Tonkean’s updated no-code platform aims to simplify application deployment

Businesses are looking for any edge that will increase efficiency, particularly as they need to scale application development. As a result, internal teams are facing greater demands to coordinate complex tasks that require collaboration across different teams and departments.

Tonkean has developed a no-code platform to automate many of these workflows. Now it’s updating that platform, which it refers to as an operating system for business operations, with new no-code tools that allow more employees to participate in the creation and deployment of applications.

According to Tonkean CEO and cofounder Sagi Eliyahu, this next generation of its service should allow for greater governance of those processes while still expanding the democratization of the tasks.

“We’re focused on using no-coding to explore the promise of building mission-critical solutions,” he said. “So we’re enabling a standard way to build software in an organization in a safe way.”

Found in 2015, the company raised $24 million in April last year. Its orchestration layer sits on top of existing enterprise applications.

While many companies want to solve issues involving data, often the impediments involve questions related to sales or legal or corporate policy. While much software is built to focus on that data, it doesn’t help manage the way these other issues get discussed and resolved when multiple teams and departments must be consulted and reach an agreement.

“If you think about contracts, you’ll usually buy a contract management system to manage the contract files,” Eliyahu said. “But the process of contracts is bigger than just legal because it’s going across sales and going across hiring managers and so on. And all of those interactions, all that back and forth following up is really manual today.”

That’s because much of that coordination tends to happen by email, which makes it hard to track changes and resolve outstanding issues. Tonkean’s no-code platform helps manage the business logic of these processes so that enterprises don’t have to introduce yet another new application that requires people to change workflows. It also helps to manage updates to things like compliance.

The new release takes this orchestration system one step farther by introducing a concept called “enterprise components.” Eliyahu described these as building blocks that teams can define and that can be reusable. This ideally makes it easier to build new applications that improve coordination across the orchestration platform.

In addition, the company has established a Solution Studio to create an environment where different operations teams and business units can collaborate to build new software. The goal here is to abstract as many of the issues coders typically must face, such as writing software for multiple environments and tracking deployment lifecycles.

“No-code has the promise of really expanding the pie by allowing more people who are not technical to build things to use the software,” he said. “To build software in a mission-critical way that actually solves massive problems in the enterprise, it’s not enough to just not write code. You need to have best practices and you need to stay compliant.”