 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. Really excited to have theCUBE at this event, lots of excitement in the keynote and happy to bring back one of the keynote speakers, Gonzalo Gaiolis. He is the vice president of product at OutSystems. Understand the team calls him Gigi, Gassalo. Thanks so much for joining us and good to talk to you. Good to talk to you too, Stu. Welcome, thank you for having me. Yeah, so we're glad to be here. One of the big themes, of course, we've heard of the show. It's build it fast, build it right, build it for the future. And a theme that you hit on, something we've been hearing for years and only more so is building new applications, that software development, we need to do it faster. I hear from Microsoft, Satya Nadella talks about just the massive amount of new applications that will be out there. So it's one of those things. Do we have enough people? Do we have the right skill set? So take us into that, developing software fast, what that really means and how you're helping your customers there. Of course, Stu. Absolutely, so when we talk to customers, I talk to customers all the time and when they speak to me, they're essentially telling me about their business problems. And today, the ability to get custom, highly customized, specific applications that fit their business, have great experiences and get go to market quickly is one of the top business issues that they have. Now we know that this has historically been something that companies have tried to do, but now more than so with the fast pace of change and sort of response cycles that companies have to go through, this has now become an imperative. We've actually built most of our platform to accelerate the entire cycle of application, not only development, but also deployment, delivery, all the pieces that where we can increase productivity, that's really what we've been doing for the past 20 years or so. And we believe that we can help customers with a bunch of things from getting access to more wide diverse talent pools to deliver great experiences that are best in class and rival the consumer experiences that people are used to and that help them modernize their existing legacy systems. All of that with unbeatable speed. It's interesting, the discussion of modernization has been around for decades, but in the old world, it was like, okay, I'm gonna do some migration. It's gonna take a couple of years. And then when I get there, just don't breathe on it because we think we got it mostly where we need. Whereas today, in the conversation we have, what I hear you and your team talking about is, we know that what we stand up, there's constantly gonna be change. It's not the monoliths anymore. Maybe speak a little bit more to that, that it's not just modernizing, it's not a destination, but it's that ongoing journey that we need to continue to have. Absolutely, absolutely. So, we spoke about speed. Speed is often thought of as how fast you get to market, but we think of speed as also on how do you keep that change going at the right pace so that you react quickly and you react without sacrificing important things like the scalability or the security or the performance of the things you're trying to do. So really think about it in three ways. The speed that we do, that we provide our customers for their initial deployments without ever sacrificing the building it right part. But then above all, building for change, building for the future, allowing customers to experience new technologies, but to react very, very quickly. So we obsess over giving customers the ability to really iterate on top of what they deliver because even with a great platform such as ours, you never get it right the first time around and the world, as we know, and this year was best proved ever, the world is always constantly changing around you. So it doesn't matter if you're the first to market, if you can change and adapt, that in due time competitors will catch up with you and you got to really build it to change, build it for the future. You bring up a really great point there and you kind of hinted at your platforms going through a lot of changes. Help us bring us inside a little bit when we're going to talk more, I know about the AI piece, some of the new enhancements there, out systems now almost 20 years old. You go back a decade ago, we weren't talking digital transformation, it was like, oh, mobile enablement, some of those other pieces there. So it's very different challenges to get day, very different skill sets, generational changes going on. So help us understand a little bit the kind of the underpinnings, the evolution of out systems to be able to still be competitive and quite relevant today. Excellent. That's a great question too. And I mean, we've spent the last 20 years just completely obsessing this problem of how do we help customers go fast and change fast? And to do that, we had to tackle the entire lifecycle of software. So in the past few years, we've actually focused very much on helping customers deliver best in class front end experiences. How do you build the great user interface? How do you do that in what is a low code quote unquote environment? How do you do that to compete with the best in class front end developers? That's really where we've focused very much of our last few years. At the same time, the back end of that and how those things get delivered and how more mission critical you can get that's been quite an investment for us. So really investing in security and scalability of the generated apps on the ability to have multiple global deployments has been a great investment. We're big on clouds. Most of our customers run on our own cloud and we invest tremendously there to give them all the options that they need. So if you think about these two things, you get very much massive mission critical enterprise applications built on top of our platform. And if I go back, you were talking about our 20 years, if I go back five or six years ago, I remember talking to customers and customers telling us, huh, wake me up when you can build a mobile banking system or my customer portal. And today, that's every week, we're building things like that in our technology. So it's really a testament of the maturity of the platform and how customers have embraced it. I would say also just to compliment and to finalize the answer, I would say we see a lot of focus as well on making it more accessible to people from different backgrounds. Just in the next couple of years, there are going to be, the world's gonna need 10 million more developers. We're not gonna get to those 10 million more developers if we keep using the same methodologies of using the past. So we invest very much on