What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Empowering Developers: A Deep Dive into WaveMaker
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Step into the software revolution with WaveMaker, a game-changing platform designed for professional developers looking to modernize and enhance their application development process. In this episode, we explore how WaveMaker distinguishes itself in a crowded market, focusing on providing solutions for enterprises wary of legacy technology. Our guest, Vikram Srivats
Chief Commercial Officer, GM Americas, outlines the pressing issues that companies face today and how WaveMaker's approach not only alleviates those challenges but also empowers developers to tap into their creativity and innovation.
We dive deep into the specific functionalities that make WaveMaker indispensable for both enterprises and independent software vendors. Vikram shares insights on how key industries, including financial services and healthcare, are leveraging WaveMaker to establish a competitive edge in their digital product offerings. Listeners will learn about the significance of customizable user experiences that meet contemporary consumer expectations, which are crucial as businesses aim to engage their audiences effectively.
In addition to addressing current trends and challenges, we discuss future initiatives underway at WaveMaker, including the integration of AI and machine learning to streamline development processes. These advancements not only refine the workflow but also position WaveMaker firmly at the forefront of the low-code movement. Get ready to discover the compelling reasons behind WaveMaker's growing popularity and its vision to shape the future of application development.
Join us as we unravel the myriad opportunities that lie within the low-code landscape and learn how WaveMaker is redefining the parameters for success in today's tech-driven world. Don't miss out on this enlightening discussion! If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to subscribe, share, or leave us a review!
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Hey, everyone, really excited as we're diving into the low-code landscape today with a true innovator in the arena, WaveMaker Vikram. How are you?
Speaker 2:Fantastic. How are you doing, Evan?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well. Thanks so much, really intrigued by the work you guys are doing. Maybe give us a high-level overview who is WaveMaker and who are the clients that you are serving these days?
Speaker 2:WaveMaker is actually an enterprise software platform for professional developers to accelerate and improve the productivity of how they build web and mobile applications. That's the simplest way to put it, but again, we differentiate. If you've heard of the space of low code, we differentiate in what I said, which is that we focus more on professional developers, whereas low code tends to have the connotation that you're trying to democratize application development and therefore it's more focused on citizen developers and people who don't write code usually. So that in itself is something that we stand out for, but a couple of other things that WaveMaker has done since we came out of VMware in 2013,. We're now a priority and a history part of VMware.
Speaker 2:For the last 11 years, we've doubled down on B2B2C apps. B2c apps, as much as some of the more low-code tends to be more internal-facing applications or B2B, but a lot of our customers value WaveMaker for the experiences that we deliver. So modern, classy, high-quality, ux, customizability all of that tends to stand out Today. We are in about 17 countries worldwide customers and financial services, telco, healthcare. The US is our largest market and also one of the things that stands out about WaveMaker, which industry analysts like Forrester have called out, is the fact that WaveMaker actually helps product companies build products, which is a very high bar and, as you think about, you know, citizen developers, then you've got professional developers and enterprises and IT, and then you've got product developers, who are the highest echelon when it comes to like fidelity and relating their product development to a platform like us.
Speaker 2:So that's a little quick intro about who we are at every stage.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and what are some of the most urgent, pressing pain points that your enterprise customers are facing these days? And you know helping them solve so many out there, but you know both on the business side and the technical side customers.
Speaker 2:So one our enterprises. So think of a home depot or just any bank for that matter. For them it's about tech. Debt is the biggest problem that we address. A lot of them have legacy applications. These are not performant. They are not competitive in the market.
Speaker 2:Consumers like you and me are now used to using applications that look really good, classy, whatnot. They have sometimes security vulnerabilities. You know, nowadays cybersecurity is a very big thing, right? So you can't have a tech stack for an application that exposes you to security threats. So in some sense, what we help them do is to modernize in a very you know sort of say like methodical manner where you modernize the tech, very you know sort of you can say like methodical manner where you modernize the tech stack. Of course, most of them will move to microservices and whatnot, but then you also want to build these modern front-end, modern capabilities from user experience to stand out and whatnot. So what is that? That problem is a huge problem and I think, because they've had this tech tech, there's also that once-put-in-twice-shed kind of thing. Like you know, you don't want to go and invest in a platform that actually is a one-way door. You want to be able to have a two-way door. You want to be able to have zero lock-in. The platform by itself generates real code so you can actually export the code outside. So there's no lock-in. So that is what we solve by enterprises.
Speaker 2:The second category of customers that we address are independent software vendors. Like I said earlier, they actually make software products. For them, software is the business and it's a super high bar, very critical. But their problems are very different. They actually have not just, of course, outdated tech stacks and experiences, but also for them, they need to differentiate and win in the market based on how the software actually performs number one.
