NRI reduces application development efforts by 65% with Oracle APEX

Nomura Research Institute (NRI) has a reputation for providing excellent services and applications to its customers, who include about 70% of Japan’s capital market firms. But as customer demands grew and applications became more complex, the cost of providing those services also grew. NRI needed a way to provide the same level of service while remaining competitive by controlling application development costs.

And, like many similar companies, NRI needed to deal with a severe shortage of developers. With Oracle APEX, less-experienced developers could create sophisticated modern web apps and improve their productivity overall. It was clear that Oracle APEX could help address both cost and resource concerns. In addition, the low-code development platform was a particularly good fit for NRI because its teams already had expertise with Oracle Database and SQL. 

NRI selected Oracle APEX after conducting a rigorous evaluation of more than 20 low-code platforms. First, the company wanted to avoid the common limitations of cloud-based development platforms, which often have storage limits or API access limits. The selection team also appreciated the fact that Oracle APEX is offered as standalone software, which would allow the company to customize the environment in which it would run APEX.

It was also important for NRI’s development teams to get up to speed quickly on a new platform. Because Oracle APEX is SQL-based, it was a good match for developers’ expertise. Its Linux compatibility also suited NRI’s compute environment.

Perhaps the most important criteria was that Oracle APEX would let the company develop the kinds of applications that its customers needed, and also turn around updates quickly. To test this, a team used Oracle APEX to build a demo photo-sharing application. NRI leaders were impressed with the responsiveness of the app, and the fact that they could easily deploy a responsive interface to both PC and mobile platforms. The application developed with APEX allowed the company to get closest to its ideal application.

"APEX is very intuitive, like a smartphone. It took about a week to understand how it works, and I was developing apps in less than a month,” says Anna Kitamura, an application engineer.

After deploying Oracle APEX in production, NRI teams built 11 applications with the platform, and on average, APEX reduced application development efforts by 65%. The company also found that updating applications using Oracle APEX in response to customer requests was a much easier process than before. UI updates that used to take days are now completed in a matter of seconds.

Another key advantage of Oracle APEX was the ease of adoption by less experienced developers. Team members can make use of their existing SQL skills and quickly become contributors to application development projects. Going forward, NRI plans to increase the company’s APEX development expertise so that it can continue to give customers high-quality applications within a fast turnaround time.