things that accelerate transitions from people coming into the professional development cycle. Obviously because our platform is visual and we invest very, very much on the user experience, the developer experience. We make it easy for people to be onboarded into the platform without really ever sacrificing the power of what they can deliver. So those are the things that we've really been focusing on for the past few years. Yeah, we've looked back the last 10 years, there's so much discussion about starting to take advantage of the cloud, companies that were born in the cloud starting off there. We know that we are just in the early days and what we hear customers, they're accelerating even more. So there needs to be that wholesale change and therefore they need tools that can help them culturally and building those new pieces. So I guess it makes sense maybe, let's bring us inside the platform itself. You did a great job in the keynote walking through it. So maybe we can encapsulate for our audience a bit some of the key capabilities that you have inside the platform. Absolutely. So you should think of our platform as divided in three great pieces, three major components. First of all, there's the entire development capabilities or we call our development studio. That's been something we've been developing for years and adding capabilities. It's a visual environment where developers can assemble really quickly applications that can consume services from their enterprise or from cloud services, which to your point is something we see customers struggling with. How do I make sense of the 240 services available to me on the cloud? How do I connect these together so that they make business sense to me? So that's one part. And that's really the part that is typically associated with low code. At the same time, we're also very much focused on this deployment and runtime capability because an app is not really so useful if you've just developed it. Now the biggest or a big part of it is actually to get it in front of customers delivered with zero downtime with many, many cycles and many, many deployments per day. So we focus very much on that delivery pipeline if you will, and our own cloud. So we've invested, we have a great partnership with AWS. We run our cloud on top of AWS. We've invested on abstracting all of the complexity that you need to run an enterprise-grade mission critical system on top of such a platform. And that's really the second component is all of our runtime capabilities of all of our cloud and our deployment capabilities. And finally, I would be remiss if I wouldn't talk about our entire community and our forge. Our forge is our repository and our marketplace of applications and components. We have a very active developer community actually grew more than 90% last year and they contribute a lot to this forge. So think of the forge as a capability that allows unlimited extension of the platform powered by a very, very active community. So it's that full stack development environment that has not only our service to you but also our builders. I forgot to mention our great builders that accelerates typical use cases like building workflows or building prototyping applications. We've seen that in the keynote. Also our cloud and our deployment capabilities very much focused. That'd be the second part, very much focused on that building it right and that mission critical deployment. And finally our community, our ecosystem of partners and our forge that really extend the platform to do many, many different use cases that are valuable for our customers. I'm looking forward. I know we have Jen Lopez coming on theCUBE to talk more about the community. One of the things that we love to see at shows like this and that builder message, of course, resonates quite well with the AWS community since that was one of their big ad campaigns for a couple of years. Maybe if you could, it often helps to illustrate if you've got a customer example, that speed of response. 2020 has had no shortage of companies having to move fast in directions that weren't necessarily what they were planning to at the beginning of the year. Absolutely, absolutely. So we've had many examples, one that we addressed in the keynote, stem cell technologies that were really able to respond super quickly to the COVID challenge by deploying a series of applications that serve many, many different stakeholders. And that speed was off the essence. We've also had a campaign, some of you might have seen around Lucro. Lucro is a financial services provider in the United States and Lucro has been able to respond to government stimulus packages and capabilities by creating applications specifically target for this use case. This is highly optimized for the workflow that they were going after. So great example as well. And we've had customers all around the world, only building their now mission critical, completely new applications to get people back to work safely in multiple different workflows from field services to people going to the office. But also customers that have seen more ramp in their own businesses and really took those digital channels to the next level. We see telcos, large telcos using out systems to deploy new digital systems that are now very, very important because they have an extra incentive to use digital channels if you will. So it's been quite intensive to see all of these customers respond and react to their own specific needs in the middle of everything that's going on. That's good, it's been quite good. Yeah, one of the trends that we've been seeing the last couple of years is the pulling together of developers, not just being a group off on the side that you threw through something over the wall too, but there was not just the DevOps movement, but a lot of the tooling now is helping to give visibility to multiple groups. When I talk to some of your customers, when I look at the serverless community, oftentimes it's not a hardcore developer, but that citizen developer that's getting involved or sometimes even somebody from marketing that can leverage some of those tools. Can you talk a little bit about how your platform is maybe now hitting different skills and different people inside organizations as we see this trend progress? Absolutely, absolutely. So I think we have a quite unique take on the entire approach to what's normally called the citizen developer. So the first thing I would tell you, Stu, is that we think we obsess over productivity of these teams and to your point, the composition of these teams, how they're put together is radically changing. You don't have the business team and the IT team and the operations team, everything is being meshed and fusing together. So we think