DEVOPSdigest

OutSystems announced a series of new tools and capabilities that will empower organizations of all sizes to build applications quickly, build them right, and build them for the future.

At NextStep 2020, OutSystems CEO and Founder, Paulo Rosado, shared the company’s vision to change the way software is built, giving every organization the power to innovate through software. The power of software has never been greater, yet IT organizations struggle with expanding application backlogs and strain to keep up with an onslaught of new technologies. OutSystems, a modern application platform, is dedicated to eliminating these challenges and enabling organizations to deftly tackle any kind of critical application — from legacy modernization and workplace innovation to customer experience transformation.

The OutSystems platform dramatically accelerates the development process for enterprise-class applications while also delivering unprecedented levels of flexibility. With OutSystems, customers not only speed through their backlogs, they are able to swiftly adapt applications in lockstep with the evolving needs of their businesses and keep pace with emerging trends in technology.

“Building and changing applications at speed and scale continues to be a painfully complex process for most organizations. Traditional technology stacks are getting more complex, atomized, and challenging to implement while traditional development remains overly manual, disconnected, and rigid,” said Rosado. “We learned over the last 20 years that there is a better approach and built a platform that solves precisely these challenges. OutSystems helps our customers build applications fast, build them right, and most importantly, build them for the future.”

Building Applications Fast

Every aspect of OutSystems is designed to help developers build complete, compelling software solutions quickly and efficiently with a high-productivity, visual development approach. Recognizing that the most effective teams have a diversity of talent and pull from all corners of the organization, OutSystems includes powerful collaboration tools that automate and augment critical phases of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). To help customers build essential applications more quickly than ever before, OutSystems today introduced the following:

■ Builders— The flagship development environment for the OutSystems platform, Service Studio, enables professional developers to quickly assemble mission-critical applications either from scratch or from components assembled by domain experts using specialized tools called OutSystems “Builders.” These best-of-breed, visual toolsets are optimized for particular aspects of the development cycle as well as for team collaboration. All Builder output seamlessly integrates with the efforts of professional developers working in Service Studio. This enables diverse teams to collaborate on applications with the expressiveness of traditional development but with superior speed and efficiency.

- Workflow Builderenables the visual mapping of complex business processes and the automated creation of high-performance, workflow-based applications.

- Experience Builderenables developers to rapidly prototype great looking and highly usable mobile applications that leverage common patterns and flows and turn them into production-ready apps.

- Integration Builderreduces the complexity of extending the existing systems on which businesses depend, like SAP and Salesforce, ensuring integrations are fast and easy to implement, while also secure and scalable.

■ AI Assist— With the goal of making application developers one hundred times faster, OutSystems has fused artificial intelligence (AI) into its platform to automate, guide, and validate development throughout the application lifecycle. Designed to aid all skill levels, from professional developers to business analysts, and in every step of the process, AI Assist enables faster delivery of robust, high-quality applications.

“Pure no code/low code solutions are easy to use but lack capability, while traditional development is powerful but lacks ease of use and agility,” said Rosado. “OutSystems delivers the best of both worlds: high-productivity tools that automate and simplify complexity, with the power and expressiveness of traditional development. This approach radically transforms the way our customers build, deploy, and most importantly, evolve their critical applications.”

Building Applications “Right”

At the heart of the OutSystems platform are integrated tools and services that ensure modern, enterprise-grade applications are secure, resilient, cloud-ready, and built to scale. Whatever is built fast, must be built right. To ensure this, OutSystems introduced:

■ Architecture Dashboard— Infused with AI technology, Architecture Dashboard helps IT visualize and enforce complex cross-portfolio architectures built with OutSystems and identify issues early in the development lifecycle. Architecture dashboard ensures that applications are secure, performant, and resilient and that teams are able to avoid costly design errors as well as duplication of effort.

■ AppShield— OutSystems AppShield secures mobile applications against even the most sophisticated malicious attacks. Effectively securing mobile applications is technically difficult with traditional tools and requires specialized skills that are hard to find – so hard that Gartner suggests that through 2022, mobile application security failures will be the biggest mobile threat to enterprises.1 By automatically adding layers of security during deployment, applications built with OutSystems are more resistant to intrusion, tampering, and reverse engineering.

“Other platforms built for quickly developing enterprise and mobile applications ultimately sacrifice quality for speed, and the complexity of traditional development often leads to issues around security, performance, and flexibility,” said Goncalo Gaiolas, VP of Product for OutSystems. “Security and architectural soundness must be central in order to build modern applications right, and OutSystems invests heavily in this area to ensure applications built with the platform exceed the most stringent criteria for enterprise-worthiness.”

Building Applications for the Future

Applications, like businesses, markets, and even economies, are constantly evolving. Seeing this as an opportunity to help customers differentiate through software, OutSystems is, at its core, designed for managing change.

With a potent combination of sophisticated platform services, AI, visual tools for design and programming, and an underlying architecture enabling the continuous introduction of features and capabilities, OutSystems helps customers deliver modern applications capable of evolving as quickly as their organizations change and as new technologies are introduced. Among the many OutSystems features highlighted at NextStep that help developers build applications for the future are:

■ TrueChange— Many developers believe their work is finished when an application is delivered, but in reality, their job has only just begun. TrueChange uses AI to help developers address the complexities created by ever-changing software requirements. TrueChange checks for bugs and architecture errors, analyzes the impact of changes on component and application dependencies, provides team and architectural governance, and even monitors performance in real-time. As a result, developers can build, manage, and change enterprise-critical applications or services – with zero friction, zero errors, zero lead time, and zero technical debt.

■ Machine Learning Builder— With the new OutSystems Machine Learning Builder, developers can easily create custom AI applications with rich personalized experiences. For example, machine learning can be used to analyze the behavior of customers to improve a chatbot experience by eliminating options they don't like or automatically routing their questions to the right department. Machine Learning Builder shows how OutSystems is able to quickly introduce new, innovative technologies into its platform and make those technologies accessible to developers.

“Two of the biggest challenges with application development are keeping up with new technologies and keeping up with ever-changing business imperatives – both of which require applications to continuously adapt,” said Gaiolas. “These are the two things we do best. The OutSystems platform makes new, valuable technologies accessible to developers, and our platform is designed from the ground up to make sure applications can change as dynamically as the needs of the most complex business.”