Interviews

How OutSystems is powering modern application development

OutSystems was founded in 2001 with the mission to give every organization the power to innovate through software. The OutSystems high-performance low-code platform gives technology leaders and developers the tools to rapidly build and deploy their own business-critical applications. The company’s network spans more than 600,000 community members, 400+ partners, and active customers in 87 countries across 22 industries. In a conversation with Subrato Bandhu, Regional Vice President, OutSystems India, he talks about how OutSystems is “The #1 Low-Code Platform®” and a recognized leader by analysts, IT executives, business leaders, and developers around the world. Some of the most well-known brands use OutSystems to turn their big ideas into software that moves their business, people, and the world forward.

 

  1.  Tell us about OutSystems. What are your offerings?

OutSystems was founded in 2001 with the mission to give every organization the power to innovate through software. Our key offering is the OutSystems high-performance low-code platform, a visual model-driven development and delivery platform that allows developers to create enterprise-grade web, mobile and cloud applications. The platform leverages low-code development, which involves straightforward drag-and-drop capabilities, replacing the need for complex programming.

With OutSystems, developers are able to design and assemble applications quickly without having to worry about coding syntax or language structure. This dramatically reduces the time required for building applications – and that speed helps promote agility. We also help our developers adapt applications to meet their organisations’ latest challenges at unprecedented speed. Whether applications require updates to workflows, user experience, back-end integration, support for new mobile devices, or new infrastructure technology, changes can be made fast, while also meeting all the security, scalability, and reliability requirements and supporting differing cloud infrastructures.

Our platform includes a rich collection of AI-powered tools and automation that enables scenarios such as this. Applications can be moved across ‘development’, ‘test’ and ‘production’ environments with a single click, and at the same time, IT can provide robust controls over who gets to manage those movements from environment to environment, as well as when and how that is accomplished. Furthermore, we have a suite of tools that can be used to manage every aspect of each environment’s parameters as well as monitoring the health and performance of each deployed application or module.

 

2. Why are low-code tools seeing greater adoption now?

Recent global events have highlighted the ongoing and growing need for enterprises to build applications quickly. The pandemic underscored this need, but ever-increasing developer workloads and rapidly changing business needs are driving the demand for a new approach to application development in the enterprise. We are seeing more and more businesses adopting  high-performance application development approaches, like low-code s, to speed up and simplify their digital transformation journeys.

In addition to the pressures brought on by the pandemic, customers’ growing demands for tailored products and services creates additional pressures on organisations to rapidly extend, transform and adapt their existing systems to be faster and more reliable than ever before. Investing in IT and adopting new, more agile technologies is more critical than ever as businesses are forced to transform more quickly than ever before. Many no- and low-code solutions over-index on speed, and aren’t built for change or  scale. In today’s business environment, it’s critical for companies to build applications in ways that support continuous innovation.

The pandemic indeed brought a shift in the way enterprises and tech leaders are reviewing their state of digital transformation. It is clear that in three to five years, every enterprise will need to be a digital innovation factory in order to be able to compete. Whether the objective is to modernise older systems, streamline processes, or respond to new market conditions by bringing new services to market faster, modern application development platforms enable organisations to become more agile and digitally resilient as we transit and embrace a hybrid workforce.

 

3. Are there any particular challenges with these tools?

Some of the common challenges in software application development faced by organisations are integrating different systems, technologies and environments, talent scarcity, and a lack of involvement by business users. Developers typically also want to spend less time tracking bugs, debugging them, and hard coding. Developers have shared that they wish to prioritise more value-added tasks like security analysis, vulnerability testing, gauging software requirements, and designing software.

Due to the pandemic, adoption of low-code tools has recently exploded globally. And in developing countries like India, companies are looking for ways to build applications quickly in response to the pandemic, ever-increasing developer workloads, and changing business needs. We see more and more businesses adopting application development solutions like low-code, no-code and other visual development platforms to speed up and simplify their digital transformation journeys.

With India being the fastest growing tech hub in the world and also the IT hub to many of the best international technology companies, the country is leading the technology trends worldwide. However, Indian developers remain under intense pressure to deliver software at lightning speed. DevOps practices are well-entrenched, with the focus turning to secure DevOps and enterprise-wide data integration. All these trends point to increased demand for solutions that improve developer productivity and speed the development, deployment and continued evolution of enterprise-class applications. In fact, according to research by OutSystems and IDC on the low-code landscape in Asia-Pacific, 28 percent of enterprise leaders in India list faster integration of customer feedback to speed software releases as their main business goal.

 

4. Which sectors are adopting low-code based applications?

 Companies that are adopting low-code based applications span across various industries including banking, media, insurance, energy, , government, and financial services  – all of which are looking to transform and digitise their operations and processes to become agile.

