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High Tech - Low Code
High Tech - Low Code
#3 Accelerating Software Development: The OutSystems Platform
For this episode of our High Tech - Low Code podcast, we have invited Roy Goonewardena, Principal Solutions Architect at OutSystems, to discuss the current status quo of low code development, the problems that OutSystems solves as one of the leading low code platforms and give an outlook on the future of software development. This episode is hosted by Mário Cunha, Trainer and Applications Developer and Gary Williams, Software Developer at OutSprint.
Hello, and welcome to the high tech low code Podcast. Today for a co-host, we have the company of Gary Williams. How are you doing, Gary?
Gary Williams:Yeah. Hello, Mario. And well thank you very much looking forward to speaking to our guests and hearing about his views on the topic we've prepared.
Mario Cunha:As for the podcast topic, we're going to talk about one of the leading local platforms OutSystems. And to help us with that we have the company of Roy G., principal Solution Architect at OutSystems. Roy has nearly a decade of hands on experience in information technology that translated into collaboration with international sales organisations and multinational teams, specialising local platforms while keeping a close eye on modern technology revolutions in blockchain and its usage. I would like to start by asking, how are you and if you would like to give listeners an intro about yourself?
Roy G.:Hi, it's Roy G.. I have a very long last Sri Lankan name. So I'm not going to pronounce that here. But having said that, I have been with OutSystems now about six years. As Mario mentioned, I'm one of the solution architects here. And I have been working in different solutions in the past with businesses support solutions, as well as operational support solutions. And then I moved on to a platform solution, which then eventually ended, I ended up with this opportunity here at OutSystems.
Gary Williams:Well, hello, Roy, it's Gary here. I'm pleased to meet you diving straight into our discussion then for today in focus on OutSystems, particularly, what made you pick OutSystems as a technology for you to invest in, I can see that you've been with, with the technology for about 10 years, I'm just interested to know what made you stay with the OutSystems platform.
Roy G.:So I think for me, what was interesting was that I used to work also with the previous platform provider a platform that enable monetization of digital services or any kind of services. So I was kind of slightly getting a board with the same kind of opportunities in the sense that it was the same industry space that I was in. So I wanted it different, I wanted a slight change. And at the same time, I was looking for something more challenging, as well as something that covered more of the industries as well as use cases around the world. And then our system fortunately fell on my lap. And that made me invest my time to really understand the platform as well as the organisation and which I'm in love with right now. But having said that, when I first joined OutSystems, I think I was also kind of sceptical because this was a industry that I had never heard before a concept called Low code. And OutSystems has moved far beyond the concept of low code, obviously. But yeah, so it took maybe few weeks to maybe a couple of months for me to get my head around it. But now, obviously, I didn't think for a second that it would go in a different direction than where it is heading today.
Mario Cunha:Focusing in OutSystems. So I would like to ask, who is our systems for? And who is it not for? And also, what is the coolest solution you have ever worked on?
Roy G.:Okay, good question there. So I think our systems if you look at our systems and our systems customers more than more than nearly two 1000 customers that we are serving around the world. And what is interesting is that spanning 22 industries, I haven't still seen a business use case where our system isn't suitable for where our systems I don't see fitting in is where you want to create the next coolest a gaming application. So gaming industry probably is not a suitable industry for OutSystems to create applications with, unless it's to serve the internal users or operational aspects of a game. But other than that, I think OutSystems can be used in almost any scenario. So we have customers that are managing the health of individuals using our applications to fund management to even helping people in need in desperate situations. So OutSystems applications and from front end all the way through to operational back end set of applications. So in that sense, yeah, so I can see OutSystems being used across a multitude of industry verticals as well as organisations. And what was the coolest solution I worked on? I think during the last couple of years, my one of the memorable ones is a organisation called Thinkmoney, who provides a great service to its customers that cannot manage finances. So they support the management of finances on behalf of an individual. And when we started, they had a mobile application that was delivered by a third party who was in control of of that delivery. And within less than few months, or maybe six months during the transition period of that systems to OutSystems, they have now taken full control of that application. And I originally participated in the evaluation cycle of this process to support the customer. And today, that app has more than 4.6 rating with by hundreds and hundreds of users. So it goes to show that OutSystems can very quickly convert the end user satisfaction of how you provide the digital services to your, to your customers. And having said that OutSystems can fit into any model of a customer where they whether they are starting out into a new business as an aspirational organisation, or are the masters of the industries that are trying to keep up with the digital evolution that is taking place today.
