 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. We always love talking to founders of companies. We love supporting the Boston area community. But even more right now, we're of course talking to leaders in the industry about some of the challenges facing with the global pandemic. So happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Palo Rosado who is the founder and CEO of OutSystem. You are based in Boston, your company is global. Palo, thanks so much for joining us. And let's start out talking about kind of the age we are in right now and how you are supporting your customers, your employees and the developer community that you engage with. Absolutely, it's a pleasure to be here Stu. We are, we actually since 23rd of March that our 1100 employees are all working remote. So we've had more than 1000 zoom calls logged at least among the people that I know. And we have dogs and kids everywhere. And we had to adjust because we have a lot of new parents. So the kids are all over them and whatever. But actually productivity is a morale is really at the high rate. The business is going really, really well. However, as in a very OutSystems type of way, actually because we're so fast building these digital solutions that we've launched a program with our partners. We asked them for ideas. We got more than 200 ideas coming in and we've sponsoring 20 of those ideas. One of them is with Deloitte for instance where we fundamentally in one week they've created a full logistics system to manage all the supplies between 16 municipalities including ventilators, masks, PPEs and the like. Yeah, well that's great to hear right. So if people want to find out more on the OutSystems website is the COVID-19 community response program. And love to see as Palo, we're going to talk a bit about OutSystems and what you're doing for customers. Of course the speed of development of new applications is what your company's been doing for a long time. And it kind of becomes a little bit bromide that we talk about, oh well software is eating the world. Well in challenging times, how is software hoping to meet the challenges that communities, municipalities, employees, companies need to survive in these challenging situations. So anything else you want to talk about kind of the community program? Yeah, well so what we did is we opened up the community for worldwide community actually because today we serve about 60 countries. And so we wanted to have projects that really had impact. We had a couple from Germany and some from Asia and it's amazing. And today we have sponsored 14. So we have 14 high scalable installations already running. Some of these projects have gone live. Some are still in development. But what's interesting is that the 200,000 plus communities, they're getting together. We have all these virtual teams, subject matter experts, relationships with health officers and health officers and the developers. And we're just churning away. And the innovation of the people when they have actually something that they can build real solutions fast, they can iterate on top. It's absolutely amazing. And it's our contribution also to the world here really. Yeah, very important, Paolo. Thank you for doing that. Boy, I think Paolo, you started the company back in 2001, the discussion around software and developers was rather nascent back in those days. So bring us a little bit through the journey of the company if you would. And some of the major things that are different now in really, you're entering the third decade of the company. So what brings us back to some of the early days as well as what is significantly different today? Actually, the idea that we had initially was very much the one that has become trues. We're just about 14 years ahead of the market. And so the company is called OutSystems because at the time, we believed that a large percentage of systems would migrate out of the data center. That is what today is called the cloud. We believe at the time, based on all evidence that a lot of software that companies were going to be built would need to be done in a very agile way, which is you'd need to build fast but not only build fast to change very, very fast. And it took us a while until we reached about three to four years ago when suddenly everything became agile. Suddenly everything that you build, all the software that you build, you no longer had one year, 18 months to build this project, now you had weeks. And those times have been compressing. And so what's happening now is we encounter ourselves in a world where companies increasingly want to build more software because they want to be differentiated, they want to compete, but the talent available and the speed they have to build these pieces of software are becoming more and more challenging. And we help a lot in doing that. We are the most mature, the most advanced local platform in the market. And so that it's a great time for us now. Yeah, Paolo, I'd like to help understand, software development, application modernization are very important topics for a number of years now. I think back to last year Satya Nadella on stage at Microsoft at night and he was talking about just the massive amounts of new applications that would be built over the next few years. And it's interesting, a company like Microsoft that you go back 10 years ago, you'll be using all of our software, not thinking about building your own software. So you've got partnerships with the public cloud providers, there's all sorts of new partners as well as competitors entering the space. So help us understand kind of where out system fits in this ecosystem and differentiate the self from some of the other noise that's out there. No, absolutely. Well, we'll walk an up a lot of giants with definitely with this approach. One of the differentiators is that these platforms are actually pretty hard to build. And so if you look into what Satya said in that particular conference, he was mentioning the fact that fundamentally every company needs to become a cloud software company. But in order for you to become a cloud software company you need a very large number of talent skills. You need to have developers, front end developers, back end developers. You need to have people understand DevOps. You need to understand scalability, security, all of these things. You can do that with the TANs and even hundreds of tools that are in the market. But what the platform like out systems end up by doing is end up by abstracting a lot of