OutSystems announced the release of
OutSystems 11,
the first low-code solution to address one of the biggest issues facing
IT leaders today - legacy system gridlock. Building on its number one,
low-code platform for web and mobile apps, OutSystems 11 delivers new
advanced capabilities to help organizations modernize legacy systems and
replace large application portfolios.
"The legacy gridlock problem is huge," said
Paulo Rosado, CEO and Founder of OutSystems. "Seventy percent of IT
budgets are spent maintaining large portfolios of legacy apps, including
aging systems and brittle, over-customized ERP and CRM systems. This
massive technical debt is a roadblock to business innovation, and it
opens the door to disruption by more agile competitors."
Traditional options for dealing with legacy
debt and gridlock include open-heart surgery on packaged applications or
embarking on multi-year custom development projects that add layers of
complexity to the codebase. Both options are slow, expensive, and
high-risk, and they force IT leaders to make tradeoffs between control,
speed, and simplicity. OutSystems 11 eliminates these problems with six new capabilities never before available in a low-code platform.
1. Modern microservices architecture plus impact analysis delivers unbreakable builds, even with huge app portfolios -
OutSystems
11 will eliminate hours spent validating and fixing the issues with
complex sets of apps and large systems. In-depth impact analysis of
entire systems before release provides advance warning so builds don't
break. Teams are more agile, safely creating and changing reusable
services and applications fast and at scale.
2. Out-of-the-box monitoring gives real-time visibility into large portfolios of interconnected apps and services - Take
the pulse of an entire app portfolio, identifying potential problem
areas before they impact the health of other systems, including SaaS and
external legacy systems. Embedded monitoring, out-of-the-box analytics,
and built-in dashboards show where or why a given app or service is not
performing as designed.
3. Continuous delivery team features to manage hundreds of developers working in the same platform - Control
who can create and manage services, and who can consume them, using a
full entitlement model that extends to all apps and services.
Organizations can structure themselves based on delivery streams for
each business area that work in parallel.
4. Container support standardizes operations and portability - Deploy
apps and services to leading container-as-a-service and
platform-as-a-service providers - including Amazon, ECS, Azure Container
Service, Pivot PAS and on-premises Docker container environments - for
faster, leaner deployment and increased scalability, resilience, and
portability.
5. New UI Framework to deliver beautiful user experiences (UX) quickly without specialized design resources -
Delivering apps with consistent, modern user interfaces is now
frictionless for development teams. A new UI framework makes it easy to
serve up experiences at scale across multiple delivery streams while
ensuring brand and UX consistency. Developers can access screen
templates and patterns derived from analyzing leading consumer apps
directly from the OutSystems visual editor and customize, extend, and
reuse them as needed.
6. Advanced security features protect entire app portfolios, from development to deployment and beyond - Scale
the security of systems and apps beyond the traditional boundaries of
IT with a platform designed for security. Automated risk assessments,
granular access controls, and activity monitoring supplement manual
processes and provide the necessary visibility and due diligence
required of large application portfolios.
OutSystems 11 allows
organizations to tackle their legacy applications in a different way
that fosters agility over time and removes legacy debt from the
equation. It also simplifies the transition to a completely new
operating model where a mesh of services supports independent delivery
lines on top of core business functions, all aligned with the business
needs.
Here are just a few of OutSystems enterprise
customers that have already embraced low-code development for
overhauling their large systems:
- Global energy company EDP replaced its entire payment processing gateway that manages millions of transactions every month.
- Industry
leader Schneider Electric built a "Low-Code Digital Factory" that
turned out 30 new apps in its first 15 months and transformed the IT
team's development practices.
- Vopak,
the world's leading terminal management company, re-wrote its entire
ERP system - a project originally slated for three years completed in
just 16 months.
"In parallel, we are phasing out our old ERP
system and will only support our business with PaaS and SaaS
applications going forward," Vopak CIO Leo Brand said. "For our core
processes, we made a strategic choice to develop on OutSystems low-code
development platform."
"We're on a mission to change the way
enterprises develop all their applications," said Paulo Rosado,
OutSystems CEO. "Our launch of OutSystems 10 in 2016 disrupted the
mobile app development market, so much so that Gartner now rates us as a
market leader. Now, for the first time, there is a low-code technology
able to change the economics of building large core systems and their
supporting apps and services, instead of buying and endlessly
customizing commercially available systems to make them fit."
This new platform launch comes on the heels of
a $360 million funding round for OutSystems from KKR and Goldman Sachs
that valued the company at well over $1 billion.
"Successful digital transformation requires
organizations to rethink their technology strategy," said Marcio
Spinola, OutSystems vice president of product management. "Our strategy
of combining the speed and agility of low-code with enterprise-class
security and scalability allows IT to tackle legacy modernization,
creating a new operational model that works at the speed and scale a
full digital transformation requires."