very much about how do we optimize for that entire life cycle and for the entire collaboration set of the collaboration activities and workflows on those teams. In the keynote, you've seen me talk about the thing we call the experience builder. The experience builder is a great tool for business users, business stakeholders and professional developers to collaborate on assembling in a very visual, very fast way what a beautiful mobile application would look like. So we think that is the future is to design specific capabilities that allow for these interactions, for these jobs to be done to happen in the natural context of the collaboration. We don't think, we think the citizen developer movement is an offshoot of not actually addressing the root cause of giving developers and IT teams the capabilities to interact, collaborate and respond fast enough. Now at the same time, we're very much fans of a diverse set of people or backgrounds coming into the professional developer community. We have examples all around the world of people with chemical engineering backgrounds, history majors that have transitions through training and through usage of the product that transition to full-time developer careers. And we don't think of those as citizen developers, we just think of those as the new developers coming into the workplace enabled by platforms and tools such as ours that really democratize the ability for people to make application creation their own trade, their own job. So that's a very, very exciting trend. Well, and what I hear you saying reminds me of the conversations we've been having in general about automation, AI and even robots. Or today there's a lot of software robots out there. So just as most people are familiar now, if you go into email and it starts trying to complete your sentences for you or give you responses, I heard you talking, your AI capabilities are starting to help along that way and therefore that could open up the window for a broader class of people to be able to, lowers that bar to entry to become a full developer. Is that where you see it going? I'd love to hear just a little bit more directionally the AI piece today for the next year and how comfortable are your customers with that as to partnering with the software? Oh, absolutely, that's a great, great question. We think of AI, so it's two layers actually. One is what would happen if you had a colleague that would be sitting next to you, there would be a phenomenal technical lead, somebody that would guide, automate, and validate all the work that you've done and to really remove anything that's completely boring and repetitive out of your way. That's really how we think about AI. We started this journey about three years ago, if I will, about three years ago, two to three years ago at our other next step. And what we've seen over the last few years, we started very small with a thing we call the next best action prediction and now more and more we're infusing AI across the product so that every poor part of the development cycle from what developers code and their logic, their UI, to how architecture is measured and technical depth is measured, everything is infused in with AI and we see great reception from customers because it just makes their life easier. It's removing the boring, that's the expression they use, it just removes the boring repetitive things and frees human creativity. It's not going to take the developer's job, it's essentially going to make them super humans, if you will. So that's one way. The other thing that you've seen us talk about the keynote is how do we make this happen for our customers' customers? How do we help developers deploy AI capabilities within their own applications built with the platform so that what they do and what they deliver has the same property, the same characteristics of the thing that I'm talking about. So deploying AI is still hard. It's still very, very hard these days. We talk a lot about it, but it's not for your, it's hard, it has many, many problems. You've got to treat the data, create the models, deploy the models, integrate them into the applications and we're really making sure that that cycle is compressed as well and accessible to more people. So to answer your question, we see customers, absolutely, it's probably the part of the product they get most excited when they see it in action, like they saw it on the keynote, because it's just going to make their lives easier, more easier to respond faster to change, easier to build new things and easier to have people that are just happy with their lives and with their careers. I know such good points there. I've run through people over time that sometimes they're hesitant or they're not sure, they're worried it's going to take away their job and it's like, well, don't you think if you had an extra hour or an extra day that you would do other things that would be more fulfilling and more valuable for the business? So important that we can do that and top priority we've been hearing for the last year or so to really embrace that automation. All right, Gonzalo, I want to let you have the final word, a lot going on at the show here. We're really excited to have broad coverage here, going to dig more into the AI, the community, a couple of your customers and the like. So give us the final word from OutSystems next step. Well, I think the final word here is what we're building is just starting. We're looking for, as you said, OutSystems is about 20 years old now. We're looking forward to the next 20 years into really embracing the next 10 million developers that are coming into the workplace and to make their lives and their contributions to society, to organizations, to businesses, really, really fantastic and to have people go into meetings and say yes and to feel like they're the road runner and not to feel that they're pushing their businesses back and we're gonna be here to support our community in this transition and to make them super human, super productive, so a hundred times more productive than with any alternative, that's our vision. And so I hope that if you're still on the fence about is this the right thing for me that you take a closer look and really understand what it is that we can offer to actually most businesses. We're applicable to most businesses at this point in time. Gonzalo, thank you so much. Alan Cohen, a great friend of the cube, said many years ago, right, we need to get people going from saying no or being slow and the answer needs to be go. So Gonzalo, thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure talking to you. Thank you too, pleasure. Stay tuned for more coverage from OutSystems Next Step. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube.