Hello, OutSystems friends, fans, and family.
We are so excited to be here with you again this year.
Of course, we wish we were in front of you in person.
But since there isn't possible, we
are at Nova University school of Business and Economics
sharing with you a beautiful place by the sea in Carcavelos,
just a few kilometers from our offices.
We have plans for a series of small get-togethers
very soon and throughout 2022, from user group meetings
to partner events in different places around the world.
We want to get together in person,
and will announce opportunities for that this week.
But for now, here we are at Next Step.
And it's a great place to be.
Before we get too deep into the incredible content we have
to share with you today, I want to bring your attention
to the exceptional sponsors who have
played a great role in making our event possible this year.
We send a big thank you to our diamond sponsors, AWS,
West Deloitte, and NTT Data.
Our elite sponsors, Infosys, KPMG and Vonage.
Our premium sponsors, and more than 20 additional sponsors
from across our partner community
who all make this event possible.
We are grateful to each and every one of you.
Another must see aspect of our event, is the Next Step
mobile app, build on OutSystems, naturally.
Our event app presents our full agenda for today
and connects to our OutSystems developer conference, OSDC,
taking place over the following two days.
So much more than event sessions and speakers for today,
you'll find absolute must see content,
including projects and applications built
over the past year from our OutSystems Innovation Award
winners.
And, wow, these companies creating gaps
in solving core business challenges with OutSystems
will astound you.
We expect to be inspired not only
by the quality of these projects and apps,
but also by their ambition.
And what all of these organizations accomplished
in what seems like record time, with record results.
It's incredible.
The OutSystems innovation awards honor and celebrate
the teams who are building the software that
is creating real digital transformation
in their organizations.
I am thrilled to announce and congratulate
all of the 2021 Innovation Award winners.
This year was a highly competitive field
with winners in seven categories from across the Americas,
Europe and Asia.
Take a look at them in the innovation awards booth.
They will inspire you with ideas for building your future.
OutSystems customers recognize the need
to do something different to solve a specific business
challenge or broadly change the way they
tackle digital transformation.
Some of them started with one important need and others
put the OutSystems at the center of their transformation
strategies.
Many of them however, start small
and grow as they realize the potential in our platform.
What happens are results that didn't seem possible.
We hear it time and time again.
Regardless of which starting point is yours,
or if you are interested in learning about both,
this is the place for you to explore.
At Next Step, you'll be surrounded by the companies
and organizations that are building their futures
through software innovation.
Talk to them.
Ask them why.
This is our favorite question at OutSystems, by the way.
We invite you to be curious and connect with our OutSystems
community.
They are incredible bunch.
More than 500,000 strong.
Ask them why and how and what they
are building and doing and dreaming
for the future of their businesses.
The future of their careers.
Their answers and apps will astonish and motivate you.
We'll introduce you to these many companies today,
and at our two day developer conference, OSDC.
You'll meet our innovation winners, our MVPs, who
help and shape our technology and keep us connected
to the solutions they need.
In fact, our MVPs will see their product recommendations
come to life.
Paolo will share today for the first time.
Don't forget to ask questions, share your ideas
and take a look inside the journeys of an OutSystems
developer.
Let us know what you want to build and your ideas
for transformation.
We promise to help you reach your goals.
Now, one person in particular who
is obsessed with helping you achieve
your vision through software, is our CEO and co-founder,
Paolo Rosado.
I am very happy to introduce him now.
Paolo, take it away.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to Next Step.
Thank you for joining us.
I am energized by the fact that I'm sharing great news with you
all.
As you have shared your ideas and innovations with us
for so many years.
It is great to be speaking with you today
from the University I graduated from.
I was the first in my family to attend college.
My mother pushed us every day to learn new things,
ask questions, be curious, explore, experiment.
Even though she was an absolute neat freak,
she would let me build a wood shop in my bedroom
so I could create and see where my ideas took me.
I started innovating very early in life.
I guess that is where my passion comes from,
and why I wanted to create a company that enabled anyone
to be a software innovator.
Customers have always been our ultimate motivation.
Empowering them to build incredible things
with our platform is our passion.
It's what drives us.
It's what drives me.
Next Step and OutSystems are all about powering your innovation.