Speaker 2:Number two for them is customizability. A lot of their customers are enterprises, so for them you can't have yourselves pulling up multiple teams for each and every customer to customize the software because your enterprise customers want something different. So WaveMaker is a very powerful extensibility and customizability platform for them, where they actually build on a standard you can say like microservices layer. They build the experience layer of WaveMaker which can be easily customized for their customers. Cutting down time to market increases profitability faster, right. So you don't have to spend like margin diluted professional services teams who basically dilute your software margins right For each and every customer and then basically you can absorb more demand more faster and get market share. So really we're doing a lot of business focused things for ITS.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic value prop. So it's an exciting time. As you know, low-code and no-code solutions are kind of flooding the market and there are many options out there, including big tech who've gotten in with Gen AI and AI code generation tools. But it's a little confusing. So you know why are companies picking Wavemaker over other platforms or technologies. Let's say how do you stand out in this crowded field?
Speaker 2:You know it's February 28, 2025, so I can't think of a snapshot as of today. I can't pontificate about the future, but I think, as things stand today, the JNI space is obviously something that we are keenly aware of. You know, wavemaker uses a model-based code generation scheme. Today, going forward, we may actually think about a GenAI-based code generation scheme, but today we stand behind the code. So if you actually drag and drop something on the canvas, we can actually certify and say that this is tested, this is functional, this is performant code. We do a lot of work under the covers to actually make sure that the we use, for example, in Angular. We do things like tree shaking and whatnot make sure the algorithms are perfected so that when you as a developer are doing things that are already visual, the code that gets submitted is actually very performant. So in some sense, we're doing a lot of that behind the covers, but before we relegate all that to like a GenAI model, we are actually sort of being very careful about that in terms of what we can stand here. But having said that, we're not standing still. So today we already use AI in the platform.
Speaker 2:So a lot of our customers, like I said, they don't have APIs, they may have an idea of what data sources they want.
Speaker 2:So in some sense, we have things like what we call Mockingbird, which actually creates mock APIs, which is very useful for this world of API-first developers. We just launched something called AutoPort. This is a game changer for people who are really frustrated by the amount of time and effort it takes for you to convert a design. So, let's say, the app design is created by a designer in a tool like Figma to then create working UI. In some sense, it's a chasm between developers and designers, between developers and designers, and we, for the first time in our career history, have decided to go upstream, to the design side to be able to help sort of resolve that fissure or chasm. So that uses today machine learning to be able to look at a design and understand what components it can not do, so that developers don't have to do the same operation. There's a bunch of things that we're doing in the ML and the AI space, but JNAI is coming up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great opportunity. So I am off to Mobile World Congress tomorrow in Barcelona and, of course, the annual get-together of the telecom industry and one of the many hot topics there are network APIs, opening up the black box that is traditionally or historically the telecom network. You know they've been talked about for some time, but finally gaining traction and momentum. Maybe talk about this shift and how you're leveraging this opportunity with your platform to make those APIs more intuitive and developer.
Speaker 2:You know, friendly it could have happened at the time. I think in general for the industry, I think developers are. You know, two years ago I don't think any developer would have thought about that. If you said, like, what would a developer want to do with ADAP or Amazon or T-Mobile, I guess nothing would be the answer Because all the applications were over the top and basically they just assumed the network was one simple monolithic thing. So if you build a mass attracting application or you build a remote control for a drone application, whatever it is, you presume that you basically got what you want from the network and you couldn't control certain primitives that the network exposed. But you touched on that already. So I don't mean to, you know, use this opportunity to talk about network APIs, but what we're solving there is WaveMaker, is an API person, right, and we've always been a developer and we've not been like set boxes and developers or business users.
Speaker 2:So this was just a sweet opportunity, great timing. We can subsume these APIs within WaveMaker. This is the starting point. We can minimize all of the grunt work that's required in working with these APIs. If you look at these APIs today device location number verification or SIMS file or any of these these are built by Telcos for the first time, literally in the last 12 months. So they think about, first of all, there's a lot of network capability exposure that they need to think about. There's a lot of network capability exposure that they need to think about.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of standardization on these APIs.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you're aware of these forums like Mara and the GSMA Open Gateway Project. So there's a lot of standardization because developers don't want to build applications for one operator, they want to do multi-operative use cases. So in some sense there's a lot of work that's already going on there, but people are so focused on that that the tempos may not necessarily think about the developer experience. And that's where we come in, so we can abstract a lot of the complex field of grunt work in working with these APIs handle errors, do things like masking, do things like creating the ability for these APIs to be encapsulated in components, in UI widgets. I don't think anybody's done that before, but that's the direction we're heading.
Speaker 1:Well, it's an exciting one. Great to see after myself, you know decades in the industry this finally coming to fruition. But there's always a gap between the API and real world use cases. There's a lot of sandboxes and demos and trials out there, but do you have any use cases yet where you're seeing some traction or some particular opportunities?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the lowest hanging fruit is in the financial services space. They are not just trials or demos. For example, a bunch of Brazilian operators are actually standardized from verification and location API, also the SimSwap API. Basically, if you're at an ATM, you'll be trying cash. The bank wants to know if you are actually there. So one way to do that is to reach a mobile phone and figure out if your location says the same as what that ADX location is. So in some sense, that's a real use case. That's right here and now.
