 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of OutSystems Next Step 2020 brought to you by OutSystems. Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of OutSystems Next Step. I'm your host Stu Miniman and happy to welcome back to the program. He's relatively fresh off the keynote stage. He's also a CUBE alum. So happy to welcome Paolo Rosado. He's the founder and CEO of OutSystems. Paolo, thanks so much for joining us and thanks for having theCUBE at your event. No, it's a pleasure Stu, we have to be here. So, you know, your keynote, you know, one of the big themes we've been talking about for quite a while in the industry, of course, is the growth and importance of developers and something that I heard loud and clear from you and your team are talking about. It's really about helping companies, you know, it's move faster, it's be more agile and it's really expanding, you know, we need more developers, we need them to be able to on-ramp faster and especially here in 2020, as I said, you and I spoke earlier this year at kind of the early stages of the global pandemic. Right now we know it's, you know, we can't have people slow down even when they can't go to the office, even though a lot of developers were dispersed as it is. So if you could, you know, give us, you know, at this, your high level, you know, your customers, the developer community that you're welcoming here to the show. No, absolutely. I mean, we're really excited about this event. This has gone way beyond our wildest expectations in terms of a tendency and all of that. And it's been absolutely fantastic. I mean, what we've seen, what we've seen is a growing demand from enterprises for solutions that are extremely differentiated. You can actually get softer, you can get digital systems out of the box, but there's an increasing number of systems like portals and workflows and applications that you actually have to infuse with your business process, with your intellectual property, with you as a business, and therefore you have to build your own software. And so the amount of software that's being built inside organizations is increasing. It's increasing to a point where these enterprises are facing all sorts of issues related to proliferation, to skill sets, the fact that they cannot hire enough developers, enough architects, enough SecOps people. I mean, the skill sets are just staggering. And they heard because they are, they want to build the software, but they have a lot of difficulties in finding the tools and the skill sets. Yeah, it's great to come to an event like this and hear people, they're excited about building applications, they're getting into code. It's been almost too easy this year, Palo, to say, oh, there's so many challenges, at home, everyone's fighting over bandwidth and space and there's those challenges. So we need to be able to see kind of that joy into what I can build things and get things done. So, how are you seeing that? What feedback are you getting? And as we said, 2020, we all know was a challenging year. Yeah, it's been a challenging year, but it's also been a year of opportunities. And we see that all over our install base and our prospect base and our partners and our community. And in general, these events at OutSystems have a very different vibe from your typical corporate event because one of the things that's unique about OutSystems is everyone who comes to this event have built something unique. And so it's very gratifying when you're talking with customers and you're talking with developers, the one thing they want to talk about is how they fixed one particular very unique problem that they faced using OutSystems and they exchanged these war stories about how fast they were and how quickly they managed to overcome a particular challenge or when they got the change request from the business that was we need to do this in two hours or 24 hours, whatever horrible timeline that they get and they were able to do it. It's these stories that get exchange around the next step floor in this event. And this one has been going on exactly as we've seen the other ones which were physical events in the past. So, Paolo, on the keynote stage you talked about the fact that you've now got over 1400 customers, you've got 300 partners. You're not just some new startup. OutSystems have been around for two decades now. Talk a little bit about your growth, some of the innovations that are driving customers and increasing where they're coming to OutSystems. No, absolutely. I mean, the major innovations that we have been doing is we have been focused a lot on addressing the need for speed. I mean, the cycles of innovation have been compressing in the past years. And every year there is a further compression of the cycle. And so, business are coming back to developers, are coming back to IT. They are, some of these business folks, departments are completely autonomous in terms of building some digital systems. And all of them have this need for speed, for very high productivity. And so, we've been, a lot of our investment has been first and foremost in how can we make all these folks way more productive? And we've been doing a tremendous amount of research into the anatomy of building these applications, understanding what are the typical, most common patterns, abstracting them, making them really use, using a lot of AI and machine learning to create almost like artificial bots that can help developers move quicker and create serious applications with big architectures without making mistakes, but very, very quickly. And therefore, when we provide this extreme speed, we make sure at the same time, and this is where a lot of our innovation also comes along is this notion of building these applications right, which is you have to be fast, but not at the expense of lack of security, lack of scalability, lack of availability, non-observability, all these things that you don't really pay attention when you just want to create an app and put some functional requirements, design something into either an app or workflow or whatever. But when you're scaling from 20 users to 1 million users, you need to make sure that you can do that. When you're exposing a portal to the external world, you need to make sure that you're not going to be attacked by hackers or you're going to have a the now service attack or your mobile application is completely shielded and secure and cannot be penetrated. All of these things are things that are all part that cannot be at the expense of speed. And so that's what we try to do. We try to bring together the speed, increasing speed, but at the same time, building fast, building it right and making sure that as you evolve, that your application is evergreen, doesn't create technical debt, so build it for the future. And we focus a lot on these three things. Yeah, I definitely heard that theme loud and clear. Looking forward to actually I've got, so Gigi had a products to walk through some of the announcement. Also got your head of AI in that really fascinating stuff as like emails do, they kind of start making suggestions and feels like the technology is getting better. It's not like it was a few years ago where it was like, I just want to turn that off because the suggestions were slowing me down rather than speeding me up, but moving faster. What I want to get to you, you talked about that flexibility of change. Really one of the big challenges right now is there's always new technologies, there's new opportunity, I need to move fast. So how do I make sure that I can do something today and not be locked out of that next new thing or be able to make a change? So how do you make sure that you've got an architecture we said that's now been around for decades, but meeting the needs of developers, helping to bring on new developers that you make sure that you can stay always modern if you will. No, that's a fantastic question, it's a really good point. I mean, one of the trade-offs of, one of the easy ways of building these type of products or platforms is actually your visual modeling, your abstractions, the things that you build so that you increase productivity. In a lot of scenarios, the easiest pass is towards linking whatever technology you're going to power