We are thrilled to announce our inaugural appearance in the Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, Worldwide.” Being included in this research means Quickbase is considered among the top performing application platforms in the world.
Quickbase is positioned in the “Niche Player” quadrant. This positioning is not a classification of size but rather represents our focus on supporting the citizen developer, a vertical, market segment or particular use case. (And, at more than $70 million in revenue and more than 6,000 customers actively using our platform, Quickbase is anything but niche which Gartner highlights in our “Strength’s” section).
This aligns with our own mission and strategy to date, which is to be the very best solution on the market for citizen developers. That said, we not only have built core differentiation and leadership position with Citizen Developers, but also offer many of the control capabilities IT departments need to confidently manage a Quickbase deployment centrally in IT or maintain visibility while giving the reigns to Line of Business or Operations buyers in a more decentralized business unit deployment.
We think Gartner’s definition of the aPaaS category and their description of Niche Players highlights interesting philosophical differences between the players in this market. We’re all in the business of empowering our clients with an enterprise platform on which applications can be built and deployed; however, Gartner draws fairly clear lines drawn between those who serve IT departments with high-control 3GL based solutions and those who serve IT and business citizen developers with high-productivity no-code solutions.
We believe while we have built core differentiation and leadership position with Citizen Developers, we also offer many of the control capabilities IT departments need to go all in on a platform. In that sense, the Quickbase platform offers the best of both worlds. Building a platform with the usability required to drive adoption by line of business citizen developers takes time and innovation. While many of our competitors in this Quadrant have moved into this space coming from a heritage of BPM, CRM or even more traditional Coder focused application development practices, Quickbase was born as an Application Platform-as-a Service (aPaaS) for Citizen Development and continues to execute on that mission. The main thing that has changed is that the market has simply finally caught up…
Our development philosophy has and is focused on empowering the citizen developer movement via a no-code, easy to use interface.
Gartner’s due diligence process revealed some of our strengths as well as cautions, many of which directly correlate with this chosen strategy.
Gartner highlighted that Quickbase has a large and loyal customer base. And that the combination of our no-code approach, our focus on ease of use, our App Exchange, and our dedication to serving the business-user resulted in the highest number of projects per client amongst all the platforms evaluated. We feel these are further evidence that our citizen development approach is paying dividends for our clients in increased productivity.
Gartner cautions that our high-productivity approach is limiting for those customers looking for high-control aPaaS features. As with all customer feedback we are continually vetting our roadmap with our Product Council to determine the specific demand and prioritization for further investment in this area based on our overall strategy for our fast growing segment of this broader market. Our platform goal is to be approved and recommended by IT for organizations that want to invite LOB developers into the application process. We believe it facilitates not only faster development, but BETTER development, where IT focuses on their strengths in governance and security, while the business delivers on the last mile of the application exactly to a particular business requirement.
We are honored to be included by Gartner in this Magic Quadrant, and look forward to working with them further as the needs of our customers continue to evolve.
Please join us at our EMPOWER 2016 customer event where Mark Driver, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner, (and one of the primary authors of the aPaaS Magic Quadrant) will be speaking on the effects of Citizen Development on driving business transformation.
Definitionally, Gartner describes “Enterprise Application Platform as a Service” as: “Platform as a service (PaaS) is defined as application infrastructure functionality enriched with cloud characteristics and offered as a service. Application platform as a service (aPaaS) is a PaaS offering that supports application development, deployment and execution in the cloud, encapsulating resources such as infrastructure and including services such as those for data management and user interfaces. An aPaaS offering that is designed to support the enterprise style of applications and application projects (high availability, disaster recovery, external service access, security and technical support) is enterprise aPaaS.”
