OutSystems

Last Updated: 20th June 2022
Analyst Coverage: David Norfolk

OutSystems is a comparatively small but exciting company that started in Portugal, which gives it a wider global perspective than many English or American companies. It is at the cutting edge of high productivity model-driven development and has established itself in the on-premises environments that businesses are most comfortable with. It now feels the time is right for traveling with its customers into the Cloud, with Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Introduced in 2001, the OutSystems Platform was originally developed in Portugal by a team led by OutSystems’ founder and CEO, Paulo Rosado. He now sees his company as “an international leader in cutting-edge approaches to the delivery of enterprise web and mobile applications” and is very proud of his company’s culture—see The Small Book, a guide for company employees.

Before OutSystems, Rosado was Executive VP of Global Marketing at Altitude Software, a CRM company present in 32 countries. Before joining Altitude, he co-founded Intervento, an e-business software infrastructure company, acting as its CEO until the company was successfully sold in 1999. Previously Paulo worked in Silicon Valley for Oracle Corp, where he held multiple positions in R&D and Product management.

Rosado has participated in multiple Executive Education programs, and holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Computer Engineering degree from Universidade Nova, Lisbon.

Company Info

Headquarters: Linda-a-Velha, Portugal
Telephone: +351 21 4153730

Platform

Last Updated: 10th March 2014

What it does

The OutSystems Platform is a high-productivity solution for the agile development and management of custom enterprise web and mobile applications. It allows development at the business logic level, with the platform generating the conventional code needed for deployment on the available technology. It focuses on accommodating rapidly changing business needs; scalability without arbitrary limits and with consistent ease-of-use, regardless of scale and complexity; and no vendor lock-in.

Markets and channels

OutSystems claims to have some 57 implementation partners and over 1500 certified platform professionals. In addition, the members of the Forge code-sharing community can be considered to be informal partners.

Users

The OutSystems platform has over 36,500 installations across 22 different industries, has received multiple CODiE, CRN and JOLT awards and is supported by an active community of over 6,000 developers.

Customers choose OutSystems Platform because it is seen as a best of breed high productivity platform, allowing fast development based on business logic rather than on technology, on time and in budget. It provides an easy and intuitive multichannel services oriented architecture, enabling communication between all relevant business stakeholders (internal and external). At the same time, it gives its customers a lot of control over the platform and where things run.

Technology

The OutSystems Platform is an agile platform, which allows developers to create web applications using a Scrum-based methodology, if desired. It can create both .NET and Java applications, using its database modelling tools, in conjunction with a visual modelling language operating at a business logic level higher than either Java or .NET.

Key technologies supporting OutSystems Platform include IntelliWarp and TrueChange. IntelliWarp generates application elements from application objects, which means that you can drop an Excel spreadsheet, say, into the platform and then use IntelliWarp technology to generate the logic, screen design and flows needed to create a web application from the data—typically using HTML5 doctype and constructs, and CSS3 for styling.

TrueChange complements IntelliWarp; it’s a change engine that automates impact analysis and, where possible, automates the removal of any defects it finds. If this isn’t possible, it will automate the defect removal process and alert developers to where the application has been impacted by a change.

Services

OutSystems has a global presence in 24 countries: including USA, UK and Ireland, the EU, Japan, Australia, South Africa and Brazil. Perhaps, in part due to its Portuguese origins, it has extremely strong localisation and native language capabilities.

8x5 or 24x7 phone support, email support, and a Support Portal are available for Enterprise edition customers. The OutSystems Support Portal allows paying customers to:

Submit new support cases and track answers/feedback;
Access and review all support threads, in a central location, accessible by the whole team;
Control the status of a support subscription;
Define who is able to report and follow new cases on behalf of an organisation.

A strong online community is available for both Enterprise and Community editions and we think that the provision of support is first rate—bearing in mind the size of the company. The Forge, OutSystems’ code-sharing community, is smaller than Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and more akin to a free codesharing site such as GitHub; it shares extensions of OutSystems Platform capabilities with other OutSystems Platform practitioners (e.g. developers), for free. It thus has a somewhat different aim and audience to AppExchange.