For those of you who don't know us yet,
our mission is to enable every organization
to innovate through software.
This translates to a simple product strategy.
Serious productivity for serious apps.
From my days as a computer science grad student
at Stanford, I have realized how complex it was
to deliver working software.
Back then, software was being released every few months.
Today, great software innovators release multiple times per day.
So the pressure is reaching out for software teams
to build faster, build more resilient software
and anticipate change.
OutSystems customer, Mazda, has seen a four-fold increase
in developer productivity, building
apps five times faster and even their most complex apps 2 times
faster than before working without OutSystems.
Their project to migrate 500 legacy apps
will save millions and deliver ahead of schedule.
Over the last few years, we have received a lot of great praise
from analysts.
But what really motivates us is the feedback
we get from developers, who work on the platform every day.
And the customers who count on it
to transform their businesses.
I am a developer at heart, and I wanted
to build something that really works for developers.
That unlocks their potential in a way that has never been done.
The world is unpredictable.
As this pandemic has taught us, the assumptions
that we had across so many topics
were proved wrong in almost an instant.
That environment was a perfect laboratory
to test your ability to change.
What worked perfectly yesterday, suddenly didn't work anymore.
And you had to do something about it.
Darwin's theory wasn't that the strongest or fastest
would survive, it was that those most adapt at change
would beat the competition and thrive.
So how do you thrive with so much change?
How do you stay true to your vision, your culture,
when change is constant and relentless?
Let's talk about the impact of this change
on your digital systems and how quickly
your technical debt grows.
Technical debt is real.
And is defining a system of work built on developers fighting
the degradation of old software, versus giving developers
the space to work on inventing what's needed next.
Constantly patching and rewriting software
costs enterprise 30% to 40% of their IT budgets.
I actually think it's higher.
That's one third of your IT budget
that you're not investing in new apps, more developers, better
design and the implementation of great ideas.
You're not investing in building your future.
But what if you could overcome these issues?
Take a look at OutSystems customer procedure.
Faster application development is
helping them get IT innovation on the front foot.
They used to spend about 40% of their development time trying
to manage their technical debt.
OutSystems helped, then cut that in half.
So they are spending far more of their time
delivering value to the business.
What we talk about this week will definitely change the way
you think about your productivity levels
and your ability to innovate.
We'll share real stories about real customers and the way
they're crushing their challenges
and leapfrogging competition.
Come along with us on these three days
and you'll see what's next, what's possible,
and we'll make it very easy for you to get started.
We started as an engineering company.
Over the years, we've learned that people and technology
go hand in hand.
I want to talk to you about those two things.
To get ahead of this change and truly thrive,
we need to increase our efforts and work
to bridge the talent gap.
We're putting even more emphasis and resources
on developer education.
We have a strong commitment to expanding the developer
ecosystem and educational opportunities around the world.
There is a shocking diversity gap in software development.
And we all need to work to improve this.
Our commitment to developer education
will grow in partnership with organizations
that are focused on promoting diversity, equity,
and inclusion.
We are working together to create
what we hope will be a life changing
scholarship for women who want to embark
on a new career in tech.
We're also creating a scholarship for online training
and certification exams in core IT,
networking, cybersecurity, Cloud Infrastructure
for people of color in tech.
Our latest scholarship goes towards transgender people
in tech.
Our efforts here have yielded important results so far.
Partnerships with nearly 200 universities and developer
schools.
Education programs across 40 countries.
Nearly 30,000 developers trained on OutSystems in the past 18
months.
This has granted them access to outstanding career
opportunities.
Our second major initiative is around technology.
We are announcing today the most ambitious technology platform
launch in our history.
We are envisioning a world where one hundred million developers
are creating apps used by a billion people every day.
It is my pleasure to introduce our next generation platform,
code named Project Neo.
As many of you know, Neo is the icon
that represents our developer community.
And their relentless drive to explore new ideas
and break the boundaries of traditional software
development.
The new platform will deliver on our product
vision of serious productivity for serious apps.
It reflects what we've learned as we work with all of you.
We have been working on this for a long time now.
It is an amazingly sophisticated product.
But I'm happy to see the first customers working on it,
and the release date early next year.
