 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of OutSystems Next Step 2020 brought to you by OutSystems. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of OutSystems Next Step. Always love when we get to come to the conference to be able to talk to the practitioners, understand what they're doing, give some recommendations that they have for their peers. So happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Mikhai Spruciestic. He's the Global Vice President of Information Technology at Collier's International. Coming to us from Vancouver. Mikhai, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, great to be here. All right, if you could just set up for us, first of all, Collier's, how should people be thinking about Collier's in 2020 and just a little bit briefly about your role there. Okay, so Collier's International, it's a leading commercial real estate firm, we are in 68 countries, we have over 18,000 professionals around the globe. My role is to coordinate the information technology globally, we are very much distributed, decentralized organization. So we have technology groups all around the globe and my role is pretty much to set a direction and to make sure that we're following on that direction appropriately. All right, so the theme we hear at the show, it's about building it, you hear from OutSystem, build it fast, build it right, build it for the future, lots of discussion in the industry about how you need to modernize and a lot of that is building new applications. So if you could, how does that application portfolio modernization fit in your environment? What are some of the business things that are driving you to build new applications? Well, thank you for asking me what are the things that are driving, because that's one of the themes that I am keep bringing up, that you have to start with that, you have to start with why, why do you even build applications? So what's happening in my mind, or at least I can tell these days is that the environment, the business environment, not necessarily the technology environment, but the business environment is changing and it's changing very fast. And we need to adapt to that. We need to adapt to new ways of engaging with the clients, for example, or to providing a service, or to, sometimes we just call it and say we digitize and that's the whole digital transformation story there. But that's the reason why you need applications because applications are end of the day, what makes us more efficient in what are we doing? That's where the machine interacts with humans, right? Behind that you have the infrastructure and all that stuff that nobody sees, but what you see is that application in your phone, it's the application that makes you better, makes you more efficient on the time. That's why it's very important to be able to do it. And if you're just gonna buy everything, you're not gonna derive any competitive advantage out of it. You're just gonna use what's available. So more and more these days we recognize that the ability to create something specific for the industry or for the organization, it's extremely important. So I think that's where the ability to build this application fits for us as well. All right, well, we've seen in general that that digitization is something that happened for a lot of years. I have to imagine 2020 has had some specific impacts on the marketplace. Everybody that's interested in real estate, there was probably a brief pause, but now things need to be more online. You mentioned mobile. I would think that being able to react fast is something that has been driving your activity. Take us inside that and how has 2020 impacted your activity specifically? Well, 2020 has really put something which is always in my mind to the test. And what's in my mind is the business agility that I'm talking about many times. It's not necessarily that 2020 has first tested or in the first half of 2020, I don't think that the ability to create application was tested immediately. First of all, it was tested the ability to work in a different environment, to work from home or work from somewhere else where you are not exposed to the COVID-19 pandemic. So that was the first part that was tested. And I'm extremely proud of our organization that for us, that was not too much of an issue. I mean, our system has helped us do that transition very quick and very smooth. As we are moving through 2020, now we start to get our footing again. And people are referring to this as we figure out what the new normal is. And as we figure out what the new normal is, we start shifting again back to the application. So how are we gonna do things in the new normal? What is becoming more important now that it was before, right? It's all of the sudden my ability to capture infrared thermal cameras has become a priority. And I'm not saying that it necessarily has, but it's just as an example, thing that I haven't thought about necessarily before. Now I need to switch very fast into that. My ability to track, my ability to let people in the office in a certain way to figure out how many people are in the office was the density. Those things before COVID that were kind of, well, that's very interesting. We kind of have lots of office, we can cram lots of people in there, no worries about while, well, that's gone. So all of the sudden those technologies that were called emerging are becoming very fast mainstream. So our ability to incorporate them, it's critical. Wonderful. Now that we've laid out some of the business drivers and some of the urgent needs that you have, help us connect the dots to your usage of out systems. Maybe if you could take us back to how long you've been using it and what that's enabled for your business. Right, I think we adopted out systems about three years ago. And we didn't necessarily take the most successful pattern. So the most successful pattern seems to be you're taking a low-code platform out systems on this case and you start with something small and you grow from there. We actually had a mission critical system in our hands which was obsolete, was a legacy, was a time bomb of technical debt. And we knew we need to change this but we didn't want to do it in a traditional way. We didn't want to create another monolithical application, another stovepipe. So that's when we looked for something that we call the digital platform. And that's how we got to out systems and we adopted it for that particular systems. Now the byproduct, of course we delivered on that and it's fantastic and it's great and we had lots of experience and I can't tell you what to do and what not to do and how I would do different. But the byproduct of that is that created what we were really after strategically, created that capability to do things very fast, right? And it's not only you're doing it fast but your chances to do it fast and well has increased dramatically from the perspective that chances are that you're gonna be on brand which it's a struggle. Let me tell you that with the developers don't really care about the colors. And that it's following your security patterns and whatever it is in there. All these have increased dramatically by putting it in this platform. So when you say do it fast and do it well do you have metrics internally as to how you measure that? Is it cycle time, time to market? Some percentage of quality of code. How do you kind of measure that? It is demonstrably better today, faster today, more agile today than what you were doing before. So first of all, those are KPIs that a non-technical organization probably has not have in the past. Okay, so this is something that Microsoft will measure or Intuit will measure and stuff like it. Which is just a background because it's interesting. Now we start measuring but for us it's very simple. So how many new applications did we develop in the last, I don't know, 10 years? Zero. Okay, we had a moment 10 years ago, we