We Just Raised $360 Million From KKR and Goldman Sachs. Here’s How We’re Putting That to Work For You.

You may have seen the exciting news that OutSystems just raised a $360 million investment from two of the most distinguished names in the financial world: KKR and Goldman Sachs. Yes, it’s great to see this funding as validating the founding vision for OutSystems and our thriving business. It’s even more exciting to think about how we’re going to put this investment to work for you—immediately.

Here are just some of the big plans we have lined up:

Smarter, Faster, Better

When it comes to speed, we think big. We’re investing in extreme speed and artificial intelligence to help you go from idea to app faster. Organizations are rethinking how they envision and deliver solutions, removing the distinction between business and IT. We see developers and less technical workers having access to a wider range of tools for composing apps—more industry templates, partner apps, Forge components, screens, and workflows.

When it comes to app design, we’ll be making big investments in our artificial intelligence and machine learning center of excellence (see our Project Turing announcement). We’re building the future of developer assistants to empower your teams to design better solutions leveraging data generated by thousands of customers during their application creation, change, and operation process. This effort will revolutionize not only low-code but the entire development industry. We’re in a position to lead this as our model-driven approach tied to a large number of customers and extensive portfolios yield invaluable data. We aim to reach an unprecedented level of assistance to developers, to leverage their skills and accelerate their productivity.

The Next Generation of UX Touchpoints

The world of application interfaces is changing quickly. From sensors, messaging, and chat to headless apps, AR, and voice, our vision is to make it easy for you to incorporate any user experience into your business and create apps that span any touchpoints for your customers and employees. You can expect a lot of innovation from us to help you keep on top of UX best practices and ensure you provide your customers and employees the perfect Digital Experience.

The Future Structure of Applications - Low-Code Microservices

Recently, I wrote an article about the ensuing battle between Microservices and Monoliths. I outlined a vision for an organization’s ecosystem or architecture as an array of applications and services built in-house and a “pulverized” collection of services managed by SaaS vendors. Every digital asset is a service that has an interface with an API and an SLA. Although this vision creates incredible agility, it also creates a complex network of dependent services which need to be managed, monitored and known. We’ll be investing in solutions to create, consume, compose, and monitor microservices, providing intelligent impact analysis across each one. This effort will provide all the benefits of a loosely coupled, independently scalable architecture while solving the agility issues introduced by having to manage a highly distributed micro/mini services portfolio.

Architecture, Fit, and Containers

As architectures continue to evolve from monolithic and intertwined to service-based and independent, container orchestration platforms are rapidly becoming the de facto deployment standard. Containers are lightweight and allow an application and its dependencies to be packaged efficiently together and run virtually anywhere, but require specialized knowledge and teams. We are applying our low-code philosophy to this new approach, and believe this will democratize the use of containers, making them accessible to any development team. To complement this, we’re rolling out strategic alliances with Microsoft, AWS, Pivotal, and Docker to ensure you can benefit from low-code on the infrastructure of your choice. But it doesn't stop there. We'll continue to invest in designing simpler approaches for integrating with and deploying to serverless architectures.

Business Value Assurance

Last, but certainly not least—we’ll be investing in a wide range of initiatives to help you maximize your business value and impact. Although this covers a broad range of investments, we think of three significant areas:

Digital Factories: We’re thrilled to see organizations embrace the vision for low-code digital factories as customers create super, high-productivity teams building hundreds of applications at unprecedented scale. We see this as a tremendous opportunity for businesses to build agile, modern dev teams and create a real advantage for their business. We’ll continue to invest in providing best practices, optimizing our training paths, expanding customer success teams and partners to help every customer build their own low-code digital factory.

Partners and People: Our partner ecosystem is growing fast with hundreds of consulting, technology and training partners innovating with our platform and growing the universe of certified OutSystems developers. We’re investing way ahead of the curve creating the right tools and enablement resources for rapid partner success and the ultimate developer onboarding experience.

Wait, There’s More

I can’t share everything about this last project yet, but we’ve got something very exciting to launch next quarter that is about to come out of our R&D labs. For now, all I can say is that this will be game-changing for how IT leaders demonstrate value to the business. Stay tuned for more.

Global Expansion

From a company standpoint, the low-code market is exploding. Last year we opened six new offices and we now have customers and partners in 52 countries. Supporting this growth is critical so we’ll be investing in hiring the best people to make every customer and partner successful.

Developers, Developers, Developers

In addition to new platform features, we have some big plans for our developer community.  We’re rolling out new training modules, frictionless certification processes and more ways for developers around the world to engage with each other. We also like to keep things fun—check out our special announcement just for developers.

So, What Else Is on Your Mind?

We’ve always said, some of the best ideas come from our incredible customers. We’d love to hear from you about our initiatives or other areas where you’d like to see us invest. Check out our Ideas site where we get hundreds of ideas from our developer community every year. We even have a scoreboard to show you how many of your ideas we’ve implemented!