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Join us weekly to discuss the latest and greatest in low-code and digital process automation with executives and experts. Real conversations, no marketing BS. Hosted by Rob Koplowitz, John Rymer, and Ryan Duguid. Visit analysis.tech to get in touch about your personal low-code journey and learn about ways we can help.
Rob Koplowitz (00:08)
Hi everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Lowdown on Lowcode. Listen, can you do us all a favor? If you've been enjoying the podcast, can you hit the like button? Can you share? Can you subscribe? It turns out there's a whole bunch of like -minded people out there that really dig low code and digital process automation and it will really help us get the word out. I appreciate it. So I'm your host, Rob Koplowitz. I go back a long ways in low code. I started with
Ed Jennings (00:30)
Thank you.
Rob Koplowitz (00:39)
with Lotus Notes as a Lotus Notes developer and spent my career with Lotus and IBM and Oracle and Microsoft and then spent 15 years with Forrester Research where I spent a lot of time focusing on digital process automation and did a lot of research with my very good friend and colleague, John Rymer How are you, John?
John Rymer (01:03)
Very well, Rob, great to be here. I kind of named low code with my colleague and friend, Clay Richardson, back in 2014. We were working as analysts at Forrester Research, Clay looking at the process side, process automation side of things. Myself spent a lot of time on Java. Everybody remember that. And there was this very interesting set of development tools that caught my eye.
We did a bunch of research on it that showed there was real promise to speed development and to add business people into the process of creating applications. And the rest, as they say, is history. I spent the last about eight years of my time at Forrester focused on low code, much of that with Rock.
Rob Koplowitz (01:51)
John, I completely appreciate the fact that you coined the term low code. Bye!
QuickBase has been around since 1999 and is unambiguously one of the very early entrants into low code. So while you may have coined the term low code has been around for a very long time. And we're very lucky to have with us today an old friend and the CEO of QuickBase, Ed Jennings. How are you, Ed? Thank you for joining us.
Ed Jennings (02:27)
Yeah, thanks, Rob. Hi, John. It's good to be here and I appreciate the shout out. We actually got 25th anniversary officially actually was this year. So we have been calling it low code, no code that whole time. We've had a bunch of expressions, but this notion that was the original conception, like the world's being written in software, less than 1 % of the world knows how to write software. There's got to be another approach. And so that's been sort of our driving force since the very beginning.
Rob Koplowitz (02:55)
That's great, Ed, and it's great to have you here. Sorry, John?
John Rymer (02:56)
I remember going to your conference.
I'm smart. I remember going to your conference for the first time. and, I didn't, I was being introduced to QuickBase at that point. And, every conversation was with a business person who was solving problems, usually in operational areas. And boy, what an eye opener that was. and this is, this has got to be back in, this has got to be back in 2015, 20, 2016, maybe, maybe even 2014.
So speaking of 25th anniversary, Ed, you know, QuickBase has a long history, so do you. Your background, you know, goes beyond QuickBase. Tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you found your way into this crazy world of low code and no code and citizen developers that we're all so trying to figure out.
Ed Jennings (04:00)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, I'll go. You're right. It's been over 30 years in tech and how I found my way to tech was I'll start with that story because it's been influential. I graduated from college and I had a round trip ticket to go to Japan as sort of a graduation, you know, like post graduation trip and two weeks turned into two and a half years and ended up working at Fujitsu over there and then back in California.
And haven't looked back, but in a range of markets and technology, the biggest, probably longest was more in cyber for about 10 years. And then when I was introduced to QuickBase, so this notion, I had used it at a large company before, so years before, specifically QuickBase. And was reintroduced to the company, this notion of what we're trying to solve for, digitization, automation in the hands of the people closest to the problems. And so.
It resonated having been a user of it at, we were a PTC at the time. And it felt like the early days of cyber, like people got it and other people didn't get it. And it felt like something really significant that was really coming of age because there's simply too much work to do. And then the proliferation of other applications and challenges and workflows and things. And so it really resonated. And then the opportunity, so I've been with QuickBase for four years.
And even in my tenure here, you see this just maturing of the category, this awareness of the category, this openness, this curiosity that it wasn't here even four years ago. And you guys have been tracking this space for a long time. And imagine you've seen that evolution yourselves quite a bit.
John Rymer (05:44)
Great, thanks. We'll come back to that evolution.
Rob Koplowitz (05:44)
So Ed.