developed a lot of things and then we were keep going and going and that's how they get legacy. How many did we developed in the last 18 months? Well, about 19 I think, keep growing. So I think we just start to learn what the KPIs should be because I really, I don't know, it's 19 good, it's too much maybe, it should be only eight. So we learn on this KPIs. One KPI though or one measurement is not a KPI because I didn't really make it a KPI yet but it's a measurement in the past an application was built and then sporadically there were efforts to bring it up to date. And the business behavior as it relates to that was very specific. They tried to cram everything during the project time because the chances that that thing will ever be reviewed in the next couple of years were close to zero. Well, let me tell you how the new application that we created that the core one that mission critical it's on a release cycle, a weekly release cycle. This is unheard for our organization. And I will gonna, I gonna tell you that in my 25 years of managing applications and IT in various industries, non-technical industry, that's critical. I will never achieved with anything that kind of pace. So do I have clear KPIs to tell you this it's way better? No, but I can tell you that there are a whole bunch of things that are emerging and we will start measuring in the future that are clear indication that we're in a better spot than we used to be. Well, right, it's the measurements that are important to your business that matters. Obviously clear, you've unlocked new capabilities that you didn't have before it was zero applications. And now, as you said, you know the why, you're delivering value to the business, you understand what it takes to do that. And that general discussion of like, well, everybody's becoming a software business. I think you've laid out some of that, at least in where you are right now, why that's important for your business. So you mentioned some things you've learned along the way. I'd love to hear your journey of three years, looking back, certain best practices you've seen out there. Share a little bit of that wisdom that you've gained. What would you recommend, peers, that are starting down this journey or maybe need to take a new look at how they look at their software development? What would you share with them? Yes, we learned quite a bit. The fact that you get the tool in place, it's really, really not enough to see the benefit. We grossly underestimated the resistance to change inside of IT. So, you know, if I would give somebody an advice, I would say, well, if you are in a typical North American organization where people matters and what they think and what they do matters, and you can't just be some kind of a dictatorial leader, then you have to give yourself time because people need to understand the benefits of the platform. The low-code is not something that is necessarily immediately embraced by even the brightest developers. And it's not something that you have to give yourself the brightest developers. And unfortunately, we've seen great people leaving us eventually because they simply didn't buy in the concept. So, you know, to anybody who starts this journey, I would say to not underestimate the psychological change that needs to happen in order to become efficient at this. Then it's another interesting one. There are many, but you know, the those two I think are interesting. You're gonna be for the first time probably way faster than the business respond. And this is something that again, I haven't seen in the past in my career where, you know, you're developing things and you have a question, you come something and you ask the business of how should this be? It's, you know, it's left or it's right. And the question is straightforward and the business is scratching their head and it's like, well, this is not a simple answer. I really, I don't know, I need to think about it. And the business may think a couple of days and in that time, you're not coding if you didn't plan properly. So you are so fast that if you are not managing your pipeline and you are not accounting for the fact that the business won't be able to keep up with you and will need to have time to think about certain things you're gonna have a whole bunch of dead times. Now, you can fill them with all kinds of things. You can pay technical debt that you build in your previous agile cycles. It's a whole bunch of things to do but you need to account for that. And as I said, I never seen it before and I always, IT was trying to catch up to the business. It was for the first time that I actually see this thing reversed and it's uncomfortable. It's, I saw this becoming uncomfortable actually for the business. It was, you know, perceived that already you're putting a lot of pressure on me right now. Well, yeah, but you know what? If you want me to be fast, we need to respond fast. So it's kind of dynamic that is changing in a very interesting way. Eventually, I would say, and it doesn't take a long time but eventually everybody's generally happier. I was just talking the other day with, you know our VP of North American account. It was one of the stakeholders on this product and she said, wow, yeah, this is so much better than anything we did before from an experienced perspective not necessarily from a, you know, feature by feature which is also extremely different and much better. But yes, two things. Psychology of the developer and the velocity that the business can provide when you are developing on this high productivity platform it's something you need to keep in mind. Well, it makes me laugh a little bit. I think back to in the early days of cloud computing rolling out that there was that discussion that, you know maybe IT won't matter anymore. It will just become a utility and the discussion, you know, most CIOs that I talked to people in IT is that IT needs to be responsive to the business and actually can reach a point where it is a major driver for that business and so that agility, that speed that you talk about is helping to, you know, really bring things together and help have, you know, you need to have that common vision. Great, I want to give you a final word. You've worked with OutSystems number year. We're watching them as they've, you know keep enhancing their products, see more machine learning and AI baked into it. For those coming, you know, watching the next step show, you know, what final words would you give them from this event? Oh, I wasn't prepared for that. You know, I guess keep up the good work would be the thing. We made a big bet on OutSystems. We want to see them growing, want to see the community of low-code developers growing. I want to, I don't know if I want to tell OutSystem but I want to tell the development community you still need to be a great developer to be able to deliver great applications in low-code. It doesn't diminish anybody's value in the market. It's just a different way who's going to make the developer community more productive. It's we are automating our own tools. That's a normal way to go. And I think OutSystems is doing a fantastic job at that. And I'm looking forward to see it growing. I think the next iteration of this, I want to see a little bit more of the, in our case, I hope to see a little bit more of the citizen developer coming out and continue to enhance this agility, this flexibility, the ability to create. And of the day, it's all about competitive advantage for the organization we're in. It's, I can paraphrase you and say, IT really doesn't matter, but creating value out of the technology, it's really what matters. And that's everybody should keep their eyes on that. Well, Mihai, I really appreciate you sharing your perspective. Thanks so much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. And stay tuned for more coverage from OutSystems next step, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.