Are No-Code Platforms Suitable Partners for Businesses? Hubbler CEO Discusses
Creating applications generally requires immense coding and expertise, usually over a period of time. It’s not the easiest task and definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. Entering into this landscape, Karnataka based Hubbler is simplifying the creation of a business process into a web or mobile application. The organisation assists businesses by enabling app creation within 24 hours – without writing a single line of code. Analytics India Magazine caught up with Hubbler’s founder, Mr Vinay Agrrawal,  to get an insight into his mission of creating a digital workforce on seamless app development. AIM: We’d love to know the story of the origin of Hubbler. Please take us through it. Vinay Agrrawal: I started my journey through Unicel in 2003, my previous startup. As an entrepreneur, I had to face many challenges and chaos a growing company throws. At Unicel, I spent considerable time and money to organise the chaos that I faced and took up a challenge to solve this problem using technology and innovation. Negotiating these challenges made me realise that I have a bigger goal to achieve. The idea of a new startup – Hubbler, was born. In 2015, a global multi-channel mobile messaging platform, mGage India Private Limited, acquired Unicel to bolster its presence in India’s enterprise mobile marketing in a deal that was widely reported. With this deal, I took an exit from Unicel to pursue what I loved most – building a company from scratch. With the objective to create a new venture, I started to create a team for Hubbler. Today, Hubbler is empowering so many organisations to create an app in just hours without writing a single line of code. With a revolutionary platform, Hubbler plans to change the way enterprises build and consume applications. AIM: What makes Hubbler stand out from the competition? Vinay Agrrawal: The super APP Concept. Hubbler is designed to reduce the number of applications that a business user needs to interact with. Not only can one fork a new application on Hubbler as needed, but also connect their legacy systems to Hubbler and interact with it using Hubbler as an interface. 40+ Intelligent Hubbles​: Hubbles are configurable microservice-based components that help build truly vertical/function agnostic applications and change them on the fly​.  Connect & Engage: Create and track organisation goals. Reward people and celebrate success.  Device Agnostic: Deliver applications natively to Android, iOS and Web​. Platform beyond workflows: Build around accelerating business transformation strategy than capturing just the workflows. AIM: Tell us about your flagship products and services. Vinay Agrrawal: Hubbler is a cloud platform that helps organisations build any business applications overnight without writing a single line of code. The platform has the capability to configure any kind of business application. Our customers have built over 1000+ applications on our platform. We have deployed complex solutions like Procure to Pay Cloud, Lease Management, Revenue Operations, Expense management, Field Force automation and even entire billing systems, etc. Many such solutions can be easily built on Hubbler, and possibilities are endless. Some of the startups have built their entire tech platform on us, allowing them to hit the market in a few months. AIM: Can you explain the tech behind creating an app without coding? Vinay Agrrawal: Ironically, there is a lot of code behind building a non-code platform. At the outset, we rejected hybrid application approaches for a better user experience. All the applications built on Hubbler are available natively on all the form factors. We have built a proprietary system that generates not only the user interface but also a backend database and business middleware with just a click of a button. Our core tech platform is written in Python, while the user interface uses SWIFT on iOS, Kotlin on Android, and JS on the Web. AIM: What market are you tapping into? What’s your expansion plan? Vinay Agrrawal: For the last couple of years, we had been working on perfecting the platform and learning as much as possible by solving different problems. Today, we have customers from 15+ industries with over 500+ applications in India. Predominantly, we target growth stage mid-size enterprises across verticals. We have all plans ready for an international launch (North America, Europe & Middle East) by Q3 this year, and therefore, we are raising funds now. These markets are pretty mature to adopt a no-code platform. According to the Market and Markets report on low and no-code platforms, an industry estimated to USD 45.5 Bn by 2025, a market adoption analysis found that North America and Europe were the biggest consumers of low and no-code platforms followed by the APAC region. The Middle East was also touted as a key consumer of low/no-code. AIM: Would you please elaborate on how the development of Hubbler-created apps helps them join shoulders with those developed by coders, the conventional way? Vinay Agrrawal: We gave a lot of thought to Hubbler’s ability to work with the existing or future ecosystem of the business. We acknowledged the fact that we can’t operate in silos. We have built an extensive API framework to make Hubbler work with any external system. Our architecture allows data to be handed over from any of the applications to Hubbler and then back to the same or any other application for further processing if needed. AIM: How does Hubbler contribute to India’s growing data science ecosystem? Vinay Agrrawal: We have seen many businesses talking about AI and data science in their business. However, the core issue is that their data is still trapped. The data is either scattered on multiple systems or worse, is trapped in papers and emails. At Hubbler, we are strong proponents of basic hygiene. Firstly, we are helping businesses digitise the processes that they are doing either manually or on excel sheets. Secondly, using API connectors, we are not only bringing in scattered data in a single place but also organising it based on organisation structure and processes. This ensures data can be consumed in the most efficient way. AIM: Tell us about the work culture at Hubbler. Vinay Agrrawal: Hubbler nurtures leaders, learners and challengers. We work beyond hierarchy barriers and foster a culture of collaboration. Our teams can be found in huddles, discussing everything from new application development to the latest Netflix binge. We believe that a workplace you love will create a job you love – happy teams make happy customers! AIM: What are your views on the current data policies in India? Vinay Agrrawal: There’s a lot that has been done in the last 4-5 years to ensure that our policies match with the best practices followed in the West. However, we have yet to see a push from the government to open source the data trapped within their multiple departments. All government departments should offer anonymised data (for privacy) as an API. This would result in a wave of new interesting applications that would not only help citizens but also create a lot of employment opportunities.
“Ironically, there is a lot of code behind building a non-code platform.”
“Ironically, there is a lot of code behind building a non-code platform.”
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["data science", "Go", "API", "AI", "ML", "Git", "Python", "Aim", "analytics", "R"]
["AI", "ML", "data science", "analytics", "Aim", "Python", "R", "Go", "Git", "API"]
Avi Gopani is a technology journalist that seeks to analyse industry trends and developments from an interdisciplinary perspective at Analytics India Magazine. Her articles chronicle cultural, political and social stories that are curated with a focus on the evolving technologies of artificial intelligence and data analytics.