 Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re-event 2021. I'm Lisa Martin and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events with AWS and its ecosystem partners this year. We have two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. And we're excited to be joined by Patrick Jean, the CTO of OutSystems. Patrick, welcome to the program. Thank you. I appreciate being one of those 100 guests. One of the 100, one of the elite 100 will say it like that, right? Yes. So OutSystems has some revolutionary news. You guys are saying, you know what? Developer experience needs to change. Tell us more. It does. I mean, it needs to change. And I've been in the industry developing applications for too many years to mention, basically since I was 12 years old writing software. And, you know, going over that time and thinking about it doing the traditional software development route, so many applications that take too long was, you know, costly to build, so much risk involved in it, eventually didn't meet all the requirements. And if you look at the investment we make in software, which is important. I mean, software is a unique differentiator for businesses. That investment has such a high risk and a high cost and that needs to change. And it needs to change just because of the complexity that is in that process in here. And that's, and that is what we are doing in OutSystems is tackling that problem. And from a business standpoint, it must change. It must change, that is strong words there. So talk to me about what you're announcing. What were the gaps in the market? Customer feedback, were there any catalysts from the pandemic going, we've got to change this developer experience. And this is the time. For sure, I mean, if you think about from the pandemic and I mean, we were on a journey for digital transformation. We've been on this journey for a number of years. The pandemic really accelerated that. The experiences that we have with each other, you and me, we're not in the same studio today. I mean, there are reasons that we have used this experience remote. We have a technology that can do it. The pandemic accelerated that. And so so much of the experiences we have are digital experiences. And if you think about it, there's a device in between us. Is it going to be a device in between all the people viewing what we're looking at? That experience that they will have with us will be basically surfaced through an application on that device. And the pandemic has really accelerated that. And that's an area that we play in, obviously, for what's considered low-code application development. And if you just think about application development in general, that's what powers all of these experiences. And going back to that statement about that it needs to change, if we need these experiences to be diverse, if we need these experiences to be meaningful, if we need them to make sure that when people engage as far as what that device is, something that brings delight and pleasure to them, we need developers across the board investing in that. Today, there is a very constrained market for professional developers because of the inherent complexity in software development. And so if you think about how that's almost, almost you're limiting access to the people who can create those experiences, that's not a good situation. There's about 25 million developers in the world that would consider themselves developers today, seven, eight, nine, 10 billion devices out there. Think of that disparity between those two numbers. And so we need a larger number of people to actually develop applications so that experience can be much more diverse. We need to expose development to many more people. The problem today with software development is that it is complex, it's too specialized, it's too inherent as far as with failure when you get it together. And so either you shy away from that as an organization or as an individual to do development, or you go on these very long development as far as cycles to actually create these applications. What we do is we take the approach of let's make it very simple to get into. In some terms, we call it citizen developer, low code, basically all they're saying is let's reduce the risk of development. Let's go into a process where we make it accessible to more and more people. You can go through and develop applications with a lower risk. You can build change into that process. You can get value into end users as rapidly as possible. So that is the value proposition. That is what needs to change. Strong value proposition, well said, Patrick. Talking about reducing the complexity, the risk as well. So go ahead and crack open what you guys were actually announcing today. Yeah, for sure. So we've been doing this for many years. We have software development, we have 14 million plus as far as end users using applications that have been developed with the AlSystems platform. What we're announcing is taking some of the great benefits that we have to what you'd consider is the first part of that low code process where you have a developer that has an idea and there's a canvas in front of you. You're an artist with a canvas. That's what you are as a developer. And so you go in and you create that application. We've been doing this for many years and it works really well. The thing that we're improving upon now is the ability to do that and scale that out to millions of end users, 10 millions of end users. So if you think about that inherent speed of developing an application using a platform like AlSystems, we're taking that same concept and rolling that into an internet scale application hosting architecture. So any developer that uses AlSystems, basically like it would be comparable to a traditional development team that has application architects, cloud architects, security engineers, database engineers, a whole team of very smart individuals that generally the biggest technology companies in the world can put together. Most companies can't do that. You don't have access to that type of skill set. And so we're providing that with Project Neo, which is what we're announcing today at our user conference and customer conference, is this brand new as far as platform that allows you to build these applications at scale. And this is initially built on AWS using all the