Uniface: A low-code development disruptor

…a modern visual development platform with provenance

author • David Norfolk

of past ownership, is newly funded, and delivers a fully modern interface – a modern IDE (integrated development environment), called Uniface 10. Its intended audience includes:

• Opinion leaders in potential partners, who want to build stable products under their own name, that can adapt quickly and reliably to the needs of the Mutable Enterprise (the business in a constant state of change and reinvention, in response to the changing business environment);

• Opinion leaders in large companies who want to modernise their business automation environment quickly, with no surprises;

• Managers in companies with failing modernisation and other projects who rapidly need an alternative approach with low barriers to adoption and a good success record.

niface is a different kind of disruptor in the increasingly popular “low-code” development platform space. Like more

recent model-driven development tools, it is driven from a visual model of business requirements with little conventional coding required. However, Uniface has a long history back to 1984 and over that time it has constantly demonstrated its ability to deliver high productivity, timely, and successful, automation to the business. But, possibly more important, it has also demonstrated an ability to keep up-to-date as technology changes, and to bring its customers along with it on the technology journey at their own pace, thus helping to manage technology risk.

This eBook is intended to highlight an opportunity for high-productivity business automation that has been successful in a niche marketplace (often with VARs, ISVs and SIs who develop their own products, under their own name, without necessarily advertising the use of Uniface under the covers, as a VAR may wish to promote just its own “brand”). It is now independent

Executive summary

U“Uniface has a long history back to 1984 and over

that time it has constantly demonstrated its ability to

deliver high productivity, timely, and successful, automation

to the business.

Fast factsThe things that you should immediately be aware of concerning Uniface are:

• It is well-funded by its venture capital owners and is profitable.

• It is an independent company formed out of a stable, long-established business automation player and now wholly free of baggage from its previous owners.

• It has strong underlying technology and proven “low-code” capabilities.

• It develops automation at the business, not technology, level.

• It can point to many established success stories, especially with its partners.

• It had, and still maintains, an enviable reputation for helping its customers innovate without pain.

The bottom lineBloor’s overall view of Uniface is that it is competitive, at the technology level, with the latest “low-code” development tools, now that Uniface 10 has given it a contemporary look-and-feel. However, it is differentiated by its long history of supporting its customers through the changing technology environment, allowing them to modernise effectively, but at their own pace. The final reason that you should be taking it seriously today is its comparatively recent privatisation has given its management team free reign to persue their vision for the product, with adequate finances from its new owners.

With Uniface 10, its latest incarnation, you retain the key characteristic of Uniface that has made it popular with its users for years: model-driven development. You build a model of the business, (but, now, using an IDE or integrated development environment, with a modern look-and-feel), and generate the application runtime – this is “low-code” because there is no actual coding of a low level application, you just have to describe high-level business logic, which is, as it always has been, the chief advantage of the Uniface approach.

Because the Uniface Runtime is separated from the user experience code, Uniface is inherently platform neutral and provides good mobile application support and can build applications that run on Cloud – its main difference from some competing development platforms today is that it is not actually a Cloud application – the Uniface Runtime is not a PaaS (platform as a service) – but that will change in the future.

Uniface is being actively and continually developed: it is enthusiastically adopting the latest Container approaches (which provide a light-weight and Agile alternative to conventional virtualisation); will be developing offline mobile services; and a Community Edition that will reduce barriers to entry even further is also in development.

Chapter 1, The “low-code” opportunityBusinesses are having to respond to a constantly changing business environment, powered by increasingly powerful (and usually mobile) technologies. Customers have, increasingly, grown up using computers and will change suppliers in an instant if their user experience of an automated system falls below their increasingly stringent expectations.

Established businesses can no longer rely on customer loyalty – or customer inertia – when “the better mousetrap” is only a few clicks away for a dissatisfied customer. Their strong and profitable businesses can easily be disrupted by a newcomer who has built its applications with the

very latest technology, offering the most fashionable “look and feel” (that is, user experience). The new business disruptor can cherry-pick the incumbent’s most profitable and active customers, leaving the incumbent with the “difficult”, the unprofitable and the inactive customers.

