Fortune 100 company reduces cost of its main no-code platform with Gen AI

The new SaaS solution on Microsoft Azure delivered efficiency at scale and eliminated decades-old technical debt

Client challenges: More than 290,000 workers used business apps hosted on a platform with significant integrations to legacy technology, increasing time and effort.

Our approach: Capgemini rearchitected the platform into a Gen AI-infused, 100 percent cloud-native SaaS offering, which accelerates the software development lifecycle.

Business outcomes:
• 25 percent overall cost savings
• $39,000 per month additional licensing cost savings
• 10,667 person hours saved per annum
• Processing time reduced by a factor of three

“The migration of our internally developed low code/no code platform from being an in-house managed platform to a partner-hosted SaaS platform provided significant value to our business.”

CIO, Digital Workplace, Fortune 100 company

A multinational corporation with several divisions spanning many industries needed to perform a substantial overhaul of its main low-code/no-code (LCNC) platform without any operational disruptions. But the company could not simply pause operations while undergoing such a substantial transformation.

LCNC empowers workers across the business to develop and modernize applications without having extensive coding expertise. Over time, the company’s platform grew to host 17,000 business apps that were indispensable for the everyday activities of roughly 290,000 users.

In partnership with Capgemini, the company adopted a new platform that incorporates recent breakthroughs in generative AI (Gen AI) and cuts all ties to outdated technologies – without any system downtime. The new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform saves the organization time and money while improving performance.

Here’s how it happened.

Remove tech debt, avoid operational downtime

The company couldn’t sunset its long-standing platform without significantly disrupting operations, especially considering that it was hosted on-premises. As a temporary solution, the Fortune 100 company rolled out a next-generation version of the platform on its internally managed Azure Cloud and migrated its operations. While this was an improvement, significant effort was still required to ensure compatibility with legacy technologies.

With major restructuring on the horizon, the company needed a partner with deep domain expertise on Microsoft Azure that was well-positioned to deliver a more cost-efficient solution. Ideally, this partner would take ownership of the platform, remove the legacy dependencies, and license it back to the company as a SaaS offering.

The company chose Capgemini to take control of the next-gen platform and the complete body of its source code, to remove its technical debt and generate cost savings. The agreement stipulated that Capgemini would license the platform back to the organization but could also implement it for additional clients as appropriate.

It’s a win-win scenario.

The company would maintain business continuity and its 20-plus year track record of deploying low-code/no-code solutions. Its more than 50,000 employee developers could continue to automate certain tasks and build simple solutions without burdening the IT department. And Capgemini would own time-tested, valuable intellectual property that’s been modernized.

Gen AI enhancements accelerate development, enhance user-facing help

In the year and a half since, Capgemini rearchitected the platform using more than 100 microservices, including Kubernetes Services, PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Key Vault, and Redis Cache. The project team also removed more than 20 on-premises and legacy dependencies from the application code, making the new SaaS offering 100 percent cloud native.

The partnership capitalized on recent breakthroughs in Gen AI to optimize development and testing, while creating a more intuitive experience for the end user. Capgemini accelerated the software development lifecycle (SDLC) with Microsoft Copilot, shipping 201 releases in 1.5 years. By doing so, the team enhanced user-facing assistance by infusing Gen AI throughout the platform. More than 800 knowledge articles were baked into the new Gen AI assistant, enabling it to answer user questions with proprietary information and relevant data. The assistant’s outputs will be continually refined based on interactions with employees. A second version, coming soon, will allow users to build apps with declarative prompts.

Perfect what’s there, add what’s needed

To date, eight additional enhancements have been commissioned, including a built-in feature that allows the client to manage software licenses on its own, without relying on external support. This self-service capability allows the client to add, remove, or update software licenses directly, without relying on a third party as it had before.

The project has rolled out more than 17,000 business solutions, including financial year-end closings as well as medical, engineering, and manufacturing processes. As a result, the company cut costs by 25 percent, including $39,000 per month in licensing expenses. At the same time, the Gen AI-driven approach reduced the required time investment by 10,667 hours annually and accelerated the average page load and processing times by three times.

Since launch, Capgemini has deployed the solution for three additional tenants – groups of users that share access to the platform. This includes one large tenant (140,000 users) stood up in six months and two small tenants (200 to 250 users) stood up in six weeks. The smaller tenants were the result of the initial client separation into distinct entities.

Capgemini will continue working with the original client in an iterative process to improve the low-code/no-code platform, with the added benefits of complete cloud nativity and Gen AI-powered assistance.