these applications to the way you build the modeling. And one of the things that out systems as always done, we designed our platform from day one with the perspective that we knew the underlying technology, name it, WebStacks to Kubernetes to on-premise virtual machines to containers, a serverless technologies, micro application servers, all of these things, we knew they were going to dramatically change in the next years and we've been proven right in the sense that not only underneath technology that's used to build these applications that have been changing, but they've been changing faster. And the turmoil of technologies that you can build applications is accelerating at creating a huge problem for enterprises that wants a certain level of stability, but they don't also want to become old. And so the out systems platform allows you to build your applications at the layer where we at out systems, we can replace the underlying technology without you having to rewrite the application. And because of our technology, you can basically just republish or we upgrade our platforms and automatically your applications will run on the next best of breed technology that's now hot and that is providing you extra scalability, extra security, extra high availability. We take care of that and we show you how we do it because we're following those types of standards, but it's really around the architecture of the product. At the same time, at the level of the development of the modeling and all of these things, we make sure that there is a certain level of stability and we keep on improving it so that we can bring developers into our community and those skillsets are constantly relevant as they move from customer to customer, as they move from simpler applications to highly complex ones. All the investment that they've made on out systems gets rewarded in the next two, three, five, seven years. We have a community, we have members of our community that have been with us for more than 15 years and we want to keep it that way. Well, that's impressive. I'm curious, we've had this discussion, gosh, how many years ago was it now that Mark Andreessen said that software is eating the world pillow? So many companies now, you're talking about building software, building that application needs to be a key thing. The role of IT just servicing the business isn't enough, IT needs to be tightly tied with the business and that capability of building software, doing things fast and reacting is so important. So what is this kind of these waves coming together mean for out systems, the growth of the company and I would have to respect that some of your newer customers look a little bit different than the ones that have been with you for 15 years. You know what, it's actually interesting that the problem that we're solving is a very basic, very old problem. And so it's just that what has changed in the recent years is that before it was acceptable for an IT person to go to the business and say this project is going to take three years or this new report or this change that you want to put in your application is going to take a six months or three months to go into production. And today that's an unacceptable answer. And so today with this type of platforms like out systems this provides a tremendous pleasant life for the guys who are actually developing and delivering these digital systems, these applications because the relationship with the business is a much more constructive one. Instead of you saying no, oh, I want this new mobile app and someone coming back to you, okay, give me two million and give me 12 months or 14 months to build this app. Now you can go back and say, okay, well, that's going to take me one week and I have Alpha guy ready to build that for you, that first version. And they can work together with you so that we get those requirements right because we know that the mobile application is going to be, the first version we're going to produce is not going to be the one you want. And so we want to iterate. That conversation is the holy grail of what we always wanted in the relationship between IT and the business. And now we have it without systems. And that's the alert. Now, if you look into the tens of industries, this particular type of characteristic is dynamic between business and IT and building these things exist in every industry. And that's why our target addressable market is so huge and that's why we're growing so fast at this point because it's a capability that everyone wants. And before, it just looks magic now before it was considered impossible. And that's why people didn't ask for it. Well, Paolo, talking about that growth and that potential, what's your commentary on the skill gaps out there? How do we onboard more developers? What's the opportunity and the talent that you see out there just really when you talk about the future of jobs in this space? Well, what we've seen is that, for instance, we measure, we have very scientific adult systems about looking at the anatomy of skills and what are the skill sets needed to build what type of systems? And it's not all on nothing thing. A lot of people try to sometimes simplify and say there's this notion of the professional developer and the business developer or even the citizen developer, which is a term we don't really enjoy adult systems that much. But it's this very binary separation. And what we've seen in reality is that there is a continuum, a spectrum of skill sets that we can pile up and we can create and develop tools and capabilities. For instance, in the OutSystems platform that allow us to take an increasingly larger number of backgrounds and people to build an increasingly larger number of more complex applications. And so it's kind of a moving target, but the potential is that the shortage of computer science grads that exist today in the world. And it's not only in the Western world. It's all over Asia, Latin America, places where you'd consider that you'd have enough talent to fulfill the demand. Demand is huge compared with that supply of developers. And so being able to, for instance, tapping on the STEM, the science majors, being able to tap on social grads like architecture, architects, normal civil architects and social engineers and all of that, all of those profiles we have found that we can bring them into the OutSystems community and then have them complement some of their natural skills with some technical skills and being able to actually produce these systems. And so by doing that, we multiply by 10 the pool of available resources to our customers and to the enterprises want to build software, but they're facing this issue of the skills shortage. Oh, Paula, we've got a great lineup for our coverage with theCUBE. I've got a couple of your customers. I mentioned some of the executives. I've got your head of developer and community on there, but want to give you the final word, takeaways you want, the audience out there to have to understand about OutSystems today and the strategy going forward. Well, I think what I wanted to say is we've proven that we've been around for some time. And the reason for this is because it takes a while to build a product that's truly comprehensive and powerful enough that you can build complex, serious applications very quickly, but that are also that do not, that you don't have to be facing a wall of security of scalability and all of that. So this is a platform that takes a long time to get right. It takes a lot of input from our install base, it takes a lot of learnings from all the hundreds of thousands of applications and projects we've seen, but today our customers can take that benefits and move forward very, very quickly. And we're going to stay around for many years to come because it's such a pleasurable job to be able to help all of these enterprises become as innovative as they can and as fast as they can. So I'm really excited about being in this position as we have today. Well, Paulo, really a pleasure for us to be part of this event. Thanks so much and definitely looking forward to talking to the rest of your teams, your customer and the ecosystem. Thank you, Stu. Stay with us for more coverage, I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE.