Vantiq founder and CEO Marty Sprinzen described his seven-year-old company's mission as using low-code application development technology at the edge, in the cloud, and everywhere in between to enable the types of smart applications necessary in a world increasingly impacted by climate change.

"Our goal is to create an environment in which you could address the challenges that the world faces today very easily and simply" through what's known as low code technology. Despite Vantiq's use of the term, low-code "is a dumb acronym," he told SDxCentral. "Of course, we're going to take advantage of concepts that exist," but his company's work is broader than low code's traditional definition.

The term inherently implies a way to generate software and code quickly. And while that's a required characteristic and definitely a benefit, it's not a real challenge.

"The biggest challenge is that the kinds of systems that need to be developed are going to run everywhere," Sprinzen said. "They're going to run on what is now commonly referred to as the edge and, of course, your smartphone, ... and the cloud, or proprietary systems of all nature. It's a different challenge."

He explained that getting one piece of software to run everywhere at once isn't that easy. For example, if a subway is flooding, "you want to have sensors right there determining what's happening. And then you want to go to the cloud to guide people away from [that subway] and get the early responders out there as quick[ly] as possible," he explained.

That type of application doesn't just require low code, "because you have code running in the edge, code running on the smartphone, code running in the cloud, [and] code integrating with other components. It's more of developing a smart application that runs everywhere," Sprinzen said.

He credits the common meaning of low code to companies like OutSystems and Mendix that focused on next-generation web applications for accessing things like corporate data. "They could do that quickly, but that's a constrained environment" like a public cloud or on-premises local processing, he said.

And while traditional low-code application platform providers have a "drag and drop, this and that" approach, Vantiq is focused on developing applications that span an entire distributed environment.

"It's easy distribution of logic to the various places it belongs. It's getting that communications up and running among all the systems very quickly. The challenges are more than just writing software for one location," Sprinzen said.

Vantiq's platform serves as an additional layer above an organization's distributed environment and allows for the development of applications that run on a smartphone, at the edge, and in multiple clouds, according to Sprinzen.

This extra layer is important because the apps the platform helps build are inherently more complex than a payroll app and will run on smartphones, cloud, and edge "at a minimum," he said. "Therefore, a new generation of software development [and] deployment environment is needed. And that's what Vantiq is."

The platform generates basic code, and then uses drag and drop to visually create application components in Vantiq's low-code development environment.

The deployment piece is where these components are automatically distributed to wherever they should run: the edge, the cloud, or a smartphone. If an application is "reading a lot of sensor information, and there's an edge that has sensors attached to it, you should run on that edge. ... If you have AI [artificial intelligence] searching a particular large database, it's in the cloud. Obviously, that AI should run there," he explained.

There are two main areas the world has to deal with in terms of climate change, and Vantiq is designed to address both, according to Sprinzen.

The first is adopting renewable sources of energy like wind and solar as alternatives to carbon-intensive fossil fuels, which he believes is likely to take longer than planned. "We have all these grandiose goals, and inherently [it] just takes longer to develop and change a monstrous system like the gasoline automotive system to move to electric," he said, "although in the long term it'll happen."

The second area is responding to the physical impacts of climate change like hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and biodiversity loss, which "are happening quicker than we thought," he said. Coral reefs, which naturally take in carbon dioxide and generate oxygen, have declined by more than half its global coverage since the 1950s. These effects of climate change are accelerating in part "because you can't model all that. It's complex systems," Sprinzen said.

On top of the problems' complexity and expected tenacity, "getting towards a sustainable reality is going to take longer," he added. "Therefore, we have to have resilient systems, built systems that can manage food supplies and water and get it to the right place at the right time when disasters happen, like 100 million people being flooded in Pakistan," he said. To that point, he claimed Vantiq enables the development of software that will help the world deal with climate challenges as they occur and move toward new sustainable systems.