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.
Gartner defines the service orchestration and automation platform (SOAP) market as encompassing solutions that empower organizations to manage and automate their entire technology stack, including workloads, workflows, resource provisioning and data pipelines. SOAPs empower infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to streamline and accelerate the delivery of business services. These platforms integrate workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid IT landscape. By automating and optimizing these processes, SOAPs enable organizations to rapidly deploy workloads, enhance operational efficiency and achieve significant cost savings while ensuring high availability and business continuity. SOAPs enhance traditional workload automation by supporting use cases in data pipelines, cloud-native infrastructures and application architectures. They complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains, enabling organizations to achieve customer-centric agility, reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and establish standardized processes across their entire IT landscape.