On Apr 23, 2024, Crowdbotics announced a new collaboration with Microsoft to help customers accelerate enterprise application development with AI and CodeOps.
Driving this collaboration is the fact that every day the need for new applications increases at a breakneck pace. However, in spite of the growing demand, most organization’s capacity to build new applications lags far behind what’s needed. The irony is that, within each organization, there are millions, if not billions, of lines of code available for reuse if only there was a systematic way to enable this. The solution to this problem, CodeOps, is precisely what Crowdbotics brings to the table.
At the same time, when it comes to accelerating the development of new lines of code, Microsoft is unrivaled. For decades Visual Studio has been the gold standard for software development. Over four times as many developers use Visual Studio as compared to the second most popular IDE. The same leadership applies when it comes to GitHub, and most recently, Microsoft has established itself as the de facto standard in generative AI-based programming with GitHub Copilot.
By combining the efficiency of developing new code that Microsoft has perfected with the efficiency of reusing existing code that Crowdbotics has pioneered, customers benefit from the best of both worlds – achieving unmatched efficiency and capacity to build new applications – for the cloud, web, mobile, desktop or IOT.
This complementary approach – using AI to enable code reuse as well as using AI to enable new code creation – means that much of the toil and repetitive functions are handled for your team. It means that requirements for testing and validation are minimized due to the reuse of already validated code. It also means that risk is reduced because much of the code being used is already proven. Finally, it means that the code your team focuses on the most is the new, unique code that delivers innovation and differentiation. By taking care of the redundant code, more time can be spent working on the code that makes the difference for your organization.
The Crowdbotics platform is available through the Azure Commercial Marketplace. If you choose to acquire the Crowdbotics platform through the Marketplace, the transaction counts towards your company’s Azure Commitment.
Artificial Intelligence
The critical AI-based capabilities of the Crowdbotics Platform are all powered by Azure OpenAI Services. We use Azure OpenAI for PRD-AI which turns your ideas into well structured product requirements documents (PRDs). Azure OpenAI underpins Match-AI, a central capability of the platform. This feature identifies reusable code modules that fulfill the requirements specified by the PRD. We also use Azure OpenAI for Assembly-AI. This feature creates your application scaffold and installs all of the required code modules, giving you a massive jump start in the application development process.
Code Repository
The Crowdbotics platform is optimized for GitHub. Reusable code modules are stored in GitHub, and the applications that the platform assembles out of reusable code are created as new GitHub project repositories. You can also use the Crowdbotics platform to scan through existing repositories to reverse engineer PRDs and we are also working on leveraging AI to scan through your existing GitHub repositories to automatically generate reusable modules from previous projects.
Azure Services
In addition to utilizing Azure OpenAI Services, the entirety of the Crowdbotics platform is implemented on Azure. Crowdbotics takes advantage of Microsoft’s industry-leading services for data, compute, containers, identity, security, networking as well as a host of other foundational technologies.
GitHub CoPilot
The way Crowdbotics uses AI is complimentary to CoPilot. If no existing code is available to solve a coding challenge, CoPilot is unrivalled in its power to generate new code. However, if existing code is available, it’s always preferable to reuse that code than create from scratch.
By reusing code, developers not only save time, they reduce risk. Reusable code is typically validated to meet the functional requirements, to be secure, to be scalable and reliable, to comply with regulatory requirements and to not violate governance rules. By minimizing the testing required in these six critical areas, the reuse of existing code saves enormous amounts of time and effort.
The Crowdbotics platform has been used to build hundreds of applications that run on Microsoft Azure Services. These include customer-facing applications for Fortune 500 companies and critical systems for the largest government agencies. These applications require the highest levels of security, scalability and resilience – and building with Azure Services helps our customers achieve their enterprise-grade requirements.
While customers primarily use the Crowdbotics platform to build applications that run in their own Azure tenants, it’s also possible to host the apps you build with our platform in Crowdbotics own cloud runtime environment – powered by Microsoft Azure. Your apps benefit from the industry leading cloud technology delivered by Microsoft without having to worry about any of the complexities of managing and operating those apps. Crowdbotics takes care of the hosting for you.
We’d love to show you more about how Crowdbotics can help accelerate building applications for Azure.
