We hope you enjoyed our articles about competitors in the niche. Why did we overview our competitors? The idea was to show you our understanding of the market needs, our readiness for challenges, and our deep research and analytical work. We do not take competitors as our enemies but as partners. They also motivate us to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and solutions range.

The major players in the large businesses and enterprises market have many valuable and demanded features for professional developers and non-technical users. They also offer scalability, cloud-based solutions, APIs, connectors, and AWS, but… they don’t work for individuals (individuals or small groups of citizen developers).

On the other hand, there are platforms precisely for individuals and SMBs. They have an affordable price policy, builders for application designing, and even workflow management (some of them), pre-defined templates, components libraries, etc. Still, mostly, they don’t offer scalability, adequate security, integrability, or a tutorial library.

We continuously investigate the market and its’ needs and strive to go beyond the niche to offer more tailored ideas.

Our aim is a combination of capabilities and opportunities provided by the main platforms for large businesses and enterprises with flexibility and cost attractivity of solutions for SMBs.

Our niche is small and medium businesses that are tired of a considerable amount of solutions and wish to find a builder to solve pains comprehensively for an affordable price. 

PLATMA allows people without solid programming skills to create functional and attractive applications. 

To do this, we develop connectors and various solution templates that you can choose from according to your foreseen configuration.

This product will be valuable for business representatives, who will get a chance to order the development of any service or connector on the platform based on the description of needs, preferences, and technical requirements. On the other hand, the platform will be used by programmers and engineers familiar with software development and less qualified citizen-developers who can act as advisers in manufacturing the final product and actual creators of individual services.

PLATMA will act as an intermediary between all the stakeholders, providing business people with ready-to-use services, engineers — with the opportunity to fully discover their potential, and citizen developers — with a platform to create new solutions for their customers.

Additionally, the platform allows entrepreneurs to save significant time and money on software development by using ready-made services and applications.

PLATMA offers infrastructure, low-code tools, business process design components, and ready-made templates for automating business processes, as well as simplifying digitization and reducing “time to market” to speed up innovation implementation. Here are the trends we follow to go beyond the niche and add new collaboration opportunities.

The PLATMA idea has several strengths: ready-made software solutions with an option to add them during project development, connectors to popular services, a high level of default standardization, open-source components, flexible configuration parameters, and, of course, no/low-code tools.

The development process in PLATMA covers the stages of idea generation, components and tools selection, application manufacturing, and testing.

To implement a solution, PLATMA users will use plain English as a universal programming language and visual templates to create a customized solution. It’s as simple as assembling puzzle pieces.

Various cloud services provide opportunities for cost-effective, efficient, and scalable improvements of IT infrastructure. PLATMA is ready to offer connectors that will integrate into cloud IT infrastructure.

PLATMA’s capabilities are based on several visual modeling interfaces. These interfaces allow users to easily create data models and workflows and design user interfaces effortlessly. Users can drag and drop available components to quickly assemble applications without writing code. This feature allows users to focus on functionality rather than basic code, saving time.

PLATMA’s data modeling interface allows users to quickly develop data models and configure data access points, simplifying integration with existing data sources. Our workflow designer (BPaaS tool) provides users with a visual interface for creating and managing business processes, automating routine tasks, and ensuring consistency across the organization.

The workflow design is a crucial feature of PLATMA. Citizen developers and non-technical users can visually create, manage, and automate business processes using our platform. The Workflow Builder provides tools and components allowing users to easily create workflows. This feature is helpful for organizations that seek a solution to automate routine tasks or define a sequence in business processes.

PLATMA is designed to be user-friendly for individuals with varying levels of technical expertise. Our platform is intuitive and easy to use, allowing users to take off quickly. We provide comprehensive reference documentation and support to help users get the most out of our platform and achieve their development goals.

What can you do using PLATMA?

PLATMA provides the opportunity to create functional, robust applications for people without extensive coding skills. The types of applications to be designed on this platform are diverse and may include:

• Websites: PLATMA is a website builder that allows you to create anything from simple landing pages to complex e-commerce sites, including product/service listings with descriptions, checkout options, questions, etc. PLATMA allows you to create, test, and publish websites without writing code.
  Building a good, high-quality website is traditionally a time-consuming task. Moreover, in the old days, considerable knowledge was required even to create a personal web project that was relatively modern and functional.
  Now, thanks to PLATMA tools, creating attractive and functional websites has become much easier than before. In essence, the main task is to figure out what exactly you need and apply the appropriate mechanisms of the platform to achieve your goals.

