We just learned a lot in an interesting update briefing on Mendix from Siemens. Jim Brown was introduced to #lowcode almost 20 years ago and was excited about the potential when Siemens acquired Mendix. They’ve kept their promise and let Mendix compete in their traditional industries, such as financial services and insurance. They’re also using it themselves across Siemens, sharing that they’ve now adopted Mendix in 11 business and operating units. My update, though, was on the progress Siemens has made in applying Mendix to industrial applications. As I wrote in “Filling Digital Transformation Gaps with Low-Code,” there’s a huge need for new applications to meet industry40, IoT, IIoT, and digital transformation needs. Lowcode creates development agility and supports collaboration so manufacturers can efficiently modernize legacy systems and deploy new applications. Mendix’s ability to deploy in multiple places like, mobile devices and at the edge, helps make that achievable.
In addition to general lowcode enhancements, Siemens has made a lot of progress applying lowcode to their Xcelerator portfolio. They’ve introduced new capabilities and templates to make it easier for customers to extend, integrate, and customize Xcelerator applications. Some interesting general capabilities the provide for lowcode developers come from AWS including text-to-speech. But they’ve also created industry solutions that help industrial companies jumpstart solutions for functions like supply risk management, complaint management, carbon footprint optimization, and more.
The last part of the update was very exciting. They shared that they embedded Mendix into the Opcenter backbone so customers can personalize and extend user experiences – including operator dashboards and screens – based on standard, OOTB templates. The solution is released in January. They shared some examples including Mendix templates for quality Inspection, smart warehouse, workforce management, and field service. This allows customers to adopt existing MES capabilities and rapidly tailor them using lowcode. Mendix capabilities also allow manufacturers to run Opcenter in an offline mode.
All this represents both a big investment and significant proofpoint of Siemens’ integration of Mendix into their core business. Thank you Subba Rao, Shaun Ennis, and Jon Heidorn for taking the time to share the updates.
