Coming off re:Invent 2021, we have a lot to be excited about, notably our AWS partnership. OutSystems was honored to be named AWS ISV Partner of the Year for the region of Iberia, a testament to the work the two companies have done together.

Paulo Rosado, CEO and Founder of OutSystems, presented with our customer, International SOS at the event and explained what drives and motivates us at OutSystems:

“We’re really into this notion of supporting customers to innovate through software. What that means is that we really are in the business of automizing the delivery of business software for enterprises.”

You can view the full session here:

AWS re:Invent 2021 session - OutSystems and AWS: The modern application platform for the cloud 

The OutSystems Mission

Speaking at AWS re:Invent 2021, Rosado explained how OutSystems product management is fundamentally driven by improvements in three areas:

  • Serious productivity: Help developers become 100x more productive, focusing on innovation and differentiation.
  • Serious applications: Help small teams build, deploy, and change enterprise-grade, mission critical systems in weeks.
  • Built for change: Always up-to-date with the latest technologies; optimized for change; automation and artificial intelligence (AI) handle undifferentiated work.

As Rosado sums up OutSystems capabilities,

“You can drag-and-drop and compose applications with full-stack visual modeling.”

Rosado then brought on Dr. Max Wang, CTO of International SOS Assistance Inc., to talk about the recent collaboration between their two companies and some real-world outcomes.

Customer Results: Highly Scalable, Highly Available, and High-Performance Systems

International SOS is a large provider of health and security services with 12,000 global clients and 63 percent of Fortune 500 companies. The company assists travelers in trouble internationally or people working in remote locations like an oil rig by providing a range of services, anything from medical assistance to helping with a lost passport or prescription refill.

Web-based and native mobile-based applications are critical to the mission of International SOS. These apps are essential and must be stable as well as highly available—people are depending on them when they need help. Especially during the pandemic, International SOS has needed to innovate in order to develop products rapidly while meeting stricter information security and data-protection requirements. However, first the company needed to modernize its systems to keep up.

International SOS has been around for 20 years, and its product has developed “organically” and, according to Wang, “drifted” over the years. This led to ailments common to a lot of companies: interdependent, tightly integrated systems components built on fragile infrastructure with less-advanced tools and platforms. International SOS turned to OutSystems to help transform its entire legacy product ecosystem and migrate it to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

On the AWS Cloud, International SOS achieved the highly scalable, highly available, and high performance it needed with development on the OutSystems platform in about six months. This included robust integration with backend system components and service providers as well as hybrid application with OutSystems modules and customized UI and full CI/CD pipeline to enable software development. As Wang put it:

“As a global organization enabling international businesses to operate safely in complex and often remote environments, it’s extremely important that we’re able to build secure and scalable software at a speed that keeps pace with our business. Tapping into OutSystems and AWS has dramatically transformed our development processes and capabilities, infusing a new level of agility into our company that has set us up to successfully tackle new ideas and software needs.”

A New Tool to Power Innovation

Another highlight of the tenth annual AWS re:Invent was the unveiling of OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC) (codename), the next iteration of the OutSystems platform. OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC) is designed to give every company in the world access to what it needs to transform into a modern software development company. OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC), available in early 2022, will be a visual, model-based development state-of-the-art container- and Kubernetes-based cloud architecture, hosted on AWS.

This new platform is re-designed to help you achieve modern architectures more easily and to build internet-scale applications that run completely cloud-native out of the box. You can build custom, robust, global-scale apps capable of continuous change. As Rosado explained:

“What this type of platform ends up doing. It dramatically simplifies the complexity and cost of not only creating all that infrastructure but also operating that infrastructure with continuous delivery processes on top of this massively complex scale.”

Building for the Future with Cloud at the Core

We at OutSystems were honored with a partner of the year award by AWS, you can view that blog post here and check out commentary from Paulo below.

“Our relationship with AWS is helping us drive forward our mission to help every organization innovate through software. AWS re:Invent presents an excellent opportunity to learn from organizations like International SOS about real-world examples of how massive developer productivity is possible on a global scale.

“As we look ahead to next year and continue to navigate the growing complexities and pace of technology and business change, our continued partnership with AWS provides developers across all company sizes and industries the tools and strategies they need to build the future they want with cloud innovation at the core.”

I invite you to take a look at the whole session. And if you want to learn more about OutSystems, why not give it a try? Click here to sign-up to our free edition (no credit card required).