Secure and efficient data collection and data management applications are one of the toughest challenges that businesses face today. The gateway to effective data collection and data management within complex, workflow oriented, business process applications are ‘forms’. Forms appear to be quite simple when seen from the application UI perspective only. However, forms are also well known to be notoriously difficult, costly, and time consuming to build and support when considering the complex conditional logic, workflow, validations, and data integrations that organizations require to manage their data in very specific ways. These data management requirements also produce numerous coding challenges when developing even the simplest of bespoke forms. Meanwhile, businesses are also seeking more powerful and innovative low-code/no-code solutions as the trends to enable non-developer business unit resources to become more prevalent. This is where Form.io is having a major impact by providing a unique and innovatively different platform solution and strategic approach to data collection and data management. Form.io is a platform that provides a range of solutions for the Master Data Management (MDM) space that even includes a development solution for the very inception of the data itself; the digital form within the application UI layer. The company’s platform enables organizations to build their complex mission critical data collection business process applications, and manage their data more effectively, streamline their workflows, and improve their overall data quality, all with an innovative combined form-building and API centric data management middleware platform.
Form.io’s MDM solutions enable and support data governance, data profiling, data integration, and data quality management with features and capabilities that are designed to help organizations manage their data from multiple sources, reduce data errors and inconsistencies, and ensure that their data is accurate and up to date. The combined form and data management API solutions slash development time and operational costs with Form.io’s flexible embedded solution that collects and stores form submission data entirely within customer environments and provides the tools to view, manage, and export that data in any way the organization requires. Since everything within the Form.io platform is an API, businesses will have the flexibility to integrate with other applications and create automated workflows that can save time across the organization. “While some portion of our value proposition is that we provide a low code/no code form building interface for non-developers, we emphasize that we are first and foremost a platform that serves software developers. We’re providing them the tools to build and manage their own bespoke low code/no code data management application workflows,” explains Gary Wetzel, Co-Founder & CEO, Form.io.
Flexible and Customizable Solutions
One of the key benefits of Form.io’s MDM solutions is that they are highly customizable and flexible, allowing organizations to tailor their data management processes to their own specific needs. The platform provides a range of form-building and integrated data management tools and features that enable organizations to create custom data models, workflows, and business rules, all within the context of a digital form-building solution, and then integrate their data with other systems and applications. Form.io’s platform is also designed to be highly scalable and performant, making it suitable for organizations of all sizes. The platform can handle large volumes of data and complex data structures and is built to support the needs of enterprise-level organizations.
Form.io deploys its entire platform in Docker containers directly into customers’ self-hosted on-prem or private cloud environments. This enables the client to run an entire platform under their own control. This provides 100% control, data security and compliance with their application forms and data workflows behind them. “Additionally, the core of our platform is open source. As a result of this, our platform is notably open-architected, highly un-opinionated, and fully extensible, embeddable, and integratable. This means we are not a closed black-box commercial off-the-shelf platform but an open-architected tool that our customers use as they wish. Moreover, people often use our platform as a deployed middleware layer that they integrate and implement on top of their existing bespoke legacy, or new data management platforms,” explains Wetzel.
Since opening its door, Form.io has been a pioneer in delivering secure and powerful data management solutions. The Form.io platform is used by companies all over the world who operate within a wide range of business verticals including government agencies, healthcare, banking and finance, insurance, legal, and compliance. An instance that highlights the company’s value proposition is when the team assisted InnovateOhio with data management challenges during the pandemic. InnovateOhio Platform (IOP), a component of the InnovateOhio program, is a group of technology-savvy software developers providing integrated and scalable capabilities that enable Ohio agencies to become more customer-centric and data-driven, delivering on InnovateOhio’s vision to better serve Ohioans. When the Coronavirus pandemic hit, it immediately needed to provide a rapid response for the dissemination and gathering of information to keep its citizens safe. The Governor of Ohio turned to its IOP team and enlisted them to build a series of web applications based on quickly evolving needs, while the course of the pandemic and the requirements of the response changed overnight. IOP quickly realized that building data collection web application solutions from the ground up would be far too time-consuming and expensive, but through its previous experience using the Form.io platform, knowing that it could rapidly standardize all of its pandemic-related form-based data collection applications by exploiting the powerful and agile front-end data collection attributes of Form.io. Rather than build their own web-based forms and data collection algorithms, IOP standardized on the Form.io platform for all their data collection and management needs.
The Global Market Presence
The founding of Form.io dates back to 2015 when its founders Gary Wetzel, Travis Tidwell, and Denise Kay, the current CEO, CTO, and CBDO decided to create a disruptive and innovative next gen offering in the data management solutions space. The team had a long working history together, and they were motivated to build a solution to address the rather significant break in application architecture that took place from 2010 to 2015 in response to the introduction of mobilized devices, IoT use-cases, big data, and emerging cloud-based micro-services. With the introduction of mobilized devices, came the need to decentralize the user interfaces, workflows and data management strategies connected to their form-centric data collection applications. This led to the emergence of all of today’s standard JavaScript and cloud frameworks and cloud-based services and microservices that essentially fractured the continuity of the full monolithic stack strategy. Form.io was built, quite specifically to address the complexities of how to manage complex data collection forms, that need to be fed into back-end data management workflows and platforms.
The company’s success also reflects its team’s expertise and experience in the industry, While Tidwell has been developing advanced enterprise software solutions for over 15 years ranging from Embedded GPS navigation products to Open-Source web solutions, Wetzel is a seasoned executive leader with extensive technology management background, and an equal balance of CEO, CFO, and COO experience leading technology, online/SaaS, and capital equipment companies. The CBDO, Denise is a dynamic sales and marketing executive leader, with multifaceted experience and capabilities driving market development and revenue-generating programs.
As a company, Form.io is growing rapidly today and has already established a substantial market presence all over the world and in every major business vertical. “As we expand, we’re going to continue to remain true to two guiding principles; (i) that we are a platform for software developers who are seeking to enable their own data management and application requirements, and (ii) we’re going to continue to build out our sophistication with decentralized platform data management solutions. We have a unique solution for form-building on the application layer and integrated data management already, and our opportunity to expand our value proposition for our major enterprise customers is to enable their initiatives on the Integrated Data Management side of the equation. We’ll continue to grow in that regard,” concludes Wetzel.