We have designed project Neo with three fundamental goals
in mind.
Most of you are competing with tech disruptors,
that deliver digital products extremely fast.
These are your most fierce competitors.
They are built as elite cloud software companies.
So our first goal is for you to achieve elite performance
in software delivery productivity.
This means literally delivering significant software
changes in hours, and doing it multiple times per day.
Project Neo combination of high productivity development
and modern CI/CD practices gives you that.
Secondly, we understand the massive cost and skills
necessary to build a Cloud Infrastructure that skills
to millions of globally distributed end users, securely
and with high quality.
It is risky and expensive.
Project Neo removes that cost and risk.
Finally, everything is changing faster.
Technology, especially so.
And these innovative applications
that you develop on OutSystems are critical to your business.
You can't stop for an upgrade, you can't stop for updates.
Project Neo is an evergreen platform
where changes and updates are deployed continuously
with minimal impact.
Our product leaders, Gonzalo and Patrick,
are going to share how we're bringing project Neo to life.
Alexandra introduced you to some of our incredible partners
and Innovation Award winners.
These are just a handful of the organizations
doing extremely powerful work with OutSystems every day.
Our customers, Western Union, Humana, Liberty Insurance,
Mazda, Red Cross, British Telecom, Plangroep, Takeda,
Arnott's Biscuits, are building things
that they just haven't been able to build before,
because of time, resources, and the ability to innovate.
Their projects may be transformative
to their entire business, or even just one lab in one group.
But they're powerful, they're freeing,
and they're building their futures.
These and every one of our customers
are the masters of innovation and change
in their organizations.
They're living our mission of innovating through software.
And instead of your team fixing and changing and maintaining,
you can craft and create and innovate.
They're living our mission of innovating through software.
And now, I'd like to introduce Goncalo Gaiolas, OutSystems
head of product, to take you through our new technology
initiatives.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thank you, Paolo.
Like most days, today I woke up thinking
about developer productivity.
This really is a topic that I live, eat and breathe.
You see, at OutSystems, a lot of us are developers at heart.
We love the creativity of solving a big challenge.
The craftsmanship of architecting a great solution.
And that thrill when you finally get
to see happy users experiencing the thing that you've built.
Normally, after a few frustrating iterations.
Like most developers, we also dread toil and repetition.
Or the hair pulling moments where
you spend 10 hours setting up your environment just so
you can do 10 minutes of development.
In the past few years, as we've continued
to improve our platform, we've had
the privilege of talking to a lot of professional developers.
Some of them who loved OutSystems,
and some were not so fond of our approach, at first.
I personally like to hear and learn from both groups.
Because there is so much happening in our industry
right now, that it is hard to have
a full appreciation for the complexity
these teams of developers have to deal with.
In particular, so many of the developers
I've spoken with share the observation that modern cloud
app development is both inspiring,
because of the possibilities, yet also incredibly stressful,
because of the immense complexity and risk.
To really reap all the benefits of this new paradigm,
teams have to grapple with thousands of services.
Each with varying degrees of maturity and complexity.
And often end up with a powerful yet very complex
architectures, that strain even the best teams out there.
On average, teams today have to deal with 10 times more code
and complexity than just 10 years ago.
In the worst case scenarios, this caused a significant loss
in productivity.
At OutSystems, we want to help teams solve this problem.
To reclaim and to accelerate their productivity
without having to sacrifice the power of what
they get to build.
Over the past year, we focused on addressing a few key areas
of developer productivity.
For instance, over the summer, we
announced the general availability of our service
to you for Mac.
This has allowed customers to get OutSystems
in the hands of more and more developers
that have been eager to learn our technology.
This version also marked a significant visual revamp
that is cleaner, where we reshaped all interactions to be
modern, delightful, and of course, accessible to anyone.
Oh, and we now have the number one most requested feature,
dark mode.
Let's hear from William, a member of our developer
community, on what that experience feels like.
Gone are the days where I had to use a Windows virtual machine
to start showing studio.
The new improved Mac OS Surface Studio
is an amazing experience.
I just love the clean design.
They improved editors, and of course, dark mode.