Gary Williams:And talk about that digital revolution that was that's growing and growing. And focusing on getting started OutSystems. What advice would you give to any individual who's just about to embark on it on their IT career would like to start with OutSystems?
Roy G.:Yeah, good question there. And I think that is interesting is that we see individuals that are coming into OutSystems ecosystem from all walks of life. So we have developers that have started their journey as economist or financial advisors that have some technical acumen or curiosity that have started with OutSystems and become full architects or even expert developers using our system. So if you want to start, I think we provide a great set of tutorials on our website, and there is a ecosystem of more than 250,000 community members whom you can reach out to ask for questions. And we have our OutSystems training completely online free of charge to anyone who wants to start using OutSystems. And you can start today with the free trial that for a personal edition, which stays alive forever, where you can create very creative apps to whether you want to control your Sonos sound system at home or the Siletz Bob at home, using your own apps instead of the supplier provided one so you can start anywhere, really, and it's up to you to figure out at which creativity level you want to start at and build OutSystems. And on our Learn page, you have a whole bunch of resources where you can start from and as a, whether you have a traditional development experience, or whether you don't have any development experience, and you're just looking into starting at how to deliver digital solutions or applications. And OutSystems provide starting points around these through our training materials as specified as guided paths. So you can become a full stack developer or expert in mobile front ends or figure out how to optimise business processes, etc, etc.
Mario Cunha:Well, that's quite interesting. And using that as a segue way for challenges. What do you consider to be OutSystems biggest technological challenges? If we take into consideration traditional development, another existing local platform?
Roy G.:I think that the biggest challenge that OutSystems and other local providers face in the market is the ability to convince people that this these are solutions that really can provide digital innovation capabilities to your organisation to not only digitally evolve, but also to keep up with the fast pace that the modern consumer requires. And from the challenge point of view, I think that what is really required is a mind shift change in the sense of adopting these kinds of cloud native digital delivery, technology solution delivery technologies such as OutSystems. So OutSystems compared to other low code providers, I think our challenge really is convincing our customers and our prospects that we provide full breadth and width of the capabilities, not only full stack mobile and web development platform, but it´s also full lifecycle management too, together with the capability to very easily and quickly integrate with multitude of information repositories, as well as the ability to provide engagement to your end users, be it mobile web, or through voice driven channels as it's becoming more and more popular today. So OutSystems provides that full breadth of capabilities. But unfortunately, customers and prospects during these evaluation cycles doesn't see the full capacity sets of OutSystems. And so they kind of end up comparing a particular set of functionality that we provide against maybe other low code providers, and then choose on some other criteria. So those are the kind of the common challenges that we have. But other than that, I think we can have usually been our opportunities when, when customers evaluate the full breadth of the functional capabilities and the function feature capabilities that OutSystems platform provides.
Mario Cunha:It's actually quite interesting. Out of the blue, I was considering, have you ever got a client that would go: Oh, no, we don't want to use OutSystems. But in the end, it
kind of like:Whoa, I'm so glad we will put OutSystems.
