Low-code smart application platform provider Vantiq is currently in a league of its own, according to founder and CEO Marty Sprinzen. "We do not have competitors today – not direct competitors," he told SDxCentral.

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.

This extra layer is important because of the inherent complexity of the apps the platform helps build – they will run on smartphones, cloud, and edge “at a minimum,” he said. “Therefore, a new generation of software development [and] deployment environment is needed."

He likened his company to the first version of Apple's iPhone, which was a mobile telephone, but it was also a camera. It played music and connected to the internet. "They combined everything into one device," he said.

Sprinzen recounted a conversation with a "very big" analyst firm where an analyst told him Vantiq was essentially operating in a category of one. "The iPhone was new in its market – the smartphone – and created [that] market, and we are the same way," Sprinzen said.

Vantiq is similar in that it combines "the ability to develop software, to distribute it everywhere, to set up all of the communications among all of these distributed systems, and to make sure everything runs reliably," he explained. "And then, very importantly, we automate or make it easy to communicate to humans."

No direct competitors exist that are doing what Vantiq does today, he claimed. "Who knows who's working on it, but right now if you want to build these advanced, complex systems, we're the only game in town."

In theory, it's possible to create smart applications that span distributed cloud and edge environments by piecing together a number of different components provided by hyperscalers, for example. However, "the failure rates are abysmal," he said.

Vantiq's largest investor had failed twice in two years to build a smart building, but "it was built with us with two people [in] under six months," Sprinzen touted.

Vantiq's platform generates basic code, and then users drag and drop to visually create application components in the 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,” Sprinzen explained.

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.

Vantiq is focused on more than the typical drag and drop platform by enabling the development of 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.