Paulo Rosado, CEO of IT software provider Outsystems, talks to CBR about his company’s new cloud platform dedicated to helping firms build, deploy and manage web and mobile applications.
He is confident the PaaS will cut down on the time IT spends on application maintenance and general systems operations, freeing up IT to innovate on new solutions for their firm, and predicts the platform growing in popularity as the IT skills gap continues to worry companies.
Tell us about the obstacles faced by IT when trying to find the time to deploy changes requested by the business, and how Outsystems sets out to solve these.
This is a fundamental problem around IT. It’s known as the Keep the Lights On problem and it is a $2 trillion problem affecting IT, where they spend the majority of their budget on application maintenance, change requests and general systems operations.
Because of the drain on their resources they have no time and little money to deliver on new business solutions. They’re seen as slow and unproductive, and the change request back log grows constantly. They’re just keeping the lights on.
The business gets really frustrated with IT because they’re not responding quick enough and IT loses credibility.
Businesses deploying applications built on our platform get very fast change – it is a rapid application delivery platform. Our customers experience almost no back log.
Outsystems has now released its solution as a cloud-based platform, using Amazon Web Services. How will this change what you do and what benefits can customers expect to see?
We have had a lot of demand from our customer base to do this, to have this type of offering, and we believe customers will typically pick a cloud-based solution 90% of the time. A cloud approach gives you immediacy. With our offering you can go to our website and set up three large scale environments in two or three minutes. You can start developing with a team and one week later have a major application you can test and deploy in production.
It’s not cost saving as much as cutting out friction. What’s really happening here is normally developers get tasks and they say ‘I need to create this thing within my company to test this application’. That’s just friction. It’s takes far too long. In the cloud they don’t need to talk to anybody, just build it and run it and deploy it.
The business is happy because they get stuff much more quickly and the change comes the next day or the next week. The business starts going to IT for solutions instead of around IT.
So who do you see as your competitors in this field, and would companies be willing to develop in the cloud when they have so much sensitive data?
A lot of alternatives today are really little startups that solve smaller problems. We’re talking about enterprise size issues with Outsystems. We’re solving the problem on a large scale. A lot of these startups won’t be able to scale in line with the business’s growth.
Outsystems is also the only PaaS platform available as a cloud, on-premises or hybrid solution. The hybrid approach gets interesting because if the application is successful [in the cloud] there’s a lot of scope to then bring it inside so it’s on-premise too. You can drag and drop between cloud and on-premise.
On-premise solutions have something like a 98% profit margin. Our margins are different but we are taking that hit because we believe people have to have full choice with no impediment to move on cloud or on-premise.
How is this new approach likely to affect collaboration in the enterprise when it comes to application development?
No-one’s managed DevOps the way we are going to with this cloud offering. It took us seven years to get it right. This is massive in terms of collaboration between IT and the business.
Changing what a button did in an application used to be the job of four or five guys taking weeks because changing that button changed a whole number of other things. We save days or even weeks by having a platform which shows you what kind of consequences changing that button will have.
It used to be a case where IT would ask ‘what do you want us to build?’ and the business would tell them and it would take the next two years and IT would come back with something the business had a lot of problems with.
You believe the PaaS will help companies cope with the IT skills gap – how?
We’ve taken computer science interns, put them in front of our training tutorials and within two weeks we have been able to throw them into the middle of an ongoing Outsystems project, which is crazy.
There’s so many types of skill sets that can be leveraged with this platform. If you know nothing about programme design you can use this product to build software applications. It broadens the field of those who can build apps. The learning curve is very small.
