For a long time, big insurers held all the aces. Decades of brand history, the protective effect of stringent regulation and large balance sheets kept competition at bay. This is now rapidly changing. The new players on the block hold the cards of agility, innovation and freedom from the millstone of legacy technology. They can use AI, cloud and IoT technology to meet escalating customer demand for highly personalised, seamless mobile digital services.

Citrix has announced the acquisition of enterprise micro-app software provider Sapho for $200 million (£155.6m) to help ‘redefine the employee experience.’

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of Sapho’s modus operandi. The company aims to break down monolithic behemoth apps into micro-apps in one mobile, social-esque feed, whether it’s expense approvals from Concur or PO approvals from...

You’d be hard pressed to find an executive who’d disagree that the speed of innovation is a critical success factor in modern business. In the face of such pressure, businesses know innovation needs to be a focus and many talk a lot about the strategic importance of innovation to secure their future.

But the unavoidable truth is that most businesses produce dozens, if not hundreds, of new ideas every year that come...

The first industrial revolution (1700-1800s) was, by any measure, a massive leap forward in history. At the heart of almost every invention in the period was a desire to do something faster and better than before, something we are seeing now at the early stages of what the World Economic Forum calls

As organisations continue to undergo their digital transformation initiatives, what does this mean for employees? According to the latest note from Gartner, the majority of workers are set to struggle with the skills needed for future roles.

More than two in three business leaders polled by the analyst firm said their company needs to become ‘significantly digitalised’ by 2020 or risk obsolescence. What’s...

Low- and no-code application technologies are helping lower barriers to software development – and thanks to a new partnership, this change is going as far back as the classroom.

App development platform provider Mendix is teaming up with Major League Hacking (MLH) to provide resources for students to build working apps in only two hours at MLH’s on-campus hackathons.

The...

Siemens has announced the acquisition of low-code app platform provider Mendix for €0.6 billion ($730m) alongside putting across a ‘significant multi-year investment to accelerate R&D innovation’ and the global footprint of its platform.

The move will see Mendix move into Siemens’ ‘digital factory’ division, which aims to focus on hardware and software products integrating with the...

Mendix, OutSystems, Salesforce and ServiceNow sit atop the summit of Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for enterprise high productivity application platform as a service (hpaPaaS).

The report marks Gartner’s second in the rather complicated-sounding ‘hpaPaaS’ category. To translate, the category covers rapid application development in the cloud with both low-code and no code capabilities; but as Gartner adds, their functionality is expanding to cover the Internet of Things (IoT),...

According to Gartner, through 2021 market demand for software application development will grow at least five times faster than IT has capacity to deliver it. And according to various analysts and surveys a significant proportion of applications developed won’t meet user expectations, probably through lack of a clear understanding of the requirement in the first place, changing needs or by not being appealing to use.

Vendors of low-code...

Cost is frequently cited as a top reason why companies don’t develop as many mobile applications as they would like.

There are, of course, ways around this–many of which we’ve discussed here on our blog. Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD), for example, turned traditional mobile app development on its head by giving companies a low-priced, efficient way to quickly develop and deploy apps. Many companies have used...