My first glance reads it to be more like airtable or even salesforce at some level, which to your point are the modern iterations of access / filemaker. Drag and drop all-in-one database and application designer that by virtue of being online and multi-user make them way more useful.
Yes my first thought was that this was like Airtable. One of these days one of these no-code solutions is going to actually stick, and I will stop getting paid to basically glue data from different systems together while browsing HN.
It's a fairly busy territory as it is, with at least 20 major enterprise players.
Microsoft PowerApps with PowerAutomate (formerly Flow, their Zapier/IFTTT) have a huge advantage of being bundled right into other licenses. SalesForce and ServiceNow have similar advantages. Quick Base[1] has to be considered the incumbent. Zoho, Oracle. And then the more independent Appian, Betty Blocks, Mendix, OutSystems.
This tends to be one space where consolidation and acquisitions aren't as popular, and the big players have built their own home grown products on top of their stacks. (counterpoint, Kony got snatched up by a fintech software services company, Temenos. Apple acquired Workflow which isnt quite the same thing but a tangent space.) In a lot of cases, its going to make way more sense to go with the Vendor that already provides other parts of your infrastructure. If you're an Oracle company, Oracle Apex is going to be simpler, which is the point of all these offerings. It makes a ton of sense for AWS to provide this naively on top of their already mature offerings.
It's also not a space I'd want to enter as an independent startup, from scratch, unless you are sure you can actually offer something better and different. Or, instead of a generic offering, your product is tailored to the specific processes and workflows of certain industries. At this point if you want to join this crowd, it would be a safer bet to hitch your ride to a specific tech company lacking this offering (if there is one left) and become so good that they want to acquire you. Or build a specific subfeature in this space, so one of them gobble you up and tack you onto their product (see 3rd link.) I would guess there is still room for some ERPs to be interested in tacking app builders on, like Infor.
[1] Somewhat shocked to not see Quick Base mentioned even once in this thread. It's a billion dollar company thats been offering this nonstop for 20 years, and is still relevant.
I agree. In our case we're focusing on gathering and sharing information securely (end-to-end encrypted) i.e. Typeform for PII[0] with information verification built-in. There are lots of use-cases for a tool that enables non-coders to incorporate that information collection into their business process (we believe).
