The OutSystems Build-for-the-Future Promise

Because of this unique architecture, our customers’ apps have persisted and evolved through many disruptive technology shifts: from client-server to web, from web to mobile, from on premise to cloud. There are applications written twenty years ago on the OutSystems platform that continue to run and be changed today, in spite of many generations of new technologies and eleven major versions of the platform. Keeping twenty year old code running as an up-to-date, modern app is virtually unheard of (ask any COBOL programmer making $700 an hour to maintain mainframe code), yet this is a reality for OutSystems customers.

While other platform vendors routinely leave customers behind when introducing even modest advances - forcing customers to rewrite or discard entire application portfolios, OutSystems always strives to bring our customers forward. Customers’ applications might need some adaptation to reap every last benefit of the most state-of-the-art technologies, but we believe that customers applications should continue to run and should be able to continuously evolve - without major rewrites - even with major changes to the underlying platform. This is the core of the OutSystems Build-for-the-Future Promise.

We’ve succeeded in helping customers adapt, evolve and refresh their applications for the last 20 years and we promise to continue doing this for customers for the next 20 years. An immutable fact is that OutSystems leads the industry in helping customers adapt their application portfolios in the face of disruptive technology shifts and we promise to continue leading the industry in this greatest of challenges.

As disruptive technology shifts go, our industry is in the middle of one of the most significant ones of the last decade: the shift from traditional applications running in the cloud to a new generation of apps built with a cloud-native architecture. As with all the previous shifts over the last two decades, OutSystems is at the forefront of helping customers build new apps that take advantage of these exciting new technologies, and at the same time, OutSystems is laying the groundwork to help customers’ existing apps make the transition into this new paradigm.

In service of the first goal:

Helping customers build a new generation of cloud-native applications

OutSystems is introducing OutSystems Developer Cloud, slated for release in late 2022. This new offering dramatically reduces the complexity of building cloud-native applications with containers, Kubernetes clusters, serverless functions and myriad other state-of-the-art technologies. Instead of customers spending months and hundreds of thousands of dollars architecting and configuring their cloud runtime and integrating the dozens of necessary cloud services, OutSystems Developer Cloud pre-packages all this work and integrates it all into the platform so developers simply focus on implementing their application logic. Productivity when building and running cloud native applications will skyrocket ten-fold.

In service of the second goal:

Helping customers extract every last advantage out of the current generation of technology and ensuring they have a smooth path forward to the next-generation of technology when the timing suits them best

Today, OutSystems flagship offering is OutSystems 11. This award-winning platform, consistently ranked by analysts and customers as a leader in this market, helps customers efficiently build strategic applications that run both on premises as well as in multiple public clouds.

Since OutSystems 11 currently supports a broader range of use cases than OutSystems Developer Cloud from launch through most of 2022, we anticipate that this year many existing customers will continue to build their applications on OutSystems 11, and similarly, many new customers will begin their development journey with OutSystems 11. With our continued engineering investment in OutSystems 11 and the Build for the Future Promise, customers should feel confident that their investments in OutSystems 11 today will pay dividends for as long as is required. OutSystems Developer Cloud only represents a benefit to those investments, not a risk.

How specifically does the Build for the Future Promise apply to OutSystems 11 and OutSystems Developer Cloud applications? The details depend on what kind of applications a customer requires:

Build for the Future Promise details for:

Customers with applications running the OutSystems 11 Cloud

You will be able to run your applications in the OutSystems 11 Cloud at least through March 2027 (5 years from now), and we will provide you with at least two years of notice for the precise end date for the OutSystems 11 Cloud.

More importantly, though, long before the end of life date for OutSystems 11 Cloud, OutSystems will enable customers to run their OutSystems 11 applications - without additional development effort - on OutSystems Developer Cloud. While not inheriting all of the benefits of native OutSystems Developer Cloud applications, OutSystems 11 apps running on OutSystems Developer Cloud will see improvements (e.g. scalability and robustness) from the new platform’s more modern architecture.

If a customer hasn’t moved their applications to OutSystems Developer Cloud by March 2027, OutSystems will upgrade their apps and data to run in OutSystems Developer Cloud for them - again without requiring any additional development effort.

Build for the Future Promise details for:

Customers with self-managed OutSystems 11 applications

As with OutSystems 11 Cloud customers, you will be able to continue running your self-managed applications at least through March 2027, and we will provide you with at least two years of notice before OutSystems 11 will no longer be available to support self-managed applications.

More importantly, though, long before the end of life date for OutSystems 11 for self-managed applications, OutSystems will offer you the option of upgrading your OutSystems 11 applications to OutSystems Developer Cloud running in your own private cloud. Everything needed to run your apps will be inside your domain, with all of your data and IP controlled by you. This option will be available by the end of 2024.

This will be a self-managed solution but based on a modern cloud architecture. We are taking this approach because OutSystems Developer Cloud is a state-of-the-art, cloud native platform. As such, it requires sophisticated services for auto scaling, low cost of operation, and complex data configurations. It also depends on network optimizations made possible through services only available from the most sophisticated cloud providers. Furthermore, this infrastructure is constantly changing and will almost certainly change dramatically over the next five years. We want to provide you with the best possible technology solution for you to run your applications and this approach reflects that’s imperative.