“A world where 100 million developers are creating apps used by a billion people every day.”
That was the vision Paolo Rosado, the founder and CEO of OutSystems, outlined when he announced Project Neo, its most ambitious technology launch to date, at the Next Step 2021 recently. The next-generation platform from the pioneer in low-code application development will be released early next year. Anyone is welcome to sign up for the Project Neo public preview to test it out today.
“Customers have always been our ultimate motivation. Empowering them to build incredible things with our platform is our passion,” Rosado said during the event’s keynote address. “I am a developer at heart, and I want to build something that really works for developers.”
He wasn’t just referring to the elites. The aim is to enable any developer to build faster and more resilient software while keeping pace and anticipating change. Add in being cost-effective on top of that as well. Rosado condensed the three fundamental goals in the design of Project Neo as follow:
- To be as quick as the elites, “delivering significant changes in hours, and doing it multiple times per day.”
- To remove expected cost and risk to build high-quality internet-scale cloud infrastructure
- To make it evergreen, “where changes and updates are deployed continuously with minimal impact”.
“On average, teams today have to deal with 10 times more code and complexity than just 10 years ago,” said Gonçalo Gaiolas, VP of Product Management at OutSystems, in his part of the keynote address, detailing new features introduced to the platform. The latest updates include Mac compatibility, cleaner visual revamp and dark mode, the most requested feature from its developer community.
“We like to keep our platform evergreen, and we keep on releasing useful capabilities like new mobile plugins, improved data editing and manipulation, and a set of very powerful, fully supported widgets,” he said before showing an illustration of the unique monograph approach and AI-powered developer assistance on the OutSystems platform at work.
The brand-new Project Neo is set to achieve a 100x increase in developer productivity.
That seems like a huge ask, but that is precisely what OutSystems is going for. In his keynote address, Patrick Jean, CTO at OutSystems, noted that more than half of cloud development projects fail due to the challenges posed by the non-deterministic nature of the cloud and the technology going outdated at a rapid speed.
“We built OutSystems Project Neo on a modern cloud foundation of Linux containers and Kubernetes to solve this exact problem. We’ve done all the work to wire the services together using state-of-the-art cloud architecture. We’ve implemented security best practices and best-of-breed CI/CD for continuous delivery,” Jean said.
“We did all this hard work so that you can build applications running on Kubernetes that operate as if you are a tech elite, but without the risk, the cost and the time commitment. We didn’t sacrifice power for complexity.”
That was just the start of Jean’s introduction to what goes under the hood of Project Neo.
There is automated business continuity and disaster recovery configured into the new platform, which can co-exist with OutSystems 11, the company’s market-leading platform for enterprise-grade low-code development. The evergreen philosophy extends to its current platform, so users can rest assured knowing the company will continue to invest in its usability and upgrades.
“We maintain all of the underlying technologies. We do all the heavy lifting to make sure that as the technology landscape changes and shifts, we keep the platform up to date. Just as we’ve been doing for the past 20 years,” Jean said, adding, “OutSystems makes sure your apps are always state-of-the-art, cloud native, and enterprise grade. This is the true concept of evergreen.”
OutSystems was founded in 2001 and has grown to have more than 525,000 community members, around 1,700 employees, over 400 partners with active customers in 87 countries and across 22 industries. More than 14 million people are currently using apps created on its platform, ranging from mobile apps and consumer websites to workgroup apps and extensions of other core systems like Microsoft, SAP, and Salesforce. Its product strategy is simple: “Serious productivity for serious apps”.
Prosegur Seguridad, which Rosado mentioned in his address, adopted OutSystems to digitally enhance its security services and keep them up to date as it sought to provide more customer-centric security. The international security firm developed the first release of its POPS operations platform and POPS Mobile app in just three months.
“The development of release one was done in just ten weeks. We’ve cut time to market by 50%, and seen a 20% reduction in development costs,” said Andrew Buch Sampaio, Director of Systems Engineering at Prosegur, adding it took a mere 18 months for the company to see a return on investment.
“We needed a platform that could scale to meet the needs of our vast user base. We also needed technology that was cloud-friendly and could integrate with lots of other systems. And, lastly, we needed to develop native mobile, web, and backend systems. OutSystems ticked all these boxes for us.”
More companies shared their experiences and results of developing their applications with OutSystems at the Next Step 2021, available on-demand here.
Jean also went into details of Project Neo at the OSDC 2021, the OutSystems developer conference, which is also available to watch on-demand.