Form.io
Combining Form Building and API Creation into One Step

One can define “Collaborative Leadership” as a voluntary partnership between two or more leaders with the unified goal of sharing responsibilities based upon their complementary skillsets. A Gartner research found that leaders who embrace this unorthodox style of leadership witness a 60 percent upturn in their teams’ efficiency and a 40 percent surge in their own performance.

If there is an organization that can truly attest to the benefits of collaborative leadership, it is Form. io, a Dallas-based software platform company with a strong Open Source core that provides developers with a combined Form-building and API creation solution. Its three-headed team of Co-founders includes CEO Gary Wetzel, CTO Travis Tidwell, and CBDO Denise Kay, who contribute their respective strengths to foster a collaborative culture throughout the organization. Wetzel points to the trio having a long history of working together, and to their equally balanced contributions to finance and administration, technology development, and sales and marketing to producing a well-oiled organizational machine. “We complement each other’s skillsets, and have always leveraged our respective strengths to create clarity while serving our customers in the developer community,” he says.

It is this “clarity” that spurred the conception of Form.io in 2015, to solve a glaring industry pain point that arose just a few years before at the start of the decade. 2010 brought the proliferation of a wide range of mobilized devices and the emergence new software development mandates that included enabling big data, IoT, microservices, and of course mobilized applications. The combination of these new mandates created what Tidwell calls a “disruptive web development chasm”, and caused developers to re-architect their approach to building web applications, and forced them to embrace API-first development processes. The early stages of what is now known as the “progressive web application movement” was underway and accelerating into high gear. This in turn gave rise to today’s nextgen solutions, which leverage new javascript frameworks, cloud-based services, and data containerization technologies. However, developers continued to be hamstrung specifically with respect to building form-centric, data collection, business process applications. Existing platform solutions still required forms to be rendered as HTML from the server side, and then be delivered to the application level for rendering on each and every request. In the new age of mobilized web apps, with decentralized user interfaces and offline mode operation, this form rendering process proved to be increasingly non-performant and problematic.

Form.io began with a simple insight into the opportunity to help developers simplify the separate time-consuming steps of building forms and creating the data management APIs that support them, by enabling them to build forms and APIs in one unified step by using a simple drag-and-drop form-building process to build both— even without the need of any coding. “Form.io was built specifically to be a fully-integrated low code form-building and API creation platform for developers who are building complex form-based, business process workflow applications for themselves or for their own clients,” elaborates Wetzel.

Five years into its inception, Form.io has evidently succeeded in its mission: to be the industry standard combined Form building and API creation platform for software developers around the world and in every business vertical. Today, its platform solutions are used by customers ranging from disruptive startups, to SMBs, and large enterprises around the world, and across government, healthcare, banking and finance, insurance, education, industrial mfg, online retail, and many more, including the global technology consultancies and development agencies that serve them. These include two arms of the United Nations, the Federal Reserve Bank, the European Central Bank, numerous federal, provincial, state, and city-level government agencies, as well as many global technology companies such as Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, KPMG, and Booz Allen, and many others.

A Make versus Buy Decision

It’s important to recognize that all of these clients choose Form.io in the context of a fundamental “make versus buy” decision. These customers are seeking a prebuilt combined form-building and API creation solution that can be fully integrated into their data collection applications on the frontend, and integrated into their own servers and databases on the backend, without compromising control or data security.

The result?

Besides providing significant increases in capabilities and reducing development time and cost, the Form.io platform solution offers customers the benefits of a “make” solution, without them having to make it. This means the platform is delivered to them in a way that enables full integration, configuration flexibility, scalability, and extensibility, all while maintaining their data security and control within their own on-premise or private cloud environments. Wetzel adds, “What makes us unique is that our customers can use our platform as a fully integrated developer middleware solution running in their own environments and on their systems as though it was their own “make” solution.

“Business process owners want greater control, increased flexibility, and quicker turnaround times when building the forms they need to run their business,” says Kay.

Although time-strapped developers and IT managers are more than happy to rid themselves of this responsibility, it is easier said than done. “It’s not an easy task to provide non-developers their own form building and form management interfaces while, at the same time, maintaining the intrinsic requirement for these forms to function as being fully integrated to the technology environments they work within,” explains Wetzel.

To tackle this pain point, Form.io offers the Form Manager Application as part of its solution. The application is a fully white-labeled, customer-branded, configurable form building and data management application that runs within customer environments, serving non-developer user stories. This allows groups of non-developer business process owner and staff resources to build and maintain their own forms, and have access to their own submission data, without having to write a single line of code. At the very same time, these forms are running behind these scenes on the developer-centric Form.io platform, enabling these forms to be controlled and integrated into the company technology architectures as desired.

Built to Address Data Security and Control Compliance Requirements

Form.io does not lag behind with regard to data security, control, and compliance, either. The company understands that regardless of the industry segment, business process applications across the globe have increasingly complex and critical requirements with respect to data security, control, and compliance. This presents developers with the need to implement technology solutions that operate entirely within their own control and environments, and to avoid introducing external third-party organizations and systems into their solutions.

Unlike a hosted SaaS solution, the Form.io platform is most commonly deployed directly within customer controlled environments, either on-premise or private cloud, and is therefore most commonly configured as a fully deployed software development middleware platform.

Since Form.io has no access to customer systems, their forms, or their submission data at any time, Form.io is entirely “out of scope” with respect to security compliance and audits. In addition, Form.io provides submission data encryption in transit and at rest. In other words, Form. io completely “integrates into a customer’s environments,” giving them absolute peace of mind as it pertains to their data security and control over their data submissions.

A Step-by-Step Approach to Adopt the Solution

During the first step of the onboarding process, the customer is encouraged to try the platform for free, following which Form.io provides them with an introductory call to underline its unique value proposition. The calls are followed up by a technical deep-dive discussion where Form.io addresses any specific requirements that the client might have. Thereafter, Form.io often supports clients with professional developer support services for training or to build a PoC app for the client.

As noted before, Form.io’s global market footprint extends to several international government agencies. One such client is the State of Ohio that uses a Form.io-built central hub and shared services technology solution to serve hundreds of its agencies across the state. “They use Form. io to deliver these agencies their forms into their website apps,” says Denise.

It is important to highlight that besides serving large enterprises, Form.io is also serving 70,000 individual developers in the open source community, who have formed a passionate and active rapidly-growing community on Github.

There is little doubt that an exceptionally bright future awaits Form.io, which recently introduced to the market a new PDF form solution to provide customers with a uniquely combined digital web-form and PDF form both with dynamic JSON-driven capabilities. In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Form.io has also witnessed a number of its global clients—especially in the healthcare and government sectors—use the platform to build data collection apps. “There has been a significant increase in Form.io customers who want to quickly build data collection apps surrounding COVID-19,” informs Denise.

Driving ahead, Form.io is particularly focused on extending its progressive web app offline capabilities, especially with the requirement for business process apps to operate in the cloud without the need for servers. Wetzel stresses that Form.io is uniquely positioned to cater to this requirement, by leveraging and while maintaining its commitment to its open source software (OSS) core platform.

Some of the other impending developments include Form.io investing heavily in complex, multiple database architectures, or distributed database architectures. The company also looks forward to expanding its PDF form replacement capabilities. “At the end of the day, we are in the trenches with the developers because of our unique perspective. We experienced the problems that our clients are facing today, and that’s why we are able to relate to them,” concludes Wetzel.