In this new environment the ability to change applications quickly and reliably is critical to the business. Moreover, there is less tolerance for making mistakes in the interpretation of customer expectations. No-one can afford to build automation several times until they find something their customers like. This is an environment ideally suited to the strengths of a “low-code” development and deployment platform such as Uniface. With Uniface, for example, you can:

• Concentrate resources on business logic, not on making technology work;

• Re-use technology efficiently at the business level, not the technology level (the underlying technology logic is supplied by Uniface and is largely invisible to Uniface business automation experts);

• Deliver what the business wants when the business wants it and get this right first time – because the business can validate the evolving automation at the business model level (and the business can’t understand conventional code or formal requirements). That is, exploit its usability in order to shorten the time from prototype to production;

• Achieve astonishing productivity, because a lot of low-level code can be generated beneath a simple statement of business logic.

This is why the market for “low-code” application development is so buoyant and why it is disrupting conventional coding – we are, in the early 21st century, at an inflection-point for the business – and technology has to follow suit or become increasingly irrelevant.

Uniface: A “low-code” disruptor

“Low-code” platforms forecast, 2015 to 2020 (US$ billions)

0

4

8

12

16

US$bn

2015 2016*

*Forrester forecast

2017* 2018* 2019* 2020*

$1.728$2.557

$3.887

$6.142

$10.318

$15.478

Source: Forrester’s Q4 2015 Global Low-Code Platforms Vendor Landscape Online Survey

1

across the world. A company that can’t cope with globalisation effectively will soon be unable to compete with those that can.

Uniface already has a global presence necessary to exploiting this market. Typically, it will build a relationship with a local partner with local knowledge – an effective way to deal with the very real cultural issues around globalisation.

It is always difficult to assess market size in a market place as large and subdivided as application development (it depends on what the marketplace sees as feasible alternatives to Uniface) but IDC reports the market opportunity for model-driven development platforms as in excess of $3 billion annually – 10 billion by 2019 – so there’s plenty of room for Uniface to grow into; and Uniface’s new owners are actively pursuing growth.

Another aspect of the 21st century business environment that is disrupting established businesses is globalisation – customer opportunities are no longer limited to one (or even a few) countries with a similar culture to the vendor, but spread

Global HQUniface sales presence including distributorsDistributor office

Americas share of FY16 revenue – 20%

• USA 14%

• Canada 3%

• Other 4%

Europe share ofFY16 revenue – 71%

• UK 22%

• Netherlands 11%

• Germany 10%

• France 10%

• Switzerland 4%

• Belgium 4%

• Others 9%Rest of World share ofFY16 revenue – 91%

• Australia 4%

• Japan 3%

• Others 2%

Uniface’s global presence

Uniface at the business level Uniface today has grown out of a leading and well-established 4GL (4th Generation Language) product. Uniface was founded in 1984 and acquired by Compuware in 1994; but it was revitalised when it was acquired by Marlin Equity in 2014. It has had a very loyal customer-base over its entire history (currently it has many customers – direct customers, channel customers and partners – and more than 10,000 customer sites). Some of its indirect customers – customers of its partners - may not even realise that they are using Uniface technology.

Essentially, Uniface is in it for the long haul. It helps business, IT and other (e.g. regulatory) stakeholders to collaborate on building essential business outcomes, rapidly, using a high-level, visual, model of the necessary business logic. What Uniface adds to the model is easy, seamless, deployment, facilitated change and maintenance, and built-in security. The tried and tested quality of the Uniface

deployment modules ensure high application quality and helps to guarantee business success.

In the normative process, as Bloor envisages it, a citizen developer (“a citizen developer,” according to the Gartner IT glossary, “is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT” – see www.gartner.com/it-glossary/citizen-developer/) sees a business issue or opportunity affecting his or her (or, rather, the company’s) desired “business outcome”, involving:

• tracking information

• process improvement

• analytics or decision support

• collaboration.

