#1: Rapid application development
The biggest selling point for any low-code development platform is its accelerated application development capabilities. Low-code platforms empower developers to code fast,right, and for the future using its visual interfaces, drag-and-drop functionalities, and pre-built templates. This negates the need for extensive hand-coding, allowing enterprises to quickly create applications and launch them to the market in a far less time than traditional development approaches.
#2. Increased agility and flexibility in application development
In today’s cut-throat industrial ecosystem, it is increasingly imperative for enterprises to be able to change, adapt, and innovate at a rapid pace. You no longer can rely on a monolithic legacy system to do the deed for you. And this is where low-code technology can help enterprises quickly change their solutions as per their business models and market demands. Low-code platforms come bearing agility, thanks to its visual development environment that allows for rapid prototyping, iterative development, and quick modifications. This allows enterprises to adapt and scale their applications efficiently and easily.
#3. Maximized productivity
As low-code development platform abstracts the need for writing extensive code lines by automating repetitive tasks and removing technical complexities, it frees developers to focus on other high-value tasks, thus boosting productivity. By leveraging pre-built modules, templates, and reusable components, developers no longer have to write code from scratch, resulting in more application deliveries in less time. Low code technology platform facilitates development, maximizes productivity, and empowers businesses to focus more on mission-critical operations.
#4. Improved customer experience
Organizations create new and innovative products much faster that meet customer expectations and boost employees efficiency and motivation. They can also adapt and change their existing products more easily based on user feedback and data. This includes the capabilities necessary for delivering multi-experiences across channels and devices, allowing businesses to deliver integrated solutions.
#5. Reduced development costs
With the crunch of resources, a low-code platform allows your business to use existing resources and staff by training them as citizen developers rather than hiring new developers for all new projects. This saves up costs spent on infrastructure and training staff.
#6. Increased collaboration between business and IT teams
With easy development, a low code environment removes barriers between business and IT to support continual collaboration and improvements. The visual-model-driven approach empowers businesses to collaborate on cross-functional projects that deliver new applications maximizing diverse knowledge and skills.
#7. Easy maintenance
Implementing reusable components and modules, development teams don’t have to start each project from scratch or write long lines of codes. Hence, adapting to evolving customer expectations becomes easier in a low-code platform, and businesses can focus on innovative solutions to stay ahead of the competition.
#8: Integration capabilities
Seamlessly connected systems form the backbone of data management to enable a 360-degree view of processes, operations, systems, and information. Poorly connected systems or nor connected systems make it difficult to analyze data for actionable insights and further implement those to the operational processes. Low-code platforms offer seamless integration with existing systems, databases, and APIs. This allows organizations to leverage their current technology investments and easily connect their low-code applications with other third-party enterprise systems, enhancing interoperability and data exchange.
#9: Improved scalability
Your enterprise systems must also be ready to scale up and down as per business requirements. If you run a growing business, you will soon grow over your current systems and then look for scalable solutions. Low-code platforms understand the need for scalability and are designed to handle it efficiently. As your business grows and user demands increase, low-code platforms can easily accommodate these scaling needs without suffering any performance or speed lag issues. This scalability ensures that applications can handle excessive workloads and user demands.
What is OutSystems?
OutSystems is a low-code platform that empowers you to develop pixel-perfect mobile and web apps via drag-and-drop functionalities easily integrated with third-party systems and customized per your business requirements. OutSystems incorporates the power of AI, cloud technology, DevOps, and visual modeling; enabling citizen developers to participate in app development and create user-centric apps. While OutSystems provides pre-built templates for application development, you can still add custom codes for innovative features and functionalities. As you don’t need to code apps from scratch, it results in future-ready mobile and web applications fast and at scale.
Here are some noteworthy features of OutSystems low-code platform:
- The OutSystems cloud-native architecture allows you to create unique customer experiences that transform your legacy architectures, simplify enterprise app development, and accelerate business processes.
- The OutSystems low-code solutions result in enterprise-level apps with serious productivity, eliminating high maintenance costs and easing optimization and enhancements.
- OutSystems empowers enterprise owners to expedite application development from months to weeks. Its drag-and-drop capabilities and graphic user interfaces streamline the application development process.
- Not just the development of apps, OutSystems also eases and speeds up the integration of applications with on-premises and existing cloud databases.
