Accelerating Enterprise Application Development Through Low Code: Ricoh Hong Kong Partners Up with Five
Accelerating Enterprise Application Development Through Low Code: Ricoh Hong Kong Partners Up with Five
Executive Summary
How can IT teams build and deploy custom business applications faster, more reliably and so that they are easier to maintain?
Five, a Cyberport start-up from Hong Kong, with offices in Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur, is changing the way that enterprise IT teams build cloud-native business applications. Its low-code development environment gives developers access to everything they need to rapidly build & deploy cloud-native, full-stack business applications on AWS.
Five recently introduced its innovative low-code development environment to Ricoh Hong Kong’s in-house development team.
Challenge
In the old days, enterprise IT teams primarily served as a support function for an organization’s core business. But in a highly digitized and electronic-first world, this has changed.
Modern organizations harness new technologies to bring business and technology closer together. And modern technology is revolutionizing the way businesses design, integrate, and deploy solutions to solve their operational challenges. As more companies are looking to reduce manual tasks to improve efficiencies, the answers they are looking for can be found in cloud-based business applications.
Ricoh is a Japanese-based multinational imaging and electronics company, which produces multi-functional printer hardware and other office equipment. Its Hong Kong subsidiary, Ricoh Hong Kong, established in 1963, also focuses on digital services, delivering innovative IT solutions and cloud-based business applications to its internal and external customers.
Its 10+ strong in-house IT team builds custom business applications such as approval systems or automatic email applications. And it does so on top of its day-to-day work of maintaining off-the-shelf systems such as the company’s ERP.
The IT team is responsible for application development and implementation and covers the full systems development life cycle: application advisory and design, building and deploying applications, as well as application management and support. It is required to deliver solutions that meet and exceed business challenges and to deliver them quickly.
That’s why accelerating software development processes is top of mind for Ricoh Hong Kong.
Solution
Five demonstrated that its solution can meet Ricoh’s requirements for modern application development. Its low-code development environment supports rapid application development of cloud-native business applications in an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.
Unlike other no-code or low-code solutions, Five does not take away developers’ freedom to write code. Five supports standard programming languages, such as SQL, JavaScript, and TypeScript, giving developers access to a code editor with syntax highlighting and code completion. Developers can build applications quickly using Five’s pre-built features, without giving up the flexibility that only traditional code offers.
Moreover, Five has many useful features to accelerate application development and to simplify application maintenance. Five natively supports Single Sign-On, for example, let’s developers rapidly build charts and dashboards for data visualization and business intelligence, can interface with other systems, and comes with application logs and audit trails, pre-built application environments, and a debugger.
“We are impressed by the maturity of the Five low-code solution, and by the platform’s capability to support rapid application development in different programming languages. As an enterprise IT team, we are most interested in increased speed of delivery, increased standardization, and increased maintainability of IT systems. Based on our evaluation of Five, we believe that the solution can fulfill these three criteria.”
– Danny Poon, General Manager for Information Technology of Ricoh Hong Kong
Results and Benefits
Any new approach to software development comes with an initial learning curve. To kick off the partnership, Five trained Ricoh’s in-house developers in the use of its platform, ensuring that developers quickly get familiar with the way that Five guides through the application development process. Given Ricoh Hong Kong’s deep expertise in business application development, this took less than 4 hours of guided practice.
Five leverages established technologies, such as relational SQL databases, functions, events, webhooks, APIs, and CSS themes, so that developers can build applications on top of Five quickly and with minimum training required. Moreover, Five’s documentation and Quick Start Guide provides many self-paced learning resources.
The solution now enables Ricoh’s in-house team to use low code to rapidly build and deploy modern web applications.
The Five development environment also includes a one-click deployment feature to launch applications onto a configurable AWS cloud infrastructure – no cloud expertise required. Five further provides discrete development, testing, and production environments for each application and application instance. This speeds up the release of new features and encourages an iterative approach to software development.
About Five
Five is a low-code start-up with offices in Hong Kong, Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur, and a member of Cyberport’s Incubation Program (CIP). Its low-code solution helps software developers to rapidly develop and deploy custom business applications by providing pre-built building blocks that can be mixed with full-code almost anywhere.
For more information visit https://five.co or email hello@five.co
About Ricoh (Hong Kong) Limited
Established in 1963, Ricoh (Hong Kong) Co., ltd. focuses on digital services and office solutions. Entering the era of digital transformation, Ricoh’s Four Areas of Expertise includes Hybrid Workplace, Workflow & Automation, Cloud & IT Infrastructure, and Cybersecurity. Ricoh has been actively advocating corporate evolution in recent years, accompanied by digital services and four customer values: Simplifying Complexity, Uncovering Hidden Opportunities, Overcoming Obstacles, and Embracing Diversity, bringing people and technology together, so companies can focus on forward.
For more information visit https://www.ricoh.com.hk