In parallel with the early access program,
we were working on a prototype with state of the art designs
which required a lot of styling and a lot of design.
With the new stylesheet editor, where
it gives you suggestions auto complete, it's just brilliant.
Also, working so closely with the Mac Os product
m with all the feedback sessions that we m it was just great.
We got to experience what it means
as a community to work together with an OutSystems product
team.
And it just shows me that the sum of its part
is greater than the whole.
Back to you, Goncalo.
Thank you, William.
We've also released a number of new capabilities
that are targeted at improving the day to day
lives of developers.
We like to keep our platform evergreen.
And we keep on releasing useful capabilities,
like New mobile plugins, improved data editing
and manipulation, and a set of very powerful, fully supported
widgets.
Most of these were ideas requested
by our very active community.
So big thank you to all of you that spend time giving us
valuable feedback.
While we've always excelled at improving developer
productivity and efficiency, and we
are making continuous improvements to our platform
as evidenced by the updates I just mentioned,
over the last few years, we've embarked on a massive effort
to rethink developer productivity
from the ground up.
Most importantly, we've been listening to the feedback
from our customers and our community,
and have been working hard to deliver some groundbreaking
innovations that will be coming out soon.
So let's talk about that future and where we are going together
with you, our community.
Let's show you what we think a state of the art,
high productivity CI/CD process should
look like for everybody, not just the tech industry elites,
with unlimited resources and massive teams.
Last year, we got to know Neo Bank, a fictional OutSystems
customer that represents the typical challenges we
hear from many of you.
Let's think of Neo Bank as a global financial institution
with multiple teams, and about 10 million customers worldwide.
Like every other company in the world,
how Neo Bank responds to change is
crucial for its survival as a business.
At Google, the DevOps research and assessment team, Dora,
has interviewed thousands of companies
to learn about DevOps best practices, which
try to help companies address this challenge.
In their model, an elite performer, the top tier,
deploys multiple times daily.
And takes less than one hour per change.
With OutSystems, let's see how Neo Bank
can implement a new business requirement
and get it live in under one hour.
So borrowing something from our friends in Hollywood,
let's cue the montage.
Neo Bank already has a significant portfolio of apps.
But there's one that stands out.
Their flagship branded app helps customers
manage all aspects of their accounts,
subscribe to new products, and get help
from the bank as needed.
Neo Bank is seizing a last minute opportunity.
With traveling starting to happen again,
they need to quickly roll out a new insurance
policy that is adapted to unique travel scenarios.
Now to perform this change, the developer
knows that the customer quote data currently
sits in salesforce.
With our embedded integration capabilities,
the developer quickly connects to the preconfigured
IT approved salesforce instance, to select and import the custom
objects that are required.
All of this is done with strict data and security governance.
At the end of this simple integration,
data is available as elements that
can be easily manipulated within the Outsystem's
visual environment.
For the next step, the developer needs
to build a user interface that works well and is appropriate,
and consistent with Neo Bank style guide.
Starting with the available data,
and with the help of our AI assisted platform,
the developer selects a curated user interface
from our marketplace, and proceeds to use it.
This process is seamless.
In fact, based on the available data,
the platform automatically morphs and adapts
the UI components instance to ensure correct binding.
And visual consistency with Neo Bank's branding.
All of this is achieved because of our unique application
monograph approach and AI powered developer assistance.
So after we quickly preview the app, we're ready to go live.
While we automatically push this change to production,
we can take a real time look into this apps detail, where
we can see the overall health and architectural composition
of this mission critical system.
Knowing the dependencies and our reduced impact
on technical debt, we can confidently
proceed with this change.
Because Neo Bank is preconfigured OutSystems CI/CD
pipelines, in which most of the heavy lifting is automated,
this step is a breeze.
The platform automatically performs regression testing,
validates for code quality, so teams can achieve that elite,
under an hour business change with maximum confidence.
And voila.
We have a live running app.
Globally distributed.
That is ready to start capturing some of that elusive business
value.
An app that is as evergreen as they come.
An app that is built with state of the art CI/CD practices.
What you just saw is our elite software development team's
work.
Moving fast with confidence.
Except, that to achieve this outcome,
you normally need vast teams of DevOps engineers,
using complex and specialized tooling.