History of OutSystems
Paulo Rosado founded OutSystems in 2001 with a vision to develop applications fast, robust, and inexpensive at any point in the app lifecycle. OutSystems is a modern development platform that simplifies building apps, reducing costs and risk by continuous development, providing rapid development, enterprise-grade scalability, and security. OutSystems addresses two major challenges of business:
- Enabling and humanizing digital transformation for enterprises of all sizes
- Faster app development, delivery and change cycles
With the recent version of OutSystems 11 addresses the biggest issue that businesses are facing today - legacy system modernization, delivering new advanced capabilities like embedded CI/CD tools, automation, integrated platform services, and security layer. In late 2022, OutSystems released the OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC), formerly known as Project Neo or OutSystems Neo, a new high-performance low-code development platform with state-of-the-art architecture. ODC cloud-native architecture leverages low-code technology capabilities reducing the complexity of development.
Global enterprises using OutSystems high-performance low-code architecture
So far, across the globe, OutSystems has been chosen by companies from 22 industries, including banking, financial services, insurance, education, government, retail, healthcare, logistics, etc. OutSystems low-code solutions range from building simple mobile front ends to large enterprise migrations and ERP solutions.
Companies are now more focused on accelerating application development, deployment, and management. Hence, they opt for a platform that offers full-stack development for all the use cases and business requirements. Global enterprises that choose the OutSystems platform to develop their enterprise applications are Lapis, Charles River, Engie, PlayRight, Liberty, Van Ameyde, and TAP.
As an award-winning OutSystems partner, Ranosys has assisted several enterprises across industrial verticals in leveraging this powerful low-code platform and developing avant-garde internal and external applications and solutions. Some of these noteworthy clients are: OCB, ComfortDelGro, Scoot Airlines, Adani Ports, Ahli United Bank (Kuwait), Singapore Management University, C. Steinweg Group.
What does OutSystems low-code platform do?
While most businesses know the need for digital transformation, many are restricted by legacy systems, increasing technical debt, and the lack of seamless connectivity between several internal and third-party systems. OutSystems is a low-code application development platform that creates applications faster, minimizing risks, and costs and enhancing your digital footprint. Let’s discuss the many OutSystems capabilities that makes it the perfect solutions for established enterprises and startups alike:
#1. Full-stack development
OutSystems supports full-stack development that encompasses the designing and development of front-end interface, back-end server infrastructure, and database. OutSystems leverages multiple programming languages (such as Java, Python, or PHP), web development frameworks (such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), database management (such as MySQL, MongoDB, or Oracle), server-side technologies, and cloud infrastructure. As a full-stack development framework, OutSystems empowers developers with a comprehensive set of tools and features to build flexible, mobile-friendly, smart applications that streamline application development process and accelerates time-to-market. Here is how OutSystems full-stack development platform accomplishes it:
- OutSystems low-code approach simplifies front-end development via its visual development environment that allows developers to design and code responsive and engaging front-end user interfaces. It is loaded with several UI components, themes, and templates that streamline front-end development. Moreover, you can easily integrate OutSystems with tools like Figma to easen the development process. Then, its drag-and-drop functionality, custom styles, and client-side logic implementation with JavaScript further accelerates front-end development.
- For backend development, OutSystems allows the creation of RESTful APIs, web services, and server-side logic. Developers can build and expose APIs to integrate external systems or create reusable custom modules to invoke specific functionalities. Moreover, OutSystems also allows data manipulation, validation, and security at the back-end server level.
- You can also build and deploy custom business logics via visual modeling and traditional programming constructs. This automates and orchestrates your unique cross-functional workflows reducing repetitive tasks and inefficiency.
- OutSystems can easily add additional features to your applications, like widgets, facial recognition plugins, pricing engine algorithms, and more, as built-in visual elements.
#2. Make development easier for developers
The ultimate goal of a low-code platform is to increase developer productivity. OutSystems provides an environment that is easier to adapt to building powerful applications without being limited by technology or losing control of code.
- Through OutSystems low-code approach, developers can use a single, integrated development environment that covers the entire application formation: development, quality, assurance, deployment, monitoring, and management using low-code approach, including frontend, backend, database, and integrations.
- OutSystems UI enables you to build interactive UI for mobile or web applications using pre-built templates and off-the-shelf components that work across devices. You can extend the UI to access any device capability like camera, calendar, and navigation, creating simpler plugins.
- OutSystems helps you visually connect databases to any existing data source. Open-source connectors or integration wizards connect with software packages, current apps, or existing databases, making developmental changes easy.
- OutSystems allows their applications to use reactive web AI, IoT, robotic process automation (RPA), and microservices. Also, the apps can integrate effortlessly with existing systems with custom code. The reusable components, modules, and connectors speed up application delivery.