Code modernization tools help organizations transform legacy applications from outdated codebases, obsolete architectures, and aging platforms into modern, high-performing, and scalable systems. These tools typically offer a comprehensive suite of capabilities, including automated code analysis and refactoring, migration to contemporary programming languages and frameworks, decomposition of monolithic systems into microservices, containerization, and seamless integration with cloud-native environments. By automating complex and time-consuming modernization tasks, these tools significantly reduce technical debt, enhance application security, improve maintainability, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. They are especially valuable in enabling organizations to align legacy systems with current business needs, regulatory standards, and evolving technology landscapes. Key customers include large enterprises in sectors such as banking, healthcare, government, telecommunications, and manufacturing, where legacy systems are mission-critical and modernization is a strategic imperative.
Gartner defines enterprise low-code application platforms (LCAPs) as software platforms for the accelerated development and maintenance of applications, using model-driven development tools, generative AI and prebuilt component catalogs for the entire application’s technology stack. Enterprise LCAP features include support for the collaborative development of all application components; runtime environments for high performance, availability and scalability of applications; and application deployment and monitoring with detailed usage insights. Enterprise LCAP platforms feature governance controls and insights, self-service capabilities, APIs for integration with external DevOps tooling, success management with exhaustive technical documentation, training programs and a comprehensive global partner network. Enterprise LCAPs provide the foundation for developing a wide range of applications and application components with distributed data architectures, including complex multimodal front ends, business workflows, agentic AI and integration capabilities. The enterprise LCAP market is closely related to the citizen application development platform (CADP) market, as they both aim to address the use cases listed below. However, they are distinctively different in terms of the target audience and complexity of the applications built on the platform.
Rapid mobile app development (RMAD) tools are a class of coding-optional tools that enable nonprogrammers to build mobile apps to support, at a minimum, iOS and Android devices. These tools offer high productivity for developers and nondevelopers alike through a variety of approaches that both automate and abstract app development efforts, including drag-and-drop editors, code generation and orchestration, model-driven development, virtualization, business process mapping, component assembly, app configuration and forms construction.