Let's probe on this a bit, Ed. So 1999, just had your 25th anniversary. And during that period, there's been a lot of folks that have come into this space, right? A lot more competition than there was. Certainly in 1999, you guys have been at this for...
a while and you know, there are definitely different sort of flavors of low code and no code in different perfect use cases and different perfect scenarios. I'm a QuickBase account executive and I've just walked into a new opportunity and I sit down with the prospect. What am I hearing that says this is really what we're designed to do. This is really hitting all the things that align with our strategy. Well, what is the perfect prospect for QuickBase?
Ed Jennings (06:38)
Yeah. Let me answer that question and then I'll give you the backstory a little bit. I mean, just straight and sort of what do we do in the simplest form, software solutions to help people manage complex operations. And we highlight speed and flexibility. We highlight affordability and, but mostly speed and flexibility. Those are really two standouts. What we've been doing now, and I'll speak to it because one of my first experiences on the job here was four years ago and I was listening in on a range of calls.
And one of them was, you know, we had gotten an inbound call from somebody dealing with quality on a manufacturing plant floor. And then a couple of days later I'm on a call and it was someone in a marketing operations trying to get better visibility of sort of opportunities. And that was a large project manager on the third call. And I sort of scratched my head and I'm like, wow, is every call improv jazz? I mean, is this how this works that like, you have no idea what's going to come at you by industry, by use case, by function. And you've got to kind of do this.
magical dance, that seems really hard. And the irony is we have now we're over 12 ,000 customers and we've done a lot. There are hundreds of thousands of live production apps right now on the QuickBase platform that do cross a million of those boundaries, size company, function, vertical, you name it. So we started this journey like, okay, how do we get more specific in our market strategy for our sake, but more importantly, for buyers, for customers, for prospects, so they, you know, we can
show them where we have a disproportionate ability to win and stand out in that value. And so for us, it's been a verticalization journey. And I can give more color on that. But it went from a very horizontal, no code, low code citizen automation to really getting specific. There are certain industries that we target because we've seen disproportionate success, big physical industries managing.
Lots of people in the field, lots of equipment, lots of locations, lots of big complex custom processes, lots of materials. And those are hard big projects and programs. And what we've seen is they make up a disproportionate number of our use cases on the platform. So we started to get more and more targeted in those industries and targeted those use cases in those industries and realized, hey, there's a lot of mostly mid -market kind of companies and medium -sized enterprises and in some cases, some really big enterprises.
We've gotten much more specific on certain industries, certain use cases. And therefore, we can get to the problem faster. We don't actually, if you look at our marketing literature, you'd struggle to find the expression no code or low code, or to have us talk horizontally about tech. That's how we win, and we'll get to that. But usually now, we're starting with very specific problems which are trying to help them to solve in their language for their industry.
Rob Koplowitz (09:35)
So Ed, John, I know you've got questions because I can tell by that nod. I'm going to jump in with one and then you can jump in with one right after this. Ed, can you hone us in on some of the industries and then maybe get us a sense of where the solutions within those industries are, where those lie?
Ed Jennings (09:38)
Bye.
Thank you.
John Rymer (09:57)
you
Ed Jennings (09:57)
Yeah. What the pattern is is big physical underserved industry. So construction, energy, manufacturing, state and local governments. We see a lot in communications. And the patterning attributes, whatever you'd see across these, again, lots of people. Lots of people not behind a laptop in a knowledge worker environment, but in the field, on a plant floor, on a location.
trying to live and work off of a phone. You have lots of people that are trying to manage not just digital assets, like working on software where everyone's working in a digital environment on a digital asset, it's physical assets that a certain location, there's certain materials that have to be delivered, that have to be moved around with certain equipment and then installed in a certain way by a technician that's certified to do that type of work. And the synchronization and orchestration of that is if you're off,
in your renting equipment, for example, and something like large scale cranes and equipment, or you have equipment that's down. I mean, they know the hard cost of them when they don't synchronize. One of our first really big use cases was Southwest Airlines was just trying to synchronize the right certified technicians with the right equipment, get to the right gate so they can make an assessment and make a fix on a plane with 300 people sitting on it waiting to leave the tarmac.
That level of orchestration and coordination in these big physical environments is hard. It's really hard. I mean, I would say exponentially harder than just managing digital assets with knowledge workers because the number of variables. And I think over the last several years, it's become harder because issues like sustainability and issues like, you know, just repatriation of manufacturing and supply chain disrupt and then acute in these industries. And I think they've realized, wow, we've got to figure this out because
It's that much harder when you have that mix of physical and digital issues and assets and things to manage and orchestrate.
