious work, increase productivity, and deliver more projects on time. “We simplify the implementation and maintenance of low-code enterprise applications, helping our customers to be more agile which accelerates the digital transformation initiatives that many of them have embarked on,” says Max Rudman, CEO of Prodly.


In an interview with CIOApplications Magazine, Rudman shares company insights and how Prodly helps its customers effectively build, test, and deploy low-code applications faster and more reliably.


How is Prodly empowering non-technical users to continually improve and enhance business applications?


Change management for software is nothing new; in fact, there is a whole category of tools to drive efficiency in the deployment of software code. However, businesses are increasingly adopting low-code, declarative applications because they promise faster speed to market. Yet, the traditional tools are solely focused on highly technical users, and they exclude non-coders from efficiently participating in the change process.


That’s the problem we are addressing at Prodly. Through our laser focus on declarative change management, we have created a purpose-built platform for the nontechnical user—the admins, business analysts, and product managers—who are increasingly responsible for managing configuration changes to low-code business systems.

We simplify change management for low-code business applications, helping our customers respond to changing business needs faster and with greater reliability than ever before


At the same time this frees up developers to do work that requires truly specialized coding knowledge. We want to help our customers build a culture that embraces change rather than fighting it.


What effect does low-code have on change management? How does AppOps help companies realize the promise of low-code?


Low-code highlights the need for effective change management, especially as it pushes application configuration and maintenance towards a shared responsibility model between IT and lines of business. This doesn’t mean we should accept a free-for-all approach to application development where anyone can make changes to applications at any time. Businesses are increasingly turning to low-code apps to manage critical, complex, business processes, like revenue and customer service, so it’s important that changes are made in a predictable way that mitigates the risk of errors, downtime, and other disruption to users.


In a nutshell, our AppOps platform provides administrators with easy to use tools for change management, version control, regression testing, and data deployment. By empowering non-technical users with tools that enable them to complete work within designated IT guardrails, we remove the bottlenecks in application development. Ultimately AppOps empowers administrators and other non-technical users to easily configure, test, and release apps faster, providing an unprecedented ability to respond to constantly changing business needs.


Our AppOps platform automates the entire development lifecycle for low-code applications while eliminating the time consuming and tedious task of managing the reference data that drives Salesforce applications. The platform is designed by Salesforce experts for Salesforce administrators and system integration (SI) partners to enable automated deployment of complex relational data between and within Salesforce orgs. In context to the deployment process, which is multifaceted, time consuming, and error-prone work, AppOps helps automate that process and make it fast and reliable.


Could you please share some of the instances where Prodly helped its customers to tackle the challenges in app development space?


We’re working with a global cybersecurity company, who estimates they’ve reduced system downtime by two thirds and eliminated 30% of configuration errors since implementing Prodly. As an example of how impactful simple configuration mistakes can be, they shared a story of how an extra space nearly brought down their quoting application for the entire global sales team. Prior to Prodly they were relying on manual data loads to update their CPQ (configure, price, quote) application which powers quoting for their entire global sales team. Unbeknownst to them they uploaded an extra space in a data record, which caused a default category discount to stop applying correctly on quotes with that product category. They couldn’t figure out what had happened and scrambled to hard code a fix so their reps could keep quoting. Later they figured it was all because someone hit the spacebar an extra time.


What does the future hold for Prodly?


So far, we have successfully executed change management for the Salesforce platform, delivering an easy-to-use platform for non-technical users to quickly make changes without sacrificing governance and compliance. However, we do understand that the change management problem is not only limited to the Salesforce platform. In the future, we have plans for adding support for cloud app platforms like SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday.


This brings us closer to our ultimate vision of building a comprehensive change management platform for lowcode enterprise applications. We also recognize that ensuring regulatory compliance is too often a painful, manual process for companies, and so we’re also working on an automated way of tracking who is making what changes to alleviate this hassle.


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