Speaker 2:There's use cases in quality of data, for example. There are some interesting use cases, just streaming and VR. Vr, both consumer as well as business to business. On the consumer side, you can pretend like you can imagine, like you're actually in the stadium and you actually need a 100-pounder like feed that you want to broadcast to your friends if they're missing out on a concert or a sporting event. Then you could also have a very serious application where ships out at sea and it's congested port and they need to be provided a video feed and you can do that only on cellular now because they're out at port. You know that's a real use case. That's happening in belgium right now. So there's a bunch of uh. I can say, uh, things are moving beyond the pilot phase right now. People are actually now getting into production. But uh, to your question, if you're really looking for like at scale, I think it's still early days and we will see the evolution.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So if you're a developer shop or maybe a telco getting started with the low-code journey, any advice in getting started with the low-code journey, any advice in getting started. And you know handling integration challenges and the onboarding experience and you know bridging the gap between legacy systems and the new applications. What are your best practices there for success?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that what we're trying to deliver is we are a platform company, so what we do is we're saying look, there are many people at various levels of security, to your point. There's people who've got legacy challenges, people who've got integration challenges, people who may not have development teams right, people who are like look, this network APIs in some sense actually opens up the opportunity for a disaggregated market so you can have a parking garage operator with a parking garage application. Just imagine that garage operator is not going to have that. I think that the way we are looking at this is what can we do? If we just take WaveMaker Studio today, that former studio for developers, that may actually only solve the problem for a fraction of these, like I said, or maturity levels. So what we're doing is we'll make an announcement shortly, just after Mobile World Congress.
Speaker 2:Mobile World Congress is so noisy. So we're doing is we'll make an announcement shortly, just after Mobile World Congress. Mobile World Congress is so noisy, so we're waiting for a week after that to settle down. But I'll be there anyway, so just to catch the fun. But we're making an announcement to actually build abstracted components, think of like building blocks, think of like Lego building blocks that have these APIs but have some understanding of where you want to use them. For example, it's a quality of demand API and typically you want to boost of bandwidth on demand. Literally, you just say I want to boost off like 2500 APIs, 25 is too small, let's say it's 100. You should be able to do that. And can you actually get a component like that? That's tested. Rebate uh, that's handling, uh, has all that. It's effectively like a strike checkout.
Speaker 2:What is shopify doing? Just think about it. Just making the, the job of millions of merchants much more easier by giving them this rich library of APIs for commerce, which have APIs encapsulated, but you have these UI widgets. So you can take those UI widgets, you can stick it into your application, just with a few lines of code and then you're off to the races. That's the mission, that's what we are, that's what we want to work with. That's not announced yet. You know we're getting there. What you see on the WaveMaker website is just the platform today. We've been inside for the last 11 years, but we're going to get there.
Speaker 1:Wow, that is a fantastic opportunity, almost like an app store kind of approach for developers, something I can imagine as much needed. What's next for Wavemaker? Where are you looking at investing in terms of resources, industries or technology?
Speaker 2:What are you focused on over the next few months and year or two? Yeah, so we've got some interesting times ahead. As much as we are super focused, we are also very aware of what's happening around us, like I said in one area of AI earlier.
Speaker 2:so the one area that we are very focused on is AI, cogeneration, wavemakers, being an experience-centric platform, so experiences that are, like I said, b2c, modern, classy, high-fidelity UX. A lot of our customers also tend to be fairly religious when it comes to what experience stack they want to use. We've historically been on Angular. We are also thinking of moving down to React, which is a very popular framework for web. For mobile, we launched React Native two years ago. Mobile is really exploding right now.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine where we'll be just a year from now, because the demand that we're seeing from native applications from enterprises is just booming. That was not a thing two years ago because people still felt like we would get away with a web responsive application or something. But this consumer apps right, stuff that we all use and people have gotten used to that. They really want classy, mobile native apps mobile is going to be a big, big threat. The third place that we're going to really really focus on, which we just, like I said, announced uh is auto code. So helping uh, get people at least to start with the Figma domain, people from Figma to go to working Waymaker UI in minutes.
Speaker 2:So you just run the plugin and then it auto-converts it with 100% pixel-to-pixel match. It's what? There you go. So that's kind of the Figma auto code play. So that's really the area we're going to double down on. And, last but not the least, since we brought up network APIs, this is a brand new thing that we're going to launch this year, which is going to be effectively, like I said, stripe for network APIs, right? So that's the big, big thrust that we're also focused on in the go space.
Speaker 1:Wow, exciting times, lots to discuss, and I can't wait to meet you personally at MWC. I think you'll be there. Love to catch up and explore what's next in mobile web and beyond. Thanks so much for joining Vikram. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Pleasure to be here. Thanks, Edward.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone for listening and watching.