Roy G.:I think it usually happens the other way around. So we have customers that have started evaluating low code, and then eventually say that, okay, this is not good enough. This happened 5 - 6 years ago, right? When the definition of low code and high productivity platforms as a service such as OutSystems didn't exist. At that point, I think customers and industry knowledge was more around, you know, the stability and the core development processes that existed in the past and still today do. And what was interesting was these, some of these customers who are customers today would start on a high code group, and then six months down the line, then come back to a sense of like, okay, we haven't been able to deliver this project, we need some other set, we need to talk to you again. So we have those opportunities more and more. And nowadays, because a lot of the customers that couldn't deliver their projects, over the past few years, are coming back to us to start engaging with us, again, to be able to show their organisation that platforms like ours can really deliver to organisations, the capabilities, the digital capabilities that they need to conduct their business.
Mario Cunha:Oh, that's quite interesting. I never thought about it on that direction.
Gary Williams:I was just gonna say I was involved. Previous to my joining OutSprint, I was working for an automotive company. And they were at the time when I joined, looking at various platform providers. And they were obviously being courted by the sales teams for each of those, those vendors. And it was a difficult decision. But the the job that I had at the time was working within the business and what for a different I wasn't working in the IT team at the time. And I got involved in pulling a demo together of the OutSystems platform, because I've been using it myself in my previous life. While since 2011, when when I first got involved in OutSystems, I bought it for my own business at that time. So I've been on that side of the fence when I was looking at the different providers. And I chose OutSystems. So I've been a big advocate of OutSystems ever since. So I have this unique opportunity when I joined this other business to show them what I have done personally. And I was more trusted, because I wasn't a sales person. I was actually working with a business. But it was interesting to see what their criteria was. And it was confusing because these IT people are obviously got lots and lots of other things projects going on. And they're not specialists. And they're often given the job of choosing these software packages almost based on all the nice glossy brochures. And the demo is which obviously worked quite well when I was able to actually give a demo, real life demo. And off the back of that then this company bought the OutSystems product and went on to successfully create some apps and it went on from there. So it's it's an interesting problem that all companies have. And OutSystems particularly, I guess is that, you know, it's a really great product. You know what it does, but you've got a finite time to demonstrate that and it's a difficult one.
Mario Cunha:That is quite interesting. I guess it's really easier to be able to get to a place and just do a technical demo than just show show up with the brochure and go on from there to try and advocate the technology. Right?
Gary Williams:Yeah, yeah, it's getting that credibility and believability. That's the thing. With the product like OutSystems from personal experience, it's so easy to sell because it's, it's great. But it's actually getting your foot in the door and getting that belief. So yeah, good luck with that. OutSystems.
Mario Cunha:True indeed.
Gary Williams:So leading on to that, from my perspective, as I've said, I'm a big advocate of OutSystems. And I've always felt that they've been a huge leader in low code area, we always get in good responses and measurements from Forrester and Gartner reports. So how would you believe Roy is that OutSystems will maintain its dominance within this market.
Roy G.:I think having competitors is a good thing, because it helps us as well as our competition to improve what they deliver to their customers in specialising and becoming better at what they deliver. But one of the key differentiators of our systems is that our vision is based around the ability to feel the creative force, delivering digital innovation or keep up with the digital evolution that is happening, right? So and with that vision, what we do every year is look at the market. And we look at what is, what are the trending technologies? And who is adopting them? And who are the innovators using them. And which companies are embracing what type of technologies and who, what are the early majority of these technologies. So for example, if you look at Micro Services, this was something that was not very, very much heard of in five years ago, but it's now become mainstream today, right? So OutSystems was able to deliver these kind of services, through platform, a platform evolution or platform innovation, within a couple of years of that technology becoming into the mainstream. So we always look at the industry to understand what's really happening, and what what are the common elements where people are interacting through. So if they, if we see, for example, in artificial intelligence is where the technology or the industry is going, than OutSystems has its own best interest to invest in it. And which what we have done recently, by incorporating artificial intelligence into a development studio, as well as it is coming into some other aspects that are going to be released with a new version, showcase that's happening next week through Next Step that we run every year. So there are certain things that we are bringing into the market as well. And we are also keeping up with where the Gardeners and the Forresters and the analysts see that digital technology is evolving