that and just gives you a very fast capacity for you to build your mobile applications, your pricing engines, your workflows, your portals in a very fast way. So leveraging the people that you have, leveraging the unique knowledge of the business that you have and letting you catch up to disruptors that really have all those technical skill sets that they are so rare. Yeah, and I'd love to hear, tell us a little bit about your customer base. So you've been around for many years, so I'm sure it is quite diverse, but how many customers does out system have? If you've got a key use case or two that might help us understand where this low code, no code solution is helping them through their journey. Oh, absolutely. I mean, we have companies like Safeway, Chevron, T-Mobile, all of them have somehow different use cases because we are in the business of innovation. And so whatever you want to innovate with, you innovate typically without system. We have a particular company which is the largest terminal management, oil and gas terminal management company in the world. They have 73 terminals. And one of the things they built was a full ERP, digital platform to manage the whole logistics of the tankers that come into the port, deploy the oil in reservoirs and then having trucks that come and take the oil away. It's a very complex business. And they were looking at fundamentally a four to six year project to build this and they did it in seven months. And so this type of compressions of time for these very large systems is a huge, huge differentiator. Then we have on the other end companies that have built their front ends, typically mobile applications integrated with the web applications. And those applications change fundamentally almost every day or every week. We have a bank, for instance, that's releasing a version per day in their applications. That speed of development gives them a huge competitive advantage that puts a lot of pressure on the stack and all the IT that's needed. Then we help there because of that. Yeah, Paulo, we've been talking for years about some of the transformations that companies are going through and that application transformation really is one of the bigger challenges that they face along those lines. Some of the events I go to, the communities I look at, there's a lot of talk about how containerization and Kubernetes is helping to move the infrastructure team to get ready for this. Of course, we've talked a bit already about how public clouds changing things, serverless is a different paradigm for how application developers should think about the platforms they're living on. How does out systems kind of plug into these trends which have come along in the time since you've been out there? Oh, very well. I mean, the way these platforms work, at least the way the out systems platform works is that we have an automation layer was responsible fundamentally for compressing time and making things increasingly easier. Basically just give an IT department or a company the capacity to build things one other times faster. But underneath, we actually use the newest architectures that give us high scalability, auto scaling, resilience 99.999% of uptime. And in those cases, for instance, we use, for that we use containers, Linux, Docker, all of those type of technologies. We run the standard on AWS. We also run on Azure. And so we can provide automation, but underneath we're fundamentally using the same tools that all enterprise-grade architects are using. Okay, great, Paolo. Last question I have for you. Give us a little bit of your outlook on the future of software development, what we should be looking at when it comes to out systems in your community. Well, actually it's not only about out systems, it's all about the development of software. We believe, and we see that, we see evidence of that, while software development used to be done by some elites about 10, 15 years ago, today every company needs to build their own software. And more than 65% of the software, new software that's going to be built in the next three to five years is going to be done with a no-code or local platform. It's just too much. You just need that speed. You don't have enough talent. And actually what we see, and we're doing a lot of research there, is that complimenting the developers, we're seeing more and more AI bots that actually assist development in a lot of the boring tasks that are part of the development and deployment cycle, like validation of code, automatic testing, creating the right patterns of architecture for high-skillability and maintainability. We're introducing a lot of those things in the platform, so in the next years, we believe we'll see more and more developers being helped by artificial intelligence bots, therefore progressing in that 100X to 1000X automation for the TVD announcement. Well, I tell you, you're hitting on one of our favorite topics to talk about. We did a bit years ago with Andy McAfee and Eric Van Jolsten from MIT, talking about how it really is about racing with the machine. So I've seen things that said, oh, computer programmers, you're the next things that are going to be replaced by robots. And what I'm hearing from you is, of course, what we know is that really it is the combination of people plus the software that are really going to supercharge things going forward. You're not, so you're in agreement. And we already have evidence of that because we have a lot of our AI is already deployed inside the platform and we're measuring, we're learning with it. And we can see tremendous, almost exponential improvements. It's almost as if a developer, as they're creating these functional requirements, it gets augmented with an extra brain. So it really works and it's time now. It's reaching time for AI to be used for to help the software development cycle. All right, well, Palo, thank you so much for the conversation. Absolutely, we hope that these kind of technologies are the ones that are going to help the global economy as we hopefully move forward from the results of the current global situation here. So thank you so much for joining us and definitely look forward to keep track of the company in the future. Thank you Steve, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thanks, I'm Stu Miniman. And as always, check out thecube.net for all of the digital events as well as the archives of interviews that we've done. Reach out to us if you have any question. And as always, thank you for watching thecube.