Enabling secure & efficient LC/NC platform customisation: Why we invested in Quality Clouds

Quality Clouds, a cloud-based software for the management of Low Code / No Code (LC/NC) platform customisation from Barcelona, Spain, recently announced that it had raised €1.2m from Adara Ventures. We are delighted to partner with CEO Albert Franquesa and the rest of the team and look forward to the journey ahead.

In this post, we discuss some of the converging macro trends within software development that create an exciting (and ever expanding) market opportunity for Quality Clouds to pursue.

1. LC/NC platforms are indispensable to enterprise application development

Every large enterprise, regardless of its industry or geography is now also a technology company. However, not every enterprise can invest in developing proprietary tech, given time pressure and resource constraint. As a result, development teams and functional areas are increasingly adopting LC/NC platforms (e.g. Salesforce, ServiceNow, MS Sharepoint) in order to scale tech capabilities without building proprietary solutions from scratch. Using LC/NC platforms allow enterprises to quickly integrate technology across the organisation.

Whilst their popularity has grown in recent years, analysts predict that LC/NC platforms are set to become the fundamental base for enterprise software development. Gartner predicts that 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four LC/NC development platforms and that LC/NC will account for 65% of all application development activity.

A market study by Forrester estimates that the LC/NC development platforms market opportunity will increase to $21.2 billion by 2022, from $3.8 billion in 2017.

2. Customisation of LC/NC platforms eat up development budgets, generate hidden costs

Whilst the advantages of using such platforms are clear (time saving on developing an in-house comparative, security and privacy by design), there are hidden costs associated to the configuration and customisation required to bring them into production.

These hidden costs primarily relate to the generation of significant Technical Debt (the gap between the best practice development prescribed by the platform and the customised development undertaken). This Technical Debt can appear innocuous at first, but if left unchecked can affect the efficiency of the platform, and variances in the quality of the customised code can cause long delays when migrating to the next version of the platform as well as security and privacy breaches.

At present, IT Managers have no way of measuring Technical Debt. Delays create unnecessary and unforeseen costs, negating the savings made by utilising the LC/NC in the first place.

According to Gartner, by 2023, 90 percent of all technical debt existing today will still exist and will continue to strangle business innovation.

Quality Clouds: Helping IT Managers improve the quality of their deployments and operations

With Quality Clouds, IT Managers can now actively measure where they are generating Technical Debt in large scale LC/NC deployments in real time, giving developers valuable insights into their code.

The Quality Clouds platform analyses at the code level and calculates Technical Debt generated by each line of code, helping IT Managers not only monitor development efficiency, but understand the impact of Developers decisions and react to them in real time. At the Enterprise level, in large scale deployments with multiple development teams, onshore and offshore, this single source of development truth helps optimise the usage and return on investment in software subscriptions.

With integrations to platforms such as Jira, ServiceNow and Slack, Quality Clouds insights are easily actionable, driving efficient development processes.

Quality Clouds is currently available for Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft Office365). To learn more, click here.

Our first Investment from our third fund

Quality Clouds was the first investment from our third fund, launched in 2019, and continues our commitment to Deep Tech B2B companies in Western Europe. We are excited to partner with the team at this early stage in their growth story.