This is why the top 1% of companies
that have the resources to invest are able to achieve.
And why they are so successful in a world where
digital productivity represents such
a high competitive advantage.
The problem for everybody else, is
that this kind of technology, processes, mindset changes
and capabilities required to achieve the flow,
are prohibitively expensive.
It is an explosion of platforms, components, frameworks, tools,
and ultimately, complexity that distracts you
from focusing on what matters, your customers.
So we're left dreaming about how fast we could be.
And stuck reading articles about how famous
streaming companies do it.
And this is why today, we are proud to unveil
the next iteration of the OutSystems platform.
Designed to give every company in the world access
to what it needs to transform into an elite software
development company.
A new platform codename Project Neo.
Designed from the ground up to help
you achieve modern architectures without the nightmares.
And to build internet scale applications
that run completely cloud native out of the box.
A platform that lets developers reclaim their time to dream,
to build, to create, to innovate.
With project Neo, we will deliver the next step
on our mission to give every company the power
to innovate through software.
And we're taking a huge leap in our quest
to help developers achieve a hundred times more
productivity.
We can't wait to see what kind of amazing things
you will be able to build with this new platform.
And now, to tell us more about this new product,
it is my pleasure to introduce my partner, my good friend,
and the OutSystems CTO, Patrick Jean.
Or PJ, as we like to call him.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thanks, partner.
I love how GG articulated our mission.
And, if like me, you've been developing software most
of your life, it touches the core of who you are.
I've been working side by side with GG over this past year
on this journey, building an amazing friendship,
while building an amazing product.
We did all this without ever seeing each other in person.
I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences, working
virtually side by side, but never physically together
in the same place.
One of the best moments I've had was when I met GG in Lisbon
recently.
What an experience.
Such a close friendship for the first time
after sharing so much time together.
What you've seen GG present is an essential part of our work
together.
And it is personal for both of us.
We're changing the game when it comes to improving developer
productivity.
He showed how we are rethinking CI/CD process
and investing in tools and automation
to deliver 100x more productivity
for all developers.
To complement this dramatic improvement
in developer productivity, we've been
investing to ensure that the applications built
by OutSystems developers run as modern cloud apps that delight
end users and are inherently secure
and use state of the art technologies,
to achieve internet scale on the access and platform.
For those of you in the audience that
have attempted to create native cloud
apps with traditional software development tools,
you know how hard that can be.
I've been there, I've done that.
And suffered the pain of these failed projects in my career.
I'm acutely aware of the challenges
that the industry faces every day.
We're here to solve those challenges.
We're here to make sure your projects don't
take twice as long as they should,
or cost three times as much.
Or even fail outright.
We're here to fix this.
Let's talk about how you would start a traditional development
project.
The traditional development journey
to create an enterprise class cloud solution
starts with assembling a team of cloud architects.
Application architects.
DevOps engineers.
Network engineers.
Security experts.
Database architects.
You get the picture.
We're all aware of the talent shortage in our industry.
There are one million unfilled developer positions in the US
alone today.
One million.
To succeed with these high end cloud
projects you need these people.
And you're competing against the biggest, most successful
companies in the world.
OK.
Let's say you hired your team.
Not only do you need the right people,
but these traditional applications
depend upon wiring together dozens
of complex, discrete, disparate cloud services.
And this doesn't even include training developers, designing
your application architecture, and implementing
sophisticated CI/CD services.
One of the most challenging aspects to cloud development
is that you have to rewire your thinking
to deal with the clouds inherently
non deterministic nature.
No wonder more than half cloud development projects fail.
On top of all this, you're making a long term bet
on a set of technologies, and more than likely, one of these
will be outdated by the end of the development project.
Heck, some of them will be outdated
by the time I'm done with my talk.
We built OutSystems project Neo on a modern Cloud Foundation
of Linux containers, and Kubernetes
to solve this exact problem.
We've done all the work to wire together
the services using state of the art cloud architecture.
We've implemented security best practice
and best of breed CI/CD for continuous delivery.
We did all this hard work so that you can build applications
running on Kubernetes that operate
as if you are a tech elite.
But without the risk, the cost, and the time commitment.