198619901988

1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 20042006

20082010

20122014

2016

1984

First fully graphicaldevelopment environment

COMPANY

PRODUCT

OWNER Compuware Corporation Marlin Equity Partners

UNIS launched byInside Automation,a Dutch startup

Uniface BV(originally known as Inside Automation)

Acquired by US-basedCompuware Corporation, a supplier of database toolsand application software

Company namechanged to Uniface

First publicrelease ofUniface

Rapid growthin early 90sdue to thepopularityof 4GLs

Introducedsupport forweb services

First thinclient mobilesupport

Possible to developapplications withrich internetfunctionality

Acquired byMarlin EquityPartners

Provided support for mobile

Became independentbusiness unit of Compuware

Uniface history timeline

Uniface, what is it2“Uniface is behaving as a

new startup, with enthusiastic management and plentiful

investment. However, it can also take advantage of its long-

established trust relationships with its customers

and partners.

Citizen Devloperdetects need forsoftware solution

Identify existing datato support new app

Approved Appis published

Review and testingof the App

Citizen and IT Departmentwork to refine the App

Simple AppConstruction

Drag and Drop

Low code Appnow available for use

and download

Conceptof solutionis imagined

He or she then visualises a new app. In practice, access to a business analyst mentor will be useful. This is because – sometimes, the requirement is really for an entirely new approach, not just a tweak to the status quo. Also, some potential business or technology issues may not be obvious to a citizen developer and must be recognised as early as possible, before time is wasted on impracticable approaches.

Then, the team (and the mentor) identify existing sources of digital data for the new app – remembering to consider data privacy and security; and, in the EU in

particular, the need to obtain consent for changes in the usage of “personally identifiable” data. It is important that such issues are identified as early as possible.

This data is connected to the new app using simple construction methods such as visual drag-and-drop of components, formulating and configuration files. At this point, IT is involved formally, to ensure security, governance, maintainability etc.

The new App can then be published for use by a controlled user community.

Ease of use in producing business outcomes

Typical process for the citizen developer

of “low-code” Apps

Uniface – a living development platformIt’s important to remember that, despite its origins in the 20th century, Uniface is still being actively developed by a management team open to new ideas and prepared to recruit new staff (e.g. for Cloud deployment) where there may be gaps in the existing Uniface culture. However, the key Uniface values of productivity, platform neutrality and customer support are still enthusiastically supported by its management team.

This means that several implementation initiatives are currently in progress:

• Uniface 10 is a radical redesign of the Uniface user experience, available since the “early adopter edition” was released for new applications in 2015; a full enterprise edition for existing and new applications was released in Sept 2016 (with a fully tested path from earlier versions). Uniface itself is moving towards an Agile 4 month incremental release schedule (it’s not sure that many businesses could keep up with, say, a weekly release cycle).

• Uniface Mobile support has been proceeding since 2015, with its hybrid HTML5 approach which offers most of the functionality of native mobile for about half of the delivery cost”. According to the Telerik survey at http://bertiaux.fr/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/11/HTML5_Adoption_Survey.pdf, HTML5 “adoption and usage is on the rise for both mobile and desktop apps, and few developers doubt HTML5’s importance over the next several years” – it’s not just Uniface. Support for offline storage, synchronisation between online and offline data, and offline app execution, will be added to Version 10 in 2017.

• The next big Uniface 10 project, for delivery in 2017, is the introduction of new version control capabilities and integration with GitHub. The availability of open APIs to the Uniface model (access to the model is becoming expected, by model-driven development cultures) and an enhanced debugger are also promised for 2017.

• An exciting development is a new Community Edition, which is also likely to become available in 2017, and which will be of particular interest to the Citizen Developer, who may wish to explore the capabilities of Uniface.

• An active Cloud Strategy is being developed for completion in the medium term. – Uniface is already running in custom Cloud

environments.– Phase 1, generic Cloud support for popular

databases on MS Azure and Amazon AWS, for Uniface 9/10, is scheduled for the end of 2016.

– Phase 2 is being built on a foundation of a strong containerisation deployment strategy and will be available for Uniface 10 in 2017.

