South African firm looks to widen use of low-code platform

Linx is registered in Mauritius for IP reasons, the company's marketing director Anthony Morris told iTWire. The company's product, known by the same name, is written in C# and hence works only on Windows.

Morris said there were no direct competitors to Linx. "There are other low-code platforms in the market but many are enterprise (Mendix, Outsystems) or no-code or limited integration products like Zapier," he said.

"Linx is different in that it mixes both EAI (enterprise application integration), ETL (extract, transform, load) and BPM (business process management) features in one. If I had to choose a similar type of product, Automation Anywhere is a good fit, but it lacks the integration capabilities and visual environment provided by Linx."

{loadposition sam08}Morris said low-code development platforms were designed to help businesses integrate and automate processes without writing reams of code. "The goal is to eliminate the time-consuming drudgery of rewriting code each time you wish to do something relatively simple like publish a web service, extract data, schedule an automated task, parse CSV files etc."

Compared to the average integrated development environment, he said Linx offered visually oriented drag-and-drop development rather than classical programming and prebuilt/precoded plugins. "These provide the user with speed and accuracy, reliability and ease of (code) maintenance."

The company has 12 staff and hires freelancers as need to work in its offices both in Mauritius and in South Africa.

Morris said Linx already had a good presence in Southern Africa (especially in the financial markets) but wanted to expand to Europe and the US.

"We have already seen some great application of the product in the US – everything from financial players to 911 dispatch centers are using it," he added.

Linx is available for free download and support is available at a fee.