in the marketplace. So for example, they believe that AI and application solutions will be more and more driven by the business, then the IT organisation so and businesses is using platform like OutSystems as a digital capability to deliver digital economy that they need to fulfil for their end users. So in that sense, OutSystems has a very big way to carry. Because we are not just a development tool in that sense, we have to you have to make sure that we are up to date with not only the experience industry in the sense that how you consume your applications, whether it's mobile, desktop, tablet, TV, or through services like Alexa and Google Home. And then we have to also keep up with the security challenges that are happening in the market. Right? So cybersecurity is one of the most important that's taken place over the last six months during this challenging time. And OutSystems, for example, out of the box provides more than 200 Plus security features that our customers usually would need to invest a lot of money to make sure that they are capable of delivering, right? So we constantly keep up with those aspects as well. And then comes the ability to scale and to be able to deliver applications in a very consumable fashion to the end user without impacting their experience of what they're going to receive from their supplier. So we also make sure that we are keeping up with the current trends such as Kubernetes and Docker and Docker Swarm, for example, to make sure that our customers will be able to deliver applications With the new technology formats and new technology platforms that are going to be up and coming soon, so that our customers do not end up in technical debt, and that's one of our key messages, right? So be able to, don't be afraid of your creativity, because the platform will enable that. And then at the same time, don't worry so much about technical debt, because OutSystems platform will make sure that you will have little technical debt compared to the traditional legacy methodologies that you had followed in the past.
Mario Cunha:I see, so we can also look at OutSystems, like one of the biggest catalysts for digital transformation, that it is something that we actually need nowadays, right? Due to the pandemic and whatnot, we actually need something that would help us bring systems that allow us to connect with each other and get on with our work and so forth. That's quite interesting. And I'm going to use that to jump on to my next question, actually. So we are seeing OutSystems as something that will help us with digital transformation being this the new wave of technology for the future, for so to speak. So what is your vision for the future of software development? Taking into account the rapid progress we are observing in technology. How do you think it might look like in, I don't know, 10 years, can we even look that further away?
Roy G.:I'm not so sure about 10 years because as you said, the technology and the whole landscape of how we consume technology or consume services are constantly changing. So one of the predictions I kind of for prediction purposes, I kind of rely on the analyst because I think they do better research than I personally would. So Gardners, Forresters, and IBC for example, they talk about lot of applications, for example, getting smaller and smaller, because we are looking for point solutions of how we are going to consume services. For example, recently Apple introducing things like AP Clip, which I personally think that will take off in some point in the future, very soon. At the same time, IBC says, for example, it has taken nearly 40 years to build for 500, nearly 500 million solutions or digital solutions that are in the marketplace today. But they also predict that the next 500 million is going to take only another four or five years or even less. So which means that these other applications are going to be delivered 10 times the speed into the market. And it's not only utilising low code platforms, but many other solutions that are in the marketplace. So that means that we are seeing more and more consumable software building digital assets in the market from complete no code to OutSystems like low code platforms and even ourselves are adding no code features on top of the OutSystems platform so that citizen developers can really start engaging with the whole IT organisation in the sense that they are the ones to be able to define and decide what kind of services that they're going to offer to their customers. So, this is going to be a fundamental part of software delivery and then comes the artificial intelligence and the AI, which are going to be available for both during the development cycles, which we have introduced already, which is going to be even further extended visit features as the platform evolves. And not only us, other competitive local providers also have enabled their digital development studios to incorporate artificial intelligence during the development process, as well as we are going to see more and more data being utilised by these AI platforms to to make decisions on behalf of consumers. And we are seeing how bots are disrupting so many things today, right. And so this is going to be out of the box features for most of the development platforms in the future. And then also we are seeing that things like hardware is slowly fading into the background and software becoming more prominent. If you look at driverless cars, for example, where the software is the key feature, they're not really the vehicle itself, of course the vehicle will provide you the comfort and the design and the the status of what, who you are but but it's actually the software that's going to drive the forces behind that. So I see software evolving in a way or the development evolving in a way that we will see more and more hard to implement digital assets today becoming more and more common commodities in the in the future.
