OutSystems Platform

I have been involved in the development of applications, whether web applications or mobile applications for multiple clients, and we have adopted OutSystems  platform for the rapid application development of our applications at enterprise level.

I have several examples to share. I would start with e-commerce and banking applications. In the initial phase when we adopted OutSystems  in one of my initial companies or organizations, we worked upon a couple of banking applications for our onsite clients where we developed end-to-end banking solutions for the citizens into their state. We also developed some government-based applications for child birth registration, citizens enrollment, and new establishments enrollment. After that, coming into the pharmaceutical domain, I got much more exposure building multiple applications into OutSystems. A couple of them are we developed the tender solution, which is for the pharmaceutical industry where different, either the private or the government sectors, send out the tenders for manufacturing of the drugs and medicines. Various medical or pharmaceutical clients can bid on those tenders and check what kind of therapeutic area, the dosage, they can particularly work upon and whether the probability of their winning or getting loose for the tender. Different perspectives or aspects are there. For example, we have the overview, planning, then tendering solution, the tender calendar, how soon it is going to come, what will be the duration, the end date, tenure, all of those things. Then even in the patient services, we did develop a lot of applications into OutSystems. Starting from making different medical solutions for the client, whether it could be copay card solutions, their insurance finders, claim submissions, and so on. These are a couple of good examples, and a lot of different domains which we have worked so far into OutSystems.

There are a couple of applications or projects where we worked which reduced the duration from six months down to approximately two months. The duration of six months can be reduced to two months and even less than that depending upon the complexity and the resources allocation into the team. We have worked upon some e-governance applications, banking applications, as well as patient services applications where we have saved an enormous amount of time and were able to give an initial MVP product for the demo purpose and a production release as well in a shorter amount of time.

All of these did save money, not to a very great level, but up to a significant level. It is reducing your resource consumption or allocation hours. You may probably need few team members with skilled capabilities into OutSystems so that your go-to-market time frame almost reduced to more than 50% as compared to other technical platforms. These are a couple of good positive aspects.

There are many valuable features. I would say if someone is looking for developing an application at a faster rate and having different integrations with a cross-functional team, OutSystems is one of the good platforms to adopt and get your application kickstarted so that it can be delivered on time. It can handle your multiple scenarios where you need to connect with different integrations perspective or connect with your internal or external databases, lazy load solution. If you want to scroll different types of huge data, you can implement some scrolling features or on-demand loading. OutSystems is very useful for that purpose.

OutSystems is purposely targeted for the rapid application development, whether it is the web or mobile application development. You can easily build if you have skilled developers into your zone and deployed at the right area. It is a market, ready-to-market kind of platform tool, then very much scalable for the enterprise-grade applications. You can get different in-built and customizable templates which are ready to use as per your needs and requirement. Cross-platform deployment is pretty much easy here. Maintenance and reusability are benefits as well.

Regarding the maintenance and the reusability aspect, I would say OutSystems is pretty much good to handle if you have quite good skilled and experienced developers into your team. From the maintenance point of view, if everything has been designed in an architectural side in a nice way, things have been put in a right space and being monitored properly. Maintenance is not a challenging task into OutSystems. Regarding the reusability, OutSystems does provide the Web Blocks  or the widgets, wherein you can design some reusable components and can deploy them into a separate module. Those modules or reusable components can be utilized into multiple applications depending upon your needs. This gives a good example for the reusability.

Regarding the scalability point of view, it is designed to scale for the enterprise needs. Depending upon your needs, you can increase the CPU memory consumption and your memory storage there. Depending upon how huge the application is or how small the application is, you can easily manage your enterprise IT level architecture things as well.

Every platform or low-code platform tool is quite good in its own area, but there is always space to groom or enhance or improve. The same is with OutSystems as well. A couple of things from the integration point of view can be enhanced. If your application or the enterprise organization is tackling a huge data application where you have bulk amounts of data, it becomes a challenge for all the technologies and the same with OutSystems. You have to design your architecture in a very magnificent and decent way so that how you process your data so that load can be easily balanced. Data handling and huge data handling is a kind of challenge you may need to face.

Then we have some vendor lock-in. If you are trying to migrate your application from OutSystems, then you probably get into this vendor lock-in system. Some organization may face challenges if some organization is on a small scale size. The small scale businesses may find OutSystems costly because of its high cost and pricing due to the licensing cost. Apart from that, OutSystems really plays well, and it needs a learning curve. If a traditional application or programming is there which your developers are skilled into and they are directly deployed into OutSystems, it may take some significant amount of time for them to get comfortable with OutSystems. There is a learning curve.

OutSystems community is already in place, but it can more be enhanced regarding some aspects. They did organize lots of bootcamps and other user groups as well, but those can also be improved from the documentation point of view and having some integration guidebook as well.

A couple of things which can be improved into OutSystems include the licensing cost, the vendor lock-in side, the learning curve, couple of integration aspects and customizations.

It has been almost more than eight years that I have been involved into the IT industry in various domains.

I would say it has been around almost six plus years that I have been involved into OutSystems.

The customer support is pretty much good. They do have the customer support ticketing system where you can raise the ticket, decide the priority, and depending upon your priority and urgency, they are going to resolve your problem.

I started with OutSystems itself. My first organization was also parallelly working on the Appian  and they did start OutSystems parallelly as well. Later on with OutSystems, we had a couple of other low-code platform tools in the organization including Mendix  and Power Apps. Different organizations have their own way of developing the application to different platforms and they can work upon multiple platforms as well. These are a couple of platforms which our organization was parallelly working on.

These are basically the leadership decisions regarding which platform they may want to go with. Higher leadership made the plan, then later on, we were involved into decisions. I think they did check out the Jongkyan or the Power Apps and the Appian , but they found OutSystems pretty much good at the initial level.

I would highlight two points here. One is the faster development, it is a ready-to-market application, rapid application development, definitely. Secondly, time efficiency. Your team can be deployed to work on different modules parallelly and you can really save time up to an enormous level. If a legacy or a traditional application is taking five to six months, those can easily be designed into OutSystems in less than two months.

Regarding the cross-platform deployment, I would say you can build your applications and deploy as per your need because OutSystems does provide different kind of architectural deployment into your organization once you are planning to adopt it. You can reach out to OutSystems and can ask them to have it on-premise so that your IT team will be having the controllability on that. You can ask them to have it cloud published so that everything will be on the cloud and OutSystems will be managing on your behalf. Or it can be in the hybrid mode, which means when you are deploying the applications, you can host in whatever the server you wish to. Even for the mobile application, you can build Android and iOS and deploy it into the different platforms. Regarding the templates, for quicker start, OutSystems does provide a couple of templates already existing into its service studio, wherein you can check out and see if those are useful, you can use them, otherwise, you can build your own templates from scratch as well.

Initially, when we adopted OutSystems, it was pretty much good because the organization was having a huge number of projects into the pipeline. The cost was pretty much comfortable because every organization has their own business budget. It depends upon if you have a large business budget organization, OutSystems is good to go. Similarly, for small scale business, it could be a challenging one. Everyone has their own perspective on that. Our way was we were initially good, but later on, the organization did face that the licensing has been increased to a much higher extent.

OutSystems is a really good platform to work upon. If any of the organizations are looking forward to working with OutSystems or adopt OutSystems platform, they can definitely go with it if they have a good budgeting with them. They just need to check out the right resources allocation. If they have skilled and trained developers who are already trained or it may take a significant amount of time as a learning curve, they should note that OutSystems does have good training documentation available. I give my very good wishes for all those business partners or organizations who are going to adopt OutSystems. The overall review rating for OutSystems is 8.5 out of 10.