– Phase 3 will deliver a Uniface PaaS, with cloud deployment services and a “per use” licensing model, built on a foundation of the Phase 1 and 2 technology enhancements. This will be delivered out past 2017.

Uniface: the architectureUniface is itself developed in Uniface 10 – a welcome sign that Uniface is prepared to “drink its own champagne”. Essentially, it comprises a Development Architecture and a Deployment Architecture; and this separation allows Uniface developers to focus on business rules and requirements. The Deployment Architecture, takes care of enterprise scalability, performance and security, things that developers have to spend time coding in conventional code-driven environments.

Uniface development is model-driven and based on a data model enhanced with business events and their triggers. Uniface would claim that any overheads in building and maintaining this model are fully compensated for by quicker delivery and the ability to “get it right first time”. Model driven development makes validation by business users easier, makes maintenance easier because you can visualise what changes really mean. You may also gain productivity, because reusing parts of the model is re-use at the business level.

On the Client side, the Deployment Architecture centres on the URB or Uniface Request Broker, which schedules work around the various Uniface components. Although Client/Server is still supported (and enhancements are still being made to it), Uniface now builds Web Applications from choice.

What is Uniface?

DatabaseManagement

System 1

DatabaseManagement

System 2Database

ManagementSystem 3

The Uniface platform is low-code – most of the application is generated from the model defined by the users, rather than needing to be programmed.

This enables applications to be developed more quickly than with traditional tools, as less code needs to be written for a given application.

Uniface is a platform that is used to build, deploy and run custom enterprise applications: software that aids the functioning of a business.

Enterprise applications can be used for a range of purposes across an organisation, including business process management and customer relationship management (CRM) and almost any kind of transaction processing application.

The Uniface development environment is model-driven and component-based.

This enables a quicker, more robust and more intuitive way of developing applications relative to traditional development environments.

1980s

1990s2000s

2010s

2016

1988Uniface 4

PC Support (MSDOS); improvements in IDE and runtime with multi-DB

support.

1984UNIS

Multi-DB 4GLfor VAX/VMS

launched by InsideAutomation of the

Netherlands.

1986Uniface 3

First public release; advanced 4GL IDE and runtime with

multi-DBsupport.

1990Uniface 5

Client/server deployment with remote DB access,

Unix support, GUI support with Universal Presentation

Interface (UPI), and 13+ data stores

supported.

1994Uniface 6

GUI form painter and application model editor,

Macintosh support, Microsoft platform

enhancements (OLE), reporting tools, and integrated version

control.

1997Uniface 7

Components and integration, request broker architecture,

Web app server, and partitioning.

2001Uniface 8 Scalability,

load balancing, and performance;

automatic garbage collection; and

XML Web services.

2003Uniface 8.3

WS-I Web servicessupport; SOAP, COM,

CORBA, andMQSeries

connectors.

2006Uniface 9

Thin-client support, early mobile support

(Windows mobile), and Unicode.

2008Uniface 9.2

Multichanneldeployment; suitecapabilities such as Uniface View

portlets andUniface Flow.

May 2015 An early adopter

edition gives usersthe ability to build

new web applicationsas well as providing

an improvedIDE.

Sep 2016 First full

Enterprise editionallow new IDE to be

used for existingapplications.

From 2017 Further IDE

enhancements, cloud and mobile improvements, and

multitenancy application

support.

2010Uniface 9.4

Uniface support for RIA and “Web 2.0”

functionalityincluding AJAX and

JavaScript.

2015Uniface 9.7

Generation anddistribution of mobile

apps to App Store and Google Play;

added DBs: SAP Hana,PostgreSQL.

2011Uniface 9.5

Better client-sideprocessing withJavaScript API,

session management, and RESTsupport.

2012Uniface 9.6

New client/server GUI features, HTML5 control

and JavaScript APIs, updated PC support

(e.g., 64 bit), and agile release cycle.

10

Uniface product evolution

3 Uniface, differentiationThe management edgeThe history of Uniface cannot be overlooked as a differentiator. Unlike many competing products it has a culture going back into the last century, emphasising productivity and customer support, under a management team that was probably chafing a little under the ownership of a bigger company, focussing on other issues beside rapid model-driven development, with limited resources for developing Uniface.

