The market for low-code tools is experiencing a renaissance, according to Rakesh Nandakumar, Kissflow’s associate vice-president for Southeast Asia, noting that numerous suppliers in the market are now vying for attention by baking artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into their offerings.
Amid the competition, Nandakumar said Kissflow is finding its place in the market by positioning itself as an inclusive platform designed to serve the entire spectrum of an organisation’s automation and application development needs.
“Kissflow is one of the few low-code platforms that business users can use to develop their own automations and IT teams can use to build applications,” he said, adding that business teams can use Kissflow to automate a purchase order without needing a complex system, for example. “There are very few players in the market that can claim that, which is our biggest strength.”
More importantly, Nandakumar said the Kissflow platform can scale according to the needs of an enterprise. “What you build as a process today can become an application tomorrow,” he said, adding that citizen-developed applications can be governed and monitored by IT, ensuring compliance and avoiding the pitfalls of shadow IT.
Enterprises can also tap Kissflow’s integration capabilities to connect workflows to existing systems using an integration framework. “It could be a chain of actions that has to be set in motion,” Nandakumar said, citing the example of a purchase order approval triggering an update in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, followed by an e-mail to a supplier. With about 80 pre-built connectors and the ability to create custom connectors, Kissflow ensures new applications can be embedded into an organisation’s broader ecosystem, he added.
While Kissflow, which has found a “very strong calling in banking, energy, manufacturing and retail” industries, empowers citizen developers, it doesn’t aim to replace core business applications like ERP, Nandakumar said. Instead, it targets the “long tail” of organisational needs that off-the-shelf software doesn’t cover, where the alternative is often custom code or simply leaving the problem unsolved.
This strategy is resonating in Southeast Asia, where Kissflow has been doubling its revenue in the last four years. The company’s growth is largely driven by demand in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia – markets Nandakumar identified as having a “large technology deficit” and are more open to embracing citizen development.
To support its expansion in the region, Kissflow has established teams in the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. It has also built a network of partners across Southeast Asia focused on workplace modernisation and digital transformation. Being cloud-native and hosted on major hyperscalers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, Kissflow can also accommodate customer requests for in-country data hosting where such infrastructure exists.
Kissflow’s go-to-market strategy in the region is deliberately top-down, targeting IT heads such as vice-presidents of IT and CIOs responsible for digital transformation in their organisations. “We don’t sell to business users because we don’t believe in shadow IT,” Nandakumar said. “If you’re going to do citizen development, it’s always a top-down, strategic initiative from the organisation.”
This philosophy underpins Kissflow’s customer engagement efforts, where Kissflow acts more like a digital transformation partner than a technology provider. “Together with the customer, we can work out a transformation plan for three to five years,” Nandakumar said, adding that such collaborative planning helps identify quick wins using existing templates, alongside areas requiring custom development, ensuring a sustainable journey for customers.
AI is set to play an even more central role in Kissflow’s platform which already incorporates AI to suggest best practices, data fields, and stages during process building, assisting citizen developers who may have knowledge gaps.
However, the next evolution is far more ambitious. In the next three to four months, Nandakumar said the platform’s AI assistant, for example, will be able to build a process or system based on user prompts.
When ready, the new capability is expected to slash development time, potentially enabling users to “go live with a process in less than 30 minutes,” a significant improvement from the hours or days it might currently take, he claimed. “That is going to be a complete game changer.”