Use cases I'll give you a couple of those that we see again and again and and I'll talk about because we oftentimes land with one and we talk about landing with one and it's a point solution type scenario and Then we start to show how we expanded of a whole range of solutions But like large -scale field project management is a huge one for us We have over 2 ,500 construction companies as big as Bechtel and and wall some of the biggest in the world
all the way down to small specialty manufacturers. And again, all those attributes I talked about earlier come up. Vendor and logistic management. Environmental health and safety is huge for us. Quality and process management is really big for us. Assets broadly and facilities management. Many of the biggest retailers from Albertsons to Walmart to CVS are managing thousands of locations and finding new locations.
and managing the construction on those locations and billions of dollars annually of capital improvements on those locations. And those are really complex messy projects and programs that cross a lot of these, you know, they bundle a lot of these use cases that we provide in one platform. So those are the kind of common industries and common use cases. I'll give one more a little bit and then turn it over to John. But we also see that we stand out more there because
A lot of times the collaborative work type tools, they stumble when things get that complex. They're great for five people in a marketing project and coordinating tasks. We have all the variables of hundreds of thousands of people and you're across lots of locations and materials are a factor and equipment's a factor and multiple locate, like it's N dimensional and they just really can't deal with that many dimensions and complexity and different people needing to see different components.
different people in the field need to see things differently with mobile applications than maybe different people in the supply chain that sit in various offices, both your own and third parties. And so that level of exponential complexity. We'll also say that a lot of our competitors on the enterprise side, and they come more from the traditional low code, no code, we don't see them as much in these industries. And so we'll make, hey, they love FinServe, they love insurance, they go after those big
mass common workflows you see in those environments. And so we're going to keep making hay in these spaces because we've got a lot of credibility and referenceability and proven examples and success. So that's why we found it, again, accelerating growth by focusing in these areas.
John Rymer (14:35)
Awesome. When I'm curious, when, so you've got a rep who's talking with a client. You hear a problem that you've dealt with before, that the company's dealt with before. So it sounds really good. What do you, what sort of, are there red flags that go off based on involvement of IT or?
Ed Jennings (14:35)
up.
John Rymer (15:01)
you know, just availability of people from the business to actually work on solutions. Cause you're, you, you've got this focus. You've had this focus on empowering people, not just developers, not just letting developers go faster. And I wonder if there, if this seems to be a, a real set of questions for customers about how do I set this up? How do I get the right people involved? What, what, what sort of
I'm curious the things that say to you, you're not ready yet, you need some training or you need some consulting. You know what I mean?
Ed Jennings (15:38)
Yeah, no, no, no, great, great, great questions. So a couple of things I'd say, you're right. We used to talk a lot about citizen development and sort of that whole notion. And, and, and when I, when I think about missions, be shifting more to the democratization of software for these types of underserved industries. And so for all the reasons I've talked about, that's why we focus. The other is we don't see the political complexity in a lot of these manufacturers. They, they don't spend a fraction of what a bank does and they don't have
tens of thousands of developers that you're conceptually trying to debate of why low code, no code, empowering people closest to business, they just need problems solved. They need problems fixed and they know that they're under resources, under staff. And a lot of times there's, and I think SaaS didn't enter through big banks either in the early days. It came through mid -market, it came through sort of under, like underdeveloped IT organizations that just needed.
Problem solved. And I think that low code, no code's gonna have to follow that journey a little bit as well. So that's one thing. So it is very different, John, when we're talking to a larger, even manufacturer, or if we do, but when wander outside of our core into some of these industries versus staying in those industries. The second thing I'd say is we actually coach our folks very quickly. You don't know what you've got until you've talked to IT.
I think historically we used to stay under the radar. We used to think that was a good idea. It's not. Eventually, if you get in and even get some apps and can get in and start to show some success and progress, and it's not so much the security checks. We get through all that. It's more conceptually, like, who is building applications? It's another reason candidly we got away from the use of low code, no code, because the minute it has code in it,
It's their realm, it's their range. They have a right to own and inspect and make sure that all standards are being met. So we're more frequently, we're going, you know, we'll still land. The business champion will still be a business unit or business owner. But we try to get and sort of show what we can do. It's why we spend so much time on governance of the platform and it made a lot of progress of integrating with other environments that they're expecting to see.
and sort of dev test prod sort of requirements they're gonna expect to see from anybody that helps build apps. And so we've evolved and we've been more likely to come through the front door than try to hide under the radar anyway, because that just doesn't work eventually. And our big breakthroughs, our big breakthroughs, when we get to some of our biggest organizations, I mean, our single largest customer has 7 ,800 production apps. And like the only way that's possible is if you get through a central IT organization. You have to become a standard.