The privitisation of Uniface put a new fire into its belly and, under its new owners, provided the finances needed for speeding up the development of Uniface. A prime example is the development of its mobile capabilities, which have been well-received by its customers. This was brought forward from Uniface 10 and has already largely been delivered on the classic Uniface 9 platform.

What this means is that Uniface is behaving as a new startup, with enthusiastic management and plentiful investment, at the same time as it can exploit its established trust relationships with its customers and partners. It is differentiated from many of its competitors by its proven ability to deliver, over a

long period of technology changes (from client-server to web applications), but it shares with them an enthusiasm for innovation – and it tells us that it is fully prepared to recruit new expertise in areas where its culture may be lacking (particularly for developing Cloud capabilities and PaaS delivery).

The technology edgeWhat gives Uniface its technology edge is its long-tested and robust approach to model-driven development, coupled with a leadership team devoted to actively developing Uniface technology but still deeply supportive of the values in its customer-focussed “Uniface Way”.

The key characteristics of Uniface, shown in the Characteristics of Uniface illustration, are the result of decades of development and customer involvement – and customers can rely on them.

Deniz YugnukVice President Sales

Arjan SchoutenCFO

Roel StoepkerCTO

Aad van SchetsenCEO

The Uniface leadership team

Uniface is a “low code

model-driven development”

platform with a strongprovenance.

It offers high productivity,

and produces highly

maintainablesolutions.

Unifacedevelopment

is reliable,with better than 95%

success ratesonce a project

is started.

It is easy to learn,

to use of the Uniface platform(usually within

a month).

Uniface applicationsare robust,

with an averagelifetime of 20+ years.

Product maintenance

renewal rates, (a good

test of platformeffectiveness)better than

~97%.

Freedom ofDeploymentis excellent

– Uniface aims to be

platform neutral.

Characteristics of Uniface “It is differentiated from

many of its competitors by its proven ability to

deliver, over a long period of technology

changes.

DataLayer(s)

BusinessLogic Layer(s)

Client/UXLayer(s)

Existing ERP Uniface Based Solution

Javascript(if needed)

BusinessLogic

Uniface Model

Mobile C/S RESTWeb

REST

REST

A Customer Use Case from FCSWhat differentiates Uniface can perhaps be best illustrated by looking at a practical Uniface use case: Hybrid ERP (Enterprise Resource Management—by Uniface’s customer FCS (http://www.fcs21.jp/product/uniface/), a Japanese-based systems integrator whose core business is delivering mission-critical applications to customers in numerous vertical markets.

ERP systems are popular and effective but often bring significant issues for a business:

• If the ERP model doesn’t exactly suit your business, ERP customisation is expensive, especially when new releases come out, and the required skills may be hard to find and expensive;

• The time needed to build customisations may be prohibitive;

• Migrating customisations to new releases of the ERP system and/or new technologies may not be trivial;

• Accommodating new User Interfaces or Channels (e.g. Web or Mobile);

• Integration of an ERP system with new environments (e.g. other apps, IoT, evolving medical or manufacturing hardware) may be difficult or not supported and can change due to unforeseen circumstances (e.g. hardware changes);

• Some ERP systems have very weak functionality in specific areas.

A high-productivity, model-driven, technology-neutral development platform such as Uniface provides a way to overcome these issues; while still being able to exploit the positive capabilities of the ERP system in full.

In essence, you produce a “hybrid ERP system” with the business logic described in a Uniface model. The ERP client/User Experience layers are easily kept synchronised with the Uniface model (if necessary); the ERP business logic layers can be synchronised with the Uniface business logic model via its REST interface; and Uniface has excellent data import/export capabilities for the ERP Data Layer – its “load definitions” functionality, “importing and creating business logic”.

From the users’ point of view, the ERP works just as they are used to – Uniface can easily generate the necessary user interfaces in ERP style. However, any existing ERP business logic can be reused (usually via RESTful interfaces) and any new (customised) business logic can be developed in the highly-productive Uniface environment and developed very rapidly. The custom Uniface business logic can be deployed alongside the existing ERP and will look much the same – but it will be largely unaffected by any changes in the ERP system (including upgrade to the next version).