Your first development activity on our platform
can immediately implement your business requirements,
because we've taken care of all of the hard work assuming
the platform for you.
We didn't sacrifice power for complexity.
We've approached reaching cloud scale
with the same philosophy we design it
to our low code platform.
Incredible power, but with a fraction of the complexity.
Project Neo gives small dev teams
the ability to deliver mission critical applications that
solve strategic business problems.
Now, here's the fun part.
Let me take you under the hood of our new platform.
We've reimagined and rebuilt our offering into a modern,
state of the art cloud development platform.
We use containers, Kubernetes, microservices,
and event based patterns.
And we didn't stop there.
The runtime for your OutSystems applications
now developed on an internet scale cloud fabric,
is also based upon Linux containers and Kubernetes,
allowing your applications to scale
to hundreds of millions of [INAUDIBLE] around the world.
In Project Neo, the Kubernetes orchestration layer
ensures that the application containers are always
in a healthy state.
With CD and technologies and global deployments,
these applications can be used by end users, employees,
and partners from any location at any time.
We use storage technologies fit for purpose, including
object stores, transaction databases, and document
databases, for fast and consistent data services.
We use robust, integrated cloud security to protect your data.
We know that business continuity and disaster recovery
is important to you.
So we've added automated replication across availability
zones and regions.
This all happens automatically, behind the scenes
for your application.
Powered by the project Neo application runtime.
So you can focus on building useful, beautiful applications.
We're going to drill down to these technologies
in my keynote tomorrow at OSDC.
I'll be going deeper into the architecture,
wearing my Neo t-shirt.
We'll have some fun.
We've talked about our mission of giving one developer
the power of an entire team of elite technologists,
providing modern cloud application
architecture with the click of a single green button.
Another way we're unique is that we continuously
invest in the project Neo cloud platform and app runtime,
so that you don't have to.
This is our evergreen commitment to you.
We maintain all of the underlying technologies.
We do all the heavy lifting to make sure
that as a technology landscape changes and shifts,
we keep the platform up to date.
Just as we've been doing for the past 20 years.
This means that no matter what improvements
we make in the tech stack, your applications still work.
You can continue to focus on solving business problems.
We will take care of the rest.
OutSystems make sure your apps are always
state of the art, cloud native, and enterprise grade.
This is a true concept of evergreen.
All of this is tremendously hard to implement
from an engineering perspective.
We're doing the hard work to ensure your applications won't
have to be rewritten.
For every application that is running today on the OutSystems
platform, there is a clear path forward to run on Project Neo.
Some apps can be migrated with a single click.
For the rest, we'll provide tools and playbooks
to assist you with the migration process.
When we talk to customers there are
many reasons you have chosen to stay on Prim.
You want to know the real reason?
You didn't have a choice.
Now you do.
With project Neo we're going to give you a choice.
If you want to migrate to the Cloud,
project Neo is the most powerful, compliant way
to rapidly build applications.
If you want to stay on Prim?
You can do that, too.
Our commitment is to continue to invest
to give you the choice of where you
want to run your applications.
In the cloud, multicloud, or on Prim.
You have been asking for these capabilities
and we're delivering them to you.
This is the foundation of our future.
Drum roll, please.
The sign up for project Neo public preview
is available today.
Go sign up, test it out, and tell us what you think.
And now Alex, take us home.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What an outstanding start to an important day.
A day about your future, your goals,
your ideas for building a better business,
or just building better apps.
I hope Paolo, Goncalo, PJ, and I have energized you
toward the possible.
A future where people and technology work together
to transform your workplace, your customer
experiences, your productivity, even your technical data.
This is where we want to go next at Next Step.
I also hope that you got to look at Portugal, the place that we
call home, and from where we drew so much of our energy
and inspiration.
We can't wait to see you all in person in the future very soon.
For today, you have two tracks to explore.
Diving into the OutSystems platform and business
transformation.
We've designed short sessions for these half day,
so you can begin to activate your ideas.
And while you're here, please connect with our team.
Our OutSystems 2021 Innovation Award winners and our event
sponsors who work closely with us and our customers
to make the future a reality today.
We built Next Step for all of you
so that you can build the future you want.
Let's go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]