• Workflow Automation: PLATMA can automate simple business processes and optimize flows. You need to automate routine tasks or ensure the consistency of your business processes; you systematically face the issues of building, documenting, and automating processes — intuitive and simple tools and components of the Workflow Builder of the PLATMA platform will help you. Lowcoder can flexibly change any business process according to the requirements (signing documents, handing over keys, automating effective interaction with leads, etc.). This could include sales, marketing, or service processes, internal (operational) processes, and any specific work scenarios that need to be improved or accelerated.

• Chatbots: PLATMA can be used to develop chatbots for customer service or sales. The extensive opportunities provided for building bots and managing information about potential customers allow you to create a sales script that takes into account the needs of a particular small business, providing the ability to build reports on the effectiveness of interaction with customers. With the help of PLATMA, a bot was created as a service that allows you to launch a full-fledged online store in Messenger. With a catalog of goods, a basket, orders, and notifications sent to customers. An online store or a service for interacting with leads in messengers can be tailored particularly for your needs, customizing for a specific business. And you can manage all the bot modules from one place — your account. Registration will take only a few minutes, and you can create and configure your store or service in half an hour.

• Data Visualization: create visual data presentations, such as diagrams, charts, and dashboards, using PLATMA. Whether you need to customize a new dashboard, create a visual representation of data such as various graphs, charts, dashboards, reports, pivot tables, and automatically generated printables, or add another filter to an existing template, PLATMA’s customizable tools will quickly solve the problem. You can independently change the field settings, customize the display, make them mandatory, or determine whether the fields will be editable. The interface is simple and intuitive. You don’t need a deep understanding of programming syntax; even beginners can work with it.

• Artificial Intelligence Solutions: With PLATMA, you can write solutions using artificial intelligence and incorporate them into operational systems. All you need to do is communicate the necessary data, from simple options (forecasting demand for the item you’re selling) to full communication with your customer.

• Integration-based solutions at PLATMA: PLATMA offers tools for setting up standard integrations in the form of a marketplace with a set of ready-made connectors to the most common systems, an open API, and integration with third-party services. Such connectors include solutions for connecting social networks, project management or accounting systems, analytical platforms, payment systems with various payment services, CRM, notification output, and integration with financial systems, where PLATMA processes all logic and other components of IT ecosystems. The solution uses a microservice architecture. Microservices implement the necessary functions, including integration, work with loads, etc.
  For example, you can create an online store without writing code and integrate it with payment gateways, delivery services, accounting systems, and other services.

• Development of web applications: if you need to create attractive, responsive interfaces quickly and easily, our design module provides a range of pre-built templates and UI components that you can customize to suit your application’s unique needs. The benefit of using PLATMA is that it enables you to develop and distribute an application to the intended users within a few hours. Moreover, this application can be a long-term project that can expand and develop alongside the company that created it. With PLATMA, you can create a fully functional web application by dragging and dropping ready-made components to select the desired functionality. 

Benefits of using PLATMA

PLATMA is easy to use and offers a range of benefits that are superior to those of its competitors, including:

• Versatility: PLATMA’s versatility makes it an excellent choice for businesses in any industry that need to develop custom solutions. It provides a customizable platform to meet individual business needs.

• Ease of use: PLATMA’s visual interface makes it easy for businesses to develop custom solutions without requiring extensive coding knowledge. Its NODE-RED graphical component and AI Builder further simplify the development process.

• Speed: PLATMA enables businesses to develop and deploy custom solutions quickly and efficiently, reducing the time it takes to bring new solutions to market.

• Scalability: PLATMA’s solutions are based on Node.js, which enables businesses to deploy and scale solutions like regular Node.js code. This makes it easy for companies to grow and adapt their solutions as their needs change.

In summary, PLATMA is a versatile and flexible platform that can be applied to various industries. So, what allows us to be flexible and meet various needs?

We use a declarative approach based on OOD (Object-Oriented Design). In our next article we want to share with you our OOD concept and provide an overview of Object-Oriented Analysis, Object-Oriented Design, and Object-Oriented Programming. Dive into depth and learn the core idea of an Object-Oriented Methodology.