New Low-Code Platform Release Is a Major Breakthrough for Modernising Legacy Systems and Replacing Large Application Portfolios   

OutSystems today 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 organisations modernise 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-customised 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 trade offs between control, speed, and simplicity. OutSystems 11 eliminates these problems with six new capabilities never before available in a low-code platform.

1. Modern micro services 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. Organisations can structure themselves based on delivery streams for each business area that work in parallel.
4. Container support standardises 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 specialised 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 analysing leading consumer apps directly from the OutSystems visual editor and customise, 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 organisations 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 customising 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 organisations 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 modernisation, creating a new operational model that works at the speed and scale a full digital transformation requires.”

To learn more, please visit the OutSystems Blog or the OutSystems website.