Mendix, a Siemens business and global leader in modern low-code enterprise application development, announced significant progress in the company’s collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS).
While the Mendix Cloud environment has been running on AWS since 2016, Mendix announced in February 2022 an expanded go-to-market relationship with AWS, which expanded the scope from cloud deployment and development operations to the overall developer experience. The goal is to make Mendix the fastest and easiest way to build apps on AWS. It is part of the broader strategic collaboration between AWS and Siemens, announced in November 2021, which allows industrial organizations worldwide to “create without limits.”
As a result of the strong and close collaboration over the last year Mendix Studio Pro is now available in AWS Marketplace, allowing developers to easily harness the power, flexibility, and speed of the Mendix development platform. Developers can also quickly learn how to build their first Mendix application on AWS, using the new, self-paced AWS Workshop on Mendix.
The Mendix enterprise application development platform can be purchased from Mendix or in AWS Marketplace, so Mendix developers can easily plug AWS services into their apps and customers can take advantage of low-code speed, flexibility, and reusability.
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“I am very happy with the progress made so far,” said Tim Srock, CEO of Mendix. “Our customers and partners are eager to adopt a ‘composable enterprise’ strategy, and the collaboration between Mendix and AWS accelerates their ability to execute on this. I’m particularly excited about the interest we’re seeing in the industrial space, thanks to the AWS-Siemens collaboration. Mendix is a key growth area in the relationship between Siemens and AWS.”
AWS also recognizes the value that Mendix brings to the Industrial space. “Low-code is unique in its ability to centralize the governance of application development, while decentralizing the execution and unleashing innovation at the manufacturing plant-level,” said Grant Bodley, Director, Manufacturing Sales at AWS. “Some plants may need to extend their core MES and ERP systems, while others are better served with smart manufacturing apps. Siemens, Mendix, and their visionary customers are already showing how this model will drive digital transformation. There was palpable excitement about this progress when I recently spoke at the Mendix Manufacturing Forum.”
Radically Simplifying Integration and Private Cloud Deployment
Mendix developed a new Authentication Connector for AWS services that manages the authentication between Mendix and AWS services, removing one of the most common challenges to integrating Mendix apps with any of the 200+ AWS services. Leveraging this, Mendix has also created a new suite of AWS connectors so developers can drag and drop AWS capabilities into a Mendix app without the complexities of REST APIs or code.
Developers and customers typically use the Mendix Free license to deploy their first apps to Mendix Cloud. The Mendix Cloud was built on AWS in 2016 and was recently launched in Africa, Bahrain and India, making it now available in 12 regions.
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However, some customers prefer – or are required – to deploy Mendix apps in their own private AWS environment, instead of Mendix Cloud. For these customers, Mendix now offers a reference deployment for Mendix on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This infrastructure as code (IaC) tool completely automates the setup of Mendix for Private Cloud in a customer’s AWS environment. This includes rapid provisioning of Amazon EKS and 95 other AWS services, radically reducing setup time from 40 hours to 30 minutes.
Customer Success in Manufacturing and Media/Entertainment
Over the past year, the collaborative innovation between Mendix and AWS has delivered significant value to customers across industries. This is best evidenced by Siemens which has one of the largest deployments of Mendix on AWS in the world.
“Mendix on AWS is a key driver of our digital transformation. It’s unleashing the creative talent of business and IT experts all over Siemens – across all business lines and functions – with over 500 apps in production and hundreds more on the way,” said Hanna Hennig, CIO of Siemens AG. “It’s the best of both worlds – the speed and innovation of Mendix with the security, scalability, reliability, and availability of AWS.”
The collaboration between AWS and Mendix also benefits customers in other industries. For example, independent television production company Banijay Benelux uses Mendix for Private Cloud on Amazon EKS. It has built 15 Mendix apps, leveraging several AWS services such as Amazon Transcribe for speech-to-text and AWS Elemental MediaConvert for video transcoding.
“Using AWS services and Mendix for Private Cloud, we can constantly adjust our applications to meet our users’ needs,” said Leon Backbier, IT Manager at Banijay Benelux. “It’s made complex problems simple and helped us to focus more on the business than just the technology. I can walk through the office and people are happy again.”
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