Dimitris Lyras – what low code tools could mean

The introduction of low code tools could massively change the financial proposition of building and maintaining software, said Dimitris Lyras, director of shipping company Lyras Shipping and software company Ulysses Systems

The introduction of low code tools could make a massive change in the way software is built, said Dimitris Lyras, director of shipping company Lyras Shipping and software company Ulysses Systems, also chairman and co-producer of the conference, in his opening remarks.

He was speaking at the Oct 29 Athens conference “Software for Domain Experts” download the full report

Mr Lyras’ company, Ulysses Systems, builds software for shipping and transactions. These “are built on conventional software architectures of entity, relationship databases,” he said.

The software “hasn’t been easy to maintain,” Mr Lyras said. But also it is hard to imagine any enterprise software built using conventional means being easy to maintain, especially if it is doing something significant.

As a software company owner, “I know this from paying for it,” Mr Lyras said. “It’s something I’ve looked into deeply.”

If software is expensive to build and maintain, it means that many start-up companies struggle to get good software made, and many companies are reluctant to change software once they have built or purchased it.

All of this could change with the advent of ‘low code’ software tools, which promise to be able to automate the task of building software. This should make it possible to build software much faster and cheaper, and the software will be more reliable immediately, so less expensive testing required, Mr Lyras said.

Building such software could be a massive opportunity for Greek software companies and software engineers. There are many people in Greece qualified to work in software who are currently unemployed or underemployed.

Mr Lyras gave one business idea, a tool which can be used to make business predictions, but also keep track of what assumptions were made in the process.

For example, he once asked a financial expert to build a model estimating future demand for shipping services. The most obvious software to use for such a task is Microsoft Excel, but Excel does not make it easy to see what assumptions were made in building the model, and makes every figure look too exact.