John Rymer (18:10)
right, eventually.
Ed Jennings (18:26)
And so that is still the ultimate for us to eventually get to.
John Rymer (18:30)
Can I ask one follow -up, Rob?
Rob Koplowitz (18:32)
Yeah, of course.
John Rymer (18:34)
so you've been, you've been at it for four years. Sounds like in that, just in that four year period, you guys have really learned a lot and really sort of begun to focus. I wonder among the customers, do you see the, the business people who get involved working with the product? Are they getting smarter? Are they getting capable, more capable of delivering solutions over that four period? I mean,
We got to expect that people are going to learn and keep going and keep applying that knowledge. Have you observed that in the customers?
Ed Jennings (19:11)
Yeah, I mean, our single best source for opportunity are existing users. I mean, as you may have seen even 10 years ago, John, Empower is the name of our user conference, which I love the name because it just speaks to the ethos of what we're trying to do here, was they are raving fans. And they take us from one organization to the next to the next. I mean, this is a category that needs a champion. It really does. You need someone to establish the program and fight for it and put their neck on the line and show
John Rymer (19:20)
Right.
Ed Jennings (19:40)
we can solve these problems and stand up to any sort of different opposing forces, either people that want to stick with an existing platform or centralize on something, whatever it is. And when they've had that kind of success and sort of relationship with us, we're blessed and fortunate to say that they take us to the next place, the next place. So that championing is real and essential for us. I'd say, yes, it's kind of amazing what they do build with the platform. And maybe we can't really give too much rope. You can.
build standard apps, drag and drop environment. We'll talk about AI in a second, what we're doing with our smart builder product, because that's, I think, really broadens the aperture of who can build on QuickBase. But you can then build whole custom interfaces. You can integrate to any data source now in QuickBase. You can do a whole assortment of applications that really do push the boundaries of citizen anything. These are sophisticated applications that
John Rymer (20:27)
.
Ed Jennings (20:36)
that are running major operations for Fortune 10 companies in a lot of cases. And so I think, yeah, it amazes us even the creativity and the capability of what our users are doing with the platform. And it's probably one of the most exciting things when you see those kind of use cases as someone that is a platform provider.
Rob Koplowitz (20:55)
That's awesome Ed. Hey folks, just so you know, a lowdown on low code is brought to you by analysis .tech. And if you'd like to interact more with John Reimer, with myself, with Dave Marcus or Francis Carden or Ryan Dugid or Andy Bartels, please hit us up on analysis .tech. We've got an array of services we'd love to have deeper conversation.
John Rymer (20:56)
Thank you.
Rob Koplowitz (21:25)
conversations with you. Ed, before the commercial break, you made a reference to AI. So let's jump into that. Because I think this is the next potentially huge disruptive force or potentially huge opportunity for all the low code vendors. We're eyeballs deep in writing some research on this topic now that will be published shortly.
Ed Jennings (21:26)
you
Rob Koplowitz (21:50)
Can you give us a sense of two things, Ed? One, quick basis product roadmap, what you see ahead of you, what you're delivering now, intended to deliver in the near future. And then maybe after that vector into what is the flying car version of AI look like in this world down the road?
Ed Jennings (22:11)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so last fall we launched what we call Smart Builder. And then in the notion again, like we were the one of the first ones in the market to say you can build apps without knowing anything about HTML or SQL or any of the things that normally would be required to build applications or Java you mentioned earlier, John, like whatever the platform was. We think the same sort of motions going on with AI right now that like that's like
People can play with JAT GPT, but to bake it into applications, to use predictive analytics across data sets that are your own, these are not standards. We want to democratize that power, that capability with the enterprises we serve and individuals within those. So we think that is our mission is just extended to sort of the next generation of how apps are created and used. So our first incarnation was Smart Builder. And now it's our only trialing experience. We're right about 10 ,000 apps have built.
on the platform with an entirely generative AI front end experience. And so you come to trial experience on QuickBase .com. What industry are you in? We asked a couple of prompts. What industry are you in? What sort of problem or business or workflow or automation are you trying to create? What sort of data are you trying to track and understand? And within 90 seconds, you'll get back a full stack application. Front end web, business logic, data tables, the relationships.