Mario Cunha:It's interesting because, as you were saying the the use of AI to make decisions for us. So we're talking about pre empting or pre - how can I say this? So pre emptive? Pre emptive. Pre emptive? Yeah, thanks. The decisions for our suffering, I'm thinking about, I don't know, industry 4.0. You know, big farm that's running loads of hardware, running loads of software, it may be making better decisions for their products to get better and more products?
Roy G.:Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the, if you look at the industry today, Gartner themselves predicts that more than 20% of the 2020 or 20 towards 2021, customers will move towards cloud native solutions. So infrastructure from organisation, custodianship is slowly disappearing into the cloud, and we will see the same happening to software as well. So more and more software assets that big organisation drawn on premise, it will move more and more towards the cloud with it comes a security challenges and other challenges cloud native architectures, fine. So organisations that are well equipped to handle these kinds of cloud native architectures, which have maybe, you know, multitude of developers, it's not everyone that can afford that have that luxury. So the smaller players who still need to play in the same playing field and disrupt the traditional economies and traditional business models, they need to also be able to provide this kind of cloud native features as well as take advantage of cloud native services organisations, such as OutSystems and our competitors provide. So I see you're correct. So you will see more and more people moving to cloud operations, as well as cloud native software delivery and development tools as well.
Mario Cunha:Right. Okay. Well, Gary, would you like to ask anything else?
Gary Williams:I was just gonna touch on something actually, what we just talked about the shift in technology and software. Also, from my perspective, my personal experience, as well as the culture change. So the automotive company that I talked about a moment ago, I was in assistance in developer type role. And the IT was scared of that, IT teams wouldn't allow me to do certain things to be scared, I was going to develop something they couldn't support, didn't have the time to support and have the money to support. And during despite me being involved in them choosing OutSystems, I was actually locked out because I was developing apps to supplement the team that I was working for. The IT team couldn't work with it. They were worried about being able to support it. And I think that's where the growth could be inhibited. If the culture doesn't change, to adopt, and allow that sort of growth of the wider ability within a team or a business to start creating these apps, to make them get into production.
Roy G.:You're absolutely correct, Gary, there's a cultural mind shift that is required by organisations. But having said that, I think when the industry or when the organisation start seeing there, hundreds and 1000s of applications that are going to be delivered using platform like ours, OutSystems, you will eventually get to a point that there will be certain trust established, within the organisations that you know, these are tools that both, the citizen developers can use, as well as the IT developers. But what is unique about OutSystems is that a citizen developer can start building some digital assets or solutions that they need for the organisations. But on top of that, we provide a full governance umbrella around it. So just because a citizen developer did something or develop something doesn't mean that it can go into the stage of the production, unless it goes through that validation cycle through that governance model that you establish with the platform like OutSystems. And because of that OutSystems, you can start with a very small team of I don't know, two or three developers, or even one developer in some cases, or to a full digital factory of 50 - 60 people that can provide the efficiency of nearly 200 people in a developer organisation and that's a lot of digital assets that you can create in a very short period of time and be the enablement of citizen developer you can bring the business as well as the IT delivery organisations together with platforms like OutSystems.
Gary Williams:Brilliant answer. Love that. Love that.
Mario Cunha:Yeah. Thank you very much, Roy. Well, unfortunately we just run out of time. Thank you very much Roy and Gary for being able to join us and taking time off from your schedule to participate in our podcast. Thank you.
Roy G.:Thanks for the invite. Happy to participate. Bye bye.
Mario Cunha:Bye. Cheers. And with that, we wrap up this episode. Thank you very much for listening and hope you join us on our next episode of high tech local podcast where we'll feature another guest and approach yet another topic of extreme importance to tech world. See you soon.