Mendix
A Siemens Company Transformational Digitalization Benefits Guaranteed

No matter what industry, software is at the heart of every business challenge. Are you struggling to increase productivity? Do you have a plan to prevent falling further behind in your backlog? You are not alone. To deal with this trouble, an estimated 88 percent of companies are adopting low-code as a standard for developing applications to relieve the pressure in application demand. But, there have been several such platforms that have shown great promise only to implode under the pressures of real-time enterprise demands for security, performance, and support. As an industry veteran, Derek Roos knew how hard it is to find the right tool and talented developers to build the applications. In fact, Roos and his team wanted to create a new and advanced way to enable teams to rapidly and continuously translate their ideas into real business value. This led to the founding of Mendix, powered by Siemens. It provides no-code/low-code application development for the enterprise, fundamentally reinventing the way applications are built in the digital enterprise. “We have three words for anybody who wants to create the digital future for their enterprise, ‘Go make it!,’” says Derek Roos, Founder, and CEO, Mendix.

Mendix was founded to solve the personal frustration that most developers face with the complexity of custom software development that is slow and consistently fails to deliver intended business results. With a vision to fundamentally reimagine and elevate the traditional roles played by business and IT teams in the app development process, Mendix provides a low-code rapid application development platform that combines speed, collaboration, and control for seamless and faster software development.

Mendix is driven by a diverse team of passionate and exceptional team with one thing in common—the desire to help people to make something significant. Derek continuous to do an outstanding job to grow Mendix triple digit numbers year over year.

Smarter and Faster Application Development

With the Mendix platform, businesses can ‘Make with More,’ by enhancing an enterprise’s development capability to seamlessly conquer the software development bottleneck. The company is steering forward with its success formula, ‘Make it Smart,’ by making apps with rich native experiences that are proactive, intelligent, and contextual; and ‘Make at Scale,’ to modernize core systems and build apps to align with growing business requirements. The Mendix platform promotes intense collaboration between business and IT teams, and dramatically accelerates application development cycles while maintaining the highest standards of quality, security, and governance. “Whether you’re a business analyst, marketing director, CIO, factory floor manager, or expert developer, you can use the Mendix platform to create enterprise-grade applications that leverage all your existing resources, using whatever cloud fits your strategy,” adds Roos.

Mendix is driven by a diverse team of passionate and exceptional team with one thing in common— the desire to help people to make something significant

From citizen developers to professional developers, the platform offers a set of tools to enable collaborative development. Mendix’s web modeler is collaborative, no-code web-based application development environment. Using the web modeler, citizen developers, and business analysts can quickly build and change applications without any software development experience. Its desktop modeler is a locally installed application and a modeling IDE that allows users to develop integrations and extensions. Developers use the Mendix desktop modeler to develop engaging web and mobile applications without code. Developers can also use their coding idea to build extensions with Javascript, combined with the desktop modeler. Changes can sync across the development environment by using a control repository.

Applications built using the Mendix platform comes with a full stack consisting of data, pages, and security. Pages are built using a visual page editor allowing users to build dynamic and static pages. Create device-specific experiences by using navigation profiles, page layouts, and logic while still sharing the common underlying app data and integrations. Domain modules are a visualization of the data structure, based on the UML, they allow developers to build and understand the data structure quickly. Modules contain entities and attributes and associations allowing creating business data. The modeler supports inheritance capability to reduce the amount of duplication across applications, inheriting an entity makes all its properties and functionality available. Just like in the coding world, Mendix supports sub-flows, error handling, and I/O parameters. Mendix supports connections and integrations to other apps or services through industry-standard interfaces and protocols such as JDBC, REST, and OData. The platform offers many solutions for ensuring that new applications can both consume and expose data and services in heterogeneous environments.

Mendix offers openness and extensibility at all levels, providing open model specifications and tools for platform extensibility. With Mendix applications can be extended with reusable components as well as custom code while leveraging third-party testing services and automation servers. It’s fully open, and pluggable platform architecture allows to leverage open standard and open source for ease of interoperability and extensibility, whereas the container-based, cloud-native architecture enables cloud agnostic capabilities.

Steering Businesses to Growth and Profitability

Over the years, Mendix has played a significant role in enhancing the application development capabilities of a number of businesses across the globe including Kuehne + Nagel, Solomon group and Saga Healthcare. The company’s solution has been adopted by more than 4,000 leading companies around the world.

Drawing a complete picture of the company’s value proposition is an instance when it assisted Zurich, a global insurance provider. Zurich recently found itself in a complicated situation, managing digital disruption while increasing its market share and strengthening the company’s market position. As a company of over 6,000 UK employees serving about 4 million customers, this was not an easy job. Zurich needed to move faster and with better agility to build software solutions that could empower their businesses. As part of their winning strategy, the group then set out to modernize the legacy application to improve data integrity and the user experience. However, they realized that though worked well in the past, its Waterfall model didn’t align with Zurich’s new strategy for creating customer-focused software at speed. They needed to implement an agile methodology and collaborate across IT, departments and users quickly and frequently. To transform the company and execute on Zurich’s strategy, the DevOps team began investigating, seeking out a low-code platform that allowed them to easily implement, quickly gather feedback and requirements from domain experts, and integrate services. They turned to Mendix.

Mendix offered the technology that Zurich required, and also provided consultancy, support and face-to-face engagement that they desired, without worrying about commercials and contracts. Automating the manual processes brought significant savings in time for the underwriting team. With Mendix’s feedback widget, Zurich could easily solicit and gather feedback, establishing the workflows and UI of the TDC application. Through this collaboration, they created a new system that eliminates the need for workarounds, manages information centrally, and generates accurate reports. They immediately recognized the intangible values Mendix brought to Zurich and the benefits that low-code development and agile methodology brought on both professional and personal levels. Without having to focus on the hard coding and programming fundamentals, there were opportunities for the team to learn new skills and solve more business problems.

"Mendix provides a low-code rapid application development platform that combines speed, collaboration, and control for seamless and faster software development"

Creating the Next Generation Software Makers

At Mendix, the team fosters and lives a cult of outcomes in a world sometimes hyper-obsessed with inputs and processes. It enables a businesses’ entire human capital to join together to create solutions that truly make giant leaps forward—ultimately delivering the next generation application development experience.

Recently, the company shipped one of the world’s most powerful no-code development environment, Mendix Studio that lets people in the business easily build their first-ever app. Roos expects 2019 to be a year in which Mendix sustains its most loyal customers and win over new buyers. Next, the team will embark on a journey to devise more sophisticated and effective application development at speed and scale.