One of our customers who have benefited from this adoption was Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management and automation and provider of integrated efficiency solutions that combine energy, automation, and software for its customers. In order to maintain the level of innovation output for customers, Schneider Electric required additional agility and efficiency in their business processes, capabilities, and operations. This also included smart and modern applications that could be developed, deployed, managed, and changed in line with changing demands. Schneider discovered that their IT landscape was fragmented, with numerous instances of duplicate apps that used non-standard architecture and poor security practices. There was not only a need for speedy development, but also governance to manage the lifecycle and quality of applications as well. Schneider Electric set about creating a “Digital Factory” to accelerate, standardize, and improve the development processes. The end result? Developers had produced 30 internal business apps in about 40 percent of the time it had previously required with traditional development. The platform sped the development process by a factor of 2x and saved 650 days of effort in the first year alone. Schneider Electric has now deployed several large enterprise applications that foster efficiency in the supply chain, sales and marketing, workforce and HR administration, finance, portfolio management, manufacturing management, and many more. A large portion of these applications replaced legacy Lotus Notes apps. While most of the applications are responsive web apps, there are mobile apps too. Schneider’s IT team completed most applications in about ten weeks of development time.

Financial services also stands to gain from such development platforms. Edelweiss Group is one of India’s leading diversified financial services companies that provides a broad range of financial products and services. They utilised OutSystems to build their Loan Origination System (LOS). A big part of how it functioned involved data capture, or CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) operations and workflows. OutSystems gave their development team the tremendous agility needed to rehash both systems in line with dynamic market conditions and regulations. Edelweiss adopted a platform-based approach to process any kind of loan and built a library of configurable widgets and analytical scorecards. It empowered their development team to roll out new features in a matter of weeks instead of months. The configuration capabilities of the platform allowed the business teams to change onboarding and underwriting parameters at will without depending on the IT team.

 

5. What trends do you foresee for this technology?

It is clear that in the post-pandemic future, work will look different: hybrid, digital-first and cloud-first transformations are on par for course now. While COVID-19 has caused many disruptions, it also presented opportunities for digital innovation and differentiation initiatives. As a result, demand for applications to support new business needs is increasing.

NASSCOM reported that India’s SaaS revenue is set to jump 6 times to $13-15 billion by 2025. The increased digital consumption (and corresponding demand) has led the Indian SaaS market to grow 1.5 times compared to the global market.

High-performance low-code application development enables organisations to meet this demand. By using visual, model-driven development and AI-powered tools,  developers quickly and easily build, deploy as well as manage software that makes a difference. With this technology, organisations can evolve, adapt and update their applications as seamlessly as business imperatives shift. . Just as DevOps moved the needle by focusing on  development processes rather than IT and networking teams, new technology for high velocity development allows an organisation to design and create applications much more quickly and efficiently. High-performance low-code development technologies can also aid in the process of creating bridges between legacy and modern applications, or, in some instances, replacing legacy systems entirely.

Here are some of the key predictions:

A new category of platforms will emerge as companies hit the limits of over-hyped no/low-code platforms

While companies flocked to a dizzying array of no- and low-code tools to meet development needs amid the uncertainties, they will quickly realize the limits of these platforms, and as a result will seek out more advanced platforms that go beyond to enable their development teams in new ways. No- and low-code platforms are fine for building white labelled, minimally capable applications. When those apps become mission-critical, or when a new app outside of the narrow domain of that tool is required, they hit a wall and become obsolete. We’ll start to see companies ditch the less mature platforms they adopted as a bandaid in a moment of panic and pursue far more capable modern application platforms that enable any type of application to be built and allow them to not only build quickly but build to the scale, security, and differentiation they need for inevitable future change.

Developer mentality will undergo a dramatic shift, from how it’s built, to what is built

Traditionally, developers have been heavily invested in how software is built – with near religious devotion to their preferred procedural language and ‘stack’. This unreasonable fervor will diminish as the number of problems that can only be solved with software dramatically increases and more development projects require business and IT to work together more closely than ever before. Developers are shifting their mindset to focus on delivering mission-critical solutions – regardless of how they’re made. Developers will open up to new approaches, such as embracing AI-powered automation that leads to less friction, errors and technical debt. Developers will ditch the dogma and embrace alternatives as they realize the outcome is the only thing that’s important.

AI will deliver productivity for all types of developers 

AI’s role in the future of application development has always been tantalizingly controversial, with a storm of opinions gracing many a conversation about its potential. But it is becoming very clear: AI has the power to create far more possibilities than it limits. This year, AI-backed development will raise the bar yet again with increasingly strategic and innovative uses. Usable by both professional developers and amateurs alike to amp up their productivity, AI delivers heightened acceleration and accuracy in application building, and will prove to boost innovation and creativity rather than hinder it. The world, currently at its peak in software augmentation and automation, is undergoing a paradigm shift and developers will soon come to see that AI is an essential tool to have in their kit, one that allows them to push the creative boundaries of their jobs and innovate.

While the OutSystems platform is already capable of solving a broad range of customer solutions – everything from application modernisation and workplace innovation to business process automation and customer experience transformation – we will continue to improve on the capabilities that deliver development efficiency, that enable team collaboration, that strengthen IT governance and that make applications adaptable enough to keep pace with the imperatives of the business. Furthermore, OutSystems will continue to add state-of-the-art features – made easily accessible through its visual, model-driven approach – such as AI-enabled chatbots, connections to the latest SaaS offerings like Snowflake, or one-click creation of PWAs.

 

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