great AWS technologies. If you look at what AWS has done and provided to developers today, it's amazing. It is absolutely amazing the amount of technologies that you can leverage. It's also daunting because as a traditional developer, you have to go in and choose, what do you do? It's like there's just massive cognitive load as far as upfront when you go in to design an application. What type of messaging? What type of data store? Well, how do I host my application? What type of network is for security do I use? We're taking all that heavy lifting, all that undifferentiated heavy lifting off of the developers, putting it into the Project Neo platform, allowing a single developer or a small group of developers to actually leverage that best in class architecture on AWS today. So when you're talking to developers, what are some of the things that you describe as the unique differentiators of Project Neo? It sounds like this was really an app time for change, but when you're talking to those folks, what do you say, one, two, three? These are the things that make Project Neo unique. Yeah, so the first is, don't worry about the application architecture. Like I mentioned, when you go in, the idea or the concept of that application and what it means to deliver some value, whether it's into a business or a hobby or whatever, I mean, however you're developing application, you're doing it for a reason. You want that value to come out as quickly as possible. You want that experience. And so that first thing is, you don't have to worry about the architecture anymore. So in the past, you'd have to think about if it's a very large application, it's millions and millions of end users, how do you structure that? How do you put it together? That concern is removed from you in that process. The other thing is we solve the problem of software disintegration. So with traditional development, when you develop an application and you get it into the hands of end users, it immediately starts to disintegrate. So there will be bugs that will appear. There will be as far as security flaws that will come up. Services that you use will become deprecated. We'll swap out cloud services, AWS or Azure or Google will swap out cloud services with different services behind the scene. Version, there'll be new versions of those. That is software disintegration. As soon as you develop software today and all these beautiful cloud services that you use and components, they, something will become outdated almost by the time you release it. A lot of times with software development projects, it literally is you start with some version or some component before you can get that out in a traditional mode, something becomes outdated. We solve that issue. What I like to call software disintegration. We as for it out systems, ensure we invest in that platform. And so when we need to change out those components, those services, those versions, fix is for security flaws, fix bugs. We do that and it's seamless. And so your application, you do not have to rewrite your application. You do not have to go through that process as a tradition, as a developer on out systems like you would as your traditional developer. We solve that software disintegration issue. So it's very empowering to developers to not have to worry about that. There are many, if you look at the numbers today about how much is invested in innovation versus maintenance. So a lot of companies start out at 70% innovation, 30% as far as maintenance and then over time that flips. And you'll get to 30% of your time spent on innovations development and 7% maintenance. That burden, we remove that burden. Those are some really powerful statements, Patrick, that you made. I really liked the way that you described software disintegration. I've actually never heard that term before and it kind of reminded me of, you know, when you buy a brand new car, you drive it off the lot, the value goes down right away that before you even get things out. And on the consumer side, we know that as soon as we buy the newest iPhone, the next one's going to be out or there's some part of it that's going to be outdated. In terms of technical debt, I was reading a stab that technical debt is expected to reach and cost businesses five trillion US dollars over the next 10 years. How does OutSystems helps customers address the challenges with technical debt and even reduce it? Now, if you think about kind of the truest sense of technical debt, it's a decision that you make in the development process to basically, you know, load up the future with some work that you don't want to do right now. And so we're solving that issue where number one, you don't even have to make that decision. So if you go back to that concept of removing that cognitive load of, do I get the software out right now or do I get it out in the right way? And that's really what technical debt, technical debt is saying, I need to get it out now and there's some things I want to do that it'd be better if I did them now, but I'm going to go ahead and push that out into the future. You don't have to do that today with us. And so what happens with OutSystems is we invest in that platform. And this is hard. I mean, this is not an easy thing to do. This is why we have some of the best and brightest engineers focusing on this process. At the heart of this, not to get too technical, but the heart of this is what we call the true change engine within our platform. We go through and we look at all of the changes that you need to make. So you think of that concept of technical debt of like, ah, I want to get this in the hands of main users, but I don't want to invest in the time to do something right. It's always done right as far as with the OutSystems platform. So we take that, we look at the intent of your change. So it's like a process where you tell us the intent when you, as an application developer, you're designing an application, you tell us the intent of the application. Just to look and feel, it could be some business processes, it could be some integrations. We determine what's the best way to do that. And then once again, from a software disintegration standpoint, we continue to invest in all the right ways to do that the best way possible. And so, I mean, we have customers that have written applications that's 10, 15 years ago, they're