Mendix 10.6 Positions Global Organizations for Transformative Business Impact with New Suite of Enterprise AI Capabilities
BOSTON (USA) – February 27, 2024 — Mendix, a Siemens business, today announced the general availability of Mendix 10.6, a platform upgrade featuring first-to-market AI enablement tools designed to simplify and accelerate enterprise adoption of this game-changing technology for the broadest range of strategic use cases.
Mendix 10.6 delivers on the company’s vision of continuous innovation in three major areas:
- Enhancing developer productivity with a suite of AI-assisted developer (AIAD) tools and updated editors for a faster and more intuitive experience
- New tooling that greatly simplifies the process of augmenting Mendix applications with AI
- Expanded visibility, transparency, and real-time insights and feedback to manage and optimize production and deployment across an organization’s entire software portfolio.
Mendix’s future-fit platform further empowers organizations to develop intelligent solutions. It does so by offering a low-code approach to AI and machine learning that makes transformative and sustainable business impacts possible. Further by embedding the highest governance standards across the entire software development lifecycle, Mendix 10.6 further reduces the complexity of delivering smart applications.
A race to unlock AI’s business value for the enterprise
There is a strategic imperative for enterprises to unlock the business value of AI within the next two years, according to market analysts. Gartner recently predicted, “that by 2025, GenAI will be a workforce partner for 90% of companies worldwide.1” The Harvard Business Review estimated that composite AI, which includes generative AI, advanced analytics, APIs, and other forms of AI-augmented decision-making, will provide a significant influence on business activities.2
Despite these market pressures, Forrester describes enterprises stymied by significant challenges to implementation. Roadblocks include lack of internal skills and capacity, complex barriers when integrating multiple technologies, and the need to stay competitive while juggling legacy systems.3
“The 10.6 platform release democratizes access to AI’s game-changing capabilities, thereby reducing the risk and complexity for any enterprise undertaking these efforts,” said Jethro Borsje, Chief Ecosystem Officer of Mendix. “A platform experience that can harness the domain expertise of data scientists, business technologists, and development teams is one that best equips an organization’s AI investment to deliver results.”
Borsje added, “Mendix 10.6 is purpose-built to unlock the value found in disparate systems, disparate data, and siloed teams. By enabling collaboration and oversight across an enterprise’s digital landscape, Mendix can connect data and information to automation and decision-making.” This strategic approach to creating digital solutions for the enterprise has been validated by Mendix’s continued leadership position by industry analysts. The latest recognition includes the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-code Application Platform (LCAP) where Mendix was named a Leader and placed highest and furthest for both its “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision.”
Working smarter, building faster with AI
According to Sheryl Koenigsberg, Vice President of Product Marketing at Mendix, “AI’s greatest value will be realized when its full range of abilities are applied to solving business problems with software. Mendix 10.6 is designed to make software development more efficient with AI-assisted development, freeing developers to work on strategic objectives. The 10.6 capabilities also position enterprises to reap tremendous value through embedding AI in multiple use cases and modalities, and strategic imperatives.”
With new AIAD tooling, organizations are empowered to set and achieve their most ambitious development goals. Capabilities include:
- Mendix Chat is a foundational feature of Mendix’s Generative AI strategy. Developers can ask Mendix Chat questions, receiving real-time guidance and suggestions from the intelligent AI chatbot. Available in beta mode, future iterations of Mendix Chat will include task automation while facilitating elements of software creation.
- MxAssist is a suite of intelligent “co-development” logic bots (including MxAssist Logic Bot, Best Practice Bot, and Validation Assist) that help developers model, configure, and optimize applications in real-time. MxAssist includes a new interface and improved AI engine trained on twelve million anonymized application logics built with Mendix.
Leveraging multiple pathways to AI enablement with low-code
Mendix 10.6 simplifies the process of harnessing AI/ML to build smart applications. The platform streamlines AI enablement in two ways — via third-party, hosted API services or by embedding open source, machine language (ML) models within the Mendix Studio Pro runtime.
For cloud-based services, Mendix worked with Amazon Web Service (AWS) to create integrated and secure connectors to AWS managed services, simplifying connectivity within Studio Pro. Connectors such as AWS Bedrock empower developers to incorporate generative AI capabilities within Mendix-built applications.
For use cases centered on cost data privacy, performance, or those which need customized AI models, Mendix 10.6’s ML Kit enables organizations to use proprietary data to train ML models in-house. It does so by employing ONNX compatible models securely and locally inside the Mendix Studio Pro runtime. Mendix is the first and only low-code platform with such capabilities.
Developers can tap into Mendix’s expansive UI/UX capabilities, rapidly building AR/VR applications, chatbots, and voice assistance applications from a single toolset in the latest platform update —and seamlessly deployed across web and mobile devices.
Finally, Mendix 10.6 delivers enhanced tools for transparency and fine-grained control across the enterprise’s entire application landscape. Real-time visibility into user requirements, system performance, stakeholder activity, data safeguards, and other elements of governance and security are centralized via new platform modules. These include the new Application Health Dashboard, providing alert status overview of production environments, and the Mendix Solutions Kit, providing dashboard visibility into solution extensions and modifications, greatly simplifying operation and maintenance needs.
“The promise of AI lies not only in delivering software faster or making it more accurate,” said Koenigsberg. “It can also be used to drive enterprise growth and digital transformation. The application of AI within a low-code platform — one that has been recognized as an industry leader — removes substantial risk for enterprises with serious digitalization goals.”
Download the Mendix whitepaper, “Building Smart Apps w/ Low-Code.”
Sources:
1. Gartner Press Release, Gartner Says CIOs Must Prioritize Their AI Ambition and AI-Ready Scenarios for Next 12-24 Months,” October 16, 2023.
2. Harvard Business Review; “5 Forces That Will Drive the Adoption of GenAI, December 14, 2023, https://hbr.org/2023/12/5-forces-that-will-drive-the-adoption-of-genai
3. Forrester White Paper, “The CIO’s Role in the Growth Agenda,” June 8, 2023, https://www.forrester.com/technology/the-cios-role-in-the-growth-agenda/
4. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, By Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Kimihiko Iijima, Mike West, Kyle Davis, Akash Jain, Paul Vincent, 17 October 2023
About Gartner
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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About Mendix
Mendix, a Siemens business, is the only low-code platform designed to address the full complexity of enterprise software development challenges. Deploying point solutions to departmental problems solves things at a micro level—but if you want to make a significant impact on your business, you need to go bigger and build powerful portfolios that move the needle sustainably and strategically.
With Mendix, enterprises can take on more complex, transformational initiatives by engaging everyone in capturing requirements, forming ideas, and embedding value assessment throughout the lifecycle of the software portfolio.
Focus on the right problems while relying on governance and control to avoid unnecessary risk. Mobilize your organization. Build the change readiness muscle. And when the next big idea drops, turn it into an outcome quicker.
More than 4,000 organizations in 46 countries use the Mendix low-code platform. An active community of over 300,000 developers has created over 950,000 applications – and counting.