Customer use case

One problem I could see with this, is if an ERP has an unstructured and opaque underlying model itself; but that’s hardly Uniface’s fault.

So, what differentiates Uniface in this application is:

• Its proven ability to deliver;

• Its fundamental technology neutrality – it can interface to most things and reuse business logic wherever it finds it;

• Its use of a powerful business logic model, abstracted from technology, as a basis for model-driven development;

• Its high productivity and rapid delivery.

Vendor landscapeIt is always difficult to identify “low-code development platforms” as there are no universally accepted definitions for any of these terms. Is developing Business Rules “low-code”, “no code” or “different code”? Is “model-driven development” essential and sufficient for inclusion, or must a product be available as a Cloud PaaS (and, if so, why)? In fact, is a twentieth century 4GL tool, which is where Uniface started off, a legitimate “low-code” development platform (and, if not, why not)?

This is a potential issue for Uniface as it may sometimes be excluded from consideration for reasons quite unrelated to its ability to deliver high-value business outcomes, rapidly and reliably, without coding. Any problems Uniface may have compared to its potential competition seem you us to be more around “mindshare” than capability. In the past, Uniface has had its own loyal customers/VARs/partners and hasn’t

often come up against the competing players; but its new vision around Uniface 10 (“just another high productivity, “low-code” IDE must mean that it will increasingly come up against them.

Forester, for example, in its The Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Development Platforms, Q2 2016 report doesn’t recognise Uniface a player but lists as leaders in this field : OutSystems Platform, Salesforce (see Bloor InComparison between these two here), Mendix (see Bloor InBrief here, Appian, and, on the edge of the leadership category, even Bizagi (which produces executable BPMN models) and ServiceNow (a Service Management orchestration tool). No doubt Forrester’s inclusion criteria are entirely defensible, and Uniface obviously isn’t as big in the marketplace as (for example) Salesforce, but we see it as being entirely capable of producing similar business automation outcomes as these other players, and Bloor is in the process of publishing an InComparison with some of them, which includes Uniface in the mix.

Champion

Innov

ator

Challenger

Mendix

Bizagi

Salesforce 1

Outsystems 10

Subjective comparison bullseye, nearer the centre the better.

Uniface deserves to be considered alongside more fashionable low-code products.

Key:

• “Low-code PaaS code generator”; • “Low-code plus 3GL hybrid PaaS”; • “Low-code modernised 4GL”; • “Low-code cloud native interpreted PaaS”; • “Low-code business process automation platform”.

UNIFACE: The Futureniface has been around for a long time and gained some impressively loyal customers and a good reputation for

helping them to manage their technology risk, as technology evolves. It now has new owners and a “new fire in its belly”.

The main issue facing Uniface, however, is attracting new customers, who may see an impressive history as a sign that Uniface is out-of-date. The new Uniface 10 IDE helps to dispel this view, and a “proof of concept” will show that it can compete with the latest products – but not everyone will make more than a superficial assessment.

This means that Uniface’s vision past Uniface 10, and its ability to attract “net new” customers, is going to be vital for its success. Luckily, it does seem to be attracting new customers and it has committed to this vision going forwards:

• A strong focus on Cloud (with Cloud-based deployment and a PaaS implementation to come);

• The Uniface Community Edition (to facilitate Proofs of Concept and rapid commitment to the platform in production);

• Increasingly rich mobile functionality

• A new License Manager (with Pay per Use on the horizon);

• A new Installer;

• and more.

It now has to deliver on this roadmap, combining the benefits Uniface offers today with new capabilities for meeting the developing market needs of tomorrow.

“Uniface has been around for a long time and gained some

impressively loyal customers and a good reputation for helping them

to manage their technology risk, as technology evolves.

It now has new owners and a “new fire in its belly”.

U

20–22 Wenlock Road LONDON N1 7GU United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)207 043 9750 Web: www.BloorResearch.com

email: info@BloorResearch.com