infrastructure in a governed environment. And then from there, you can start editing it through a chat UX experience. Do you want to connect? So we then connected pipelines, which is our iPad solution. So through a chat experience, you can create a pipeline with automations and triggers and notifications. And so then the next major step for most builders is advanced reports. So you can create those through that same sort of chat experience. So Smart Builder was about building and editing apps.
and we're extending it from the core three pieces I mentioned to the rest of the platform. It's been great because if QuickBase was about obfuscating code, this is about obfuscating QuickBase. I mean, it's about making it so you don't know anything about us necessarily, and you're going to still be able to create environments in a business context. That was amazing. We see it with just the volume and conversion of people coming to our site that don't know us, how much they're converting, how quickly they're building.
and then moving into sort of a customer with us. The second piece, and this has been going on for a while, is Data Analyzer. And that's less generative AI, and that's more predictive AI. And that's, you know, so many of our applications are bringing together data that was unstructured and or invisible to Yorg. It was spreadsheets attached to email. It was something done in some, you know, cloud providers platform that nobody else could see except for an individual.
bring all this into QuickBase. But now they have it there. Like that's great, you can track it. But with predictive analytics, you could do far more than just track it. And since so many of our applications are on these use cases, they're on asset management, inventory management, large projects and programs. I mean, most of these are a huge scale. And so be able to give them predictive analytics around likelihood of success, inventory shortages, safety and health incident reporting and potential future.
tracking based on the vendors history based on the types of work they're doing for you. This is where it really turns the corner from being interesting to fundamentally making profound decisions in how they operate their business. So both Smart Builder and Data Analyzer are live GA products for us right now. We're seeing a ton and there are thousands of customers using these regularly and we'll continue to evolve both of them because I think they just unlock a lot of different users and use cases on our platform.
Rob Koplowitz (26:04)
Great.
John Rymer (26:05)
Where do you think we go next with this technology? I mean, Rob refers to the flying car, which was supposed to be here by now, but no, self -driving car, sorry, flying car comes later. But where do you think we go with this? Does it really get to the point where people are doing complex apps with QuickBase?
Ed Jennings (26:18)
Thank you.
Rob Koplowitz (26:19)
Enjoy.
Ed Jennings (26:28)
you
John Rymer (26:33)
now, but does the scale go up or are there different kinds of apps that they can do that they wouldn't do today? Where do you think we go?
Ed Jennings (26:41)
Yeah, it's exciting to think about. I think John, like your question earlier, I think what people do, they'll tell us more. It's the experimenters that we see, some amazing things. One argument that we get asked or debate that we get pulled into, as you'd expect as a platform provider in the space, is how important is the platform with AI? I think platforms actually matter more than they did even before, because
You know, when you think about code creation, and one of my last companies was an application security company, and just scanning for vulnerabilities and these types of things. You think about a world where AI is generating code snippets is great, but whole applications need to be securely built. They need to be managed. They need to be governed. There needs to be sort of traceability. There needs to be repeatability. And a lot of, I think, where our customers are comfortable building on our platform is because
John Rymer (27:34)
Hmm.
Ed Jennings (27:37)
They build an app, but then they know how that app operates. They use generative AI to create the app, but they know how that app, it will behave exactly the same way every time, because it still is a discrete, specific application. It's not a different answer every time. So I think platform matters more now than ever. That's one thing. We have strong conviction, and we're going to continue, especially around the governance and visibility and controls and access to data sources versus this ungoverned
to generate code and see what you get and see if it's the same every time and who knows who built it and are there SQL injections embedded in it and I just there's so much that that unleashes. I think it will do probably more than we can anticipate. I still think you want it done in the context of something that gives you some controls.
Rob Koplowitz (28:26)
Yeah, I think we agree wholeheartedly, Ed. And I think what we would add to it as we kind of look forward to some research that'll be coming out shortly from analysis .tech is the visual metaphor still matters dramatically, right? Business people speak visual, they don't speak code, right? So we want them, we want them, we need them.
John Rymer (28:27)
Hear, hear.
Yes.
Rob Koplowitz (28:44)
And the other piece is there's a world of people out there developing amazing things in the world of AI and these services need a place to be consumed and that's a platform. So, you know, I think we're in.
We're in total agreement. Ed, this has just been fantastic. It's great to catch up with you again. Great to hear what's going on with QuickBase. You know, audience, check out what's going on at QuickBase. Thank you, everybody, for joining. Thank you, John, for co -hosting. And thank you, Ed, for sharing so much great information with us today.
Ed Jennings (29:27)
Thanks, Rob. Thanks, John. Great to be with you