still using our platform with those same applications. They've added to them, but they actually have not rewritten those applications. And so if you think about the normal traditional development process, the technical debt incurred over that type of lifetime would be enormous. With us, there's no technical debt. They're still using the same application. They've simply added capabilities to it. We invest in that platform so they don't have to. So big business outcomes there, obviously from a developer productivity perspective, but from the company wide perspective, the ability to eliminate technical debt. Some significant opportunities there. Talk to me about the existing out systems customers. When are they going to be able to take advantage of this? What is the migration or upgrade path that they can take and when? Yeah, and so it's very important to me and the team as far as it out systems to be able to integrate, to innovate as far as for customers without disrupting customers. And we've probably all been through this path of great new technology, it's awesome, but then to actually utilize that technology when you're a current customer, it creates pain. And so we invested heavily in making sure that the process is pain-free. So you can use Project Neo. So we are announcing it was in public preview as far as now, and then we will release it from GA as far as in the first quarter of next year. So over this timeframe, you'll be able to get in, try it out and all that. Continue to use your current version, which is out systems 11. So what we affectionately call O11 as far as the out systems, the out systems 11 version continue to use. And you can continue to use that today side by side in coexistence with the Project Neo. And Project Neo is a code name, so we will have an official product name as far as at launch, but it's our affectionate, it's kind of an unofficial mascot as Neo, so we call it Project Neo. It's a little bit of a fun thing. And you can use it side by side. And then in the future, you'll be able to migrate applications over, or you can just continue to coexist. I mean, we see a very long lifetime for out systems 11. It's a different platform, different technology behind the scenes. Project Neo is Kubernetes based, Linux containers based once again on the bill. We went in with this, just to look at it and said, re-architect, re-imagine, how would you do this if you had the best and brightest as far as engineers, architects have, which we do very smart and as people, and we did that. And so we did that for our customers. And so Neo is that, out systems 11 is still a great choice. If you have applications on it, you can use it. And we anticipate that customers will actually side by side develop on both, in which we have some customers in preview today and that's the process that they have. They will develop on 11, they will develop on Neo, and they will continue to do that. And there's no, we are dedicated to making sure that there's no disruption and no pain in that process. And then when customers are ready to migrate over, if that's what they choose, we'll help them migrate over. You make it sound easy. And I was wondering if Project Neo had anything to do with the new Matrix movie. I just saw the trailer for the other day. No, it was a happy co-incident. It is not easy. Let me be clear. It is something we have been working on for three years. And really this last year really kicked into high gear. And a lot of behind the scenes work, obviously, for us. But once again, that's our value proposition. It's we do the hard work. So developers and customers don't have to do that hard work. But no relations to Neo. I do love the Matrix movies. So it's a nice coincidence. It is a nice coincidence. Last question, Patrick, for you. As we wrap up the calendar year 2021, we head into 2022. I think we're all very hopeful that 2022 will be a better year than the last two. What are some of the things that you see as absolutely critical for enterprises? What are they most concerned about right now? Yeah, I think it's, look, I mean, it's obviously it has been a crazy, you know, a couple of years. And if you think about what enterprises want, I mean, they want to provide a great experiences for their customers, a great experience for their employees. Once again, digital transformation, where you don't even kind of talk about digital transformation more because we're in it. And I think that customers need to make sure that the experiences they provide, these digital experiences are the best possible experiences. And these are differentiators. These are differentiators for employees. These are differentiators for customers. I believe that software is one of the big differentiators for businesses today and going forward. And that will continue to be. So where businesses may be invested in supply chains, invested in certain types of technologies, business will continue to invest in software because software is that differentiator. And if you look at where we fit, you can go, you can go buy, you know, some great, sad software, right? Software as a service, off the shelf. In the end, you're just like every other business. You bought the same thing that everybody else has bought. You can go the traditional development route where you invest a bunch of money, it's a high risk, takes a long time. And once again, you may not get what you want. We believe what is most important to businesses get that unique software that fits like a glove that is great for employees, is great for their customers. And it is a unique differentiator for them. And I really see that in 2022, that's going to be big. And going forward, the legs for that type of investment that companies make and their return on that is huge. I agree with you on that in terms of software as a differentiator. You know, we're seeing every company become a software company in every industry these days to be, first to survive in the last 20 months and now to be competitive. It's really kind of a must have. So Patrick, thank you for joining me on the program, talking about Project Neo GA in first quarter of calendar year 22. Exciting stuff, we appreciate your feedback and your insights and congratulations on Project Neo. Thanks Lisa, appreciate it. For Patrick Jean, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of re-invent 2021.