OutSystems NextStep 2019: the citizen developer is here to stay

There is a growing interest for low-code in general, and for OutSystems in particular. At least, that’s what we saw when we witnessed an increasing number of partners, customers and prospects gather at OutSystems NextStep 2019 in Amsterdam.

All over the world, OutSystems is picking up speed. And yes, that includes Belgium. 2019 was a very successful year for Providit. Obviously, we will always be the first ever Belgian OutSystems partner. But we are also still the biggest one, as well as the only Belgian company that exclusively focuses on OutSystems. In the past few months, we saw a number of other partners taking their first steps with OutSystems. That only underlines our conviction: we are still only at the very beginning of something that will grow very big. We expect nothing but increasingly rapid growth in OutSystems projects next year.

OutSystems NextStep 2019

NextStep, OutSystems’ European user conference held in Amsterdam last October, welcomed some 3000 partners, customers and prospects, making it the biggest OutSystems conference in Europe so far. Among many others, the story of Vopak made a lasting impression. The 400-year-old Dutch tank storage company, which operates in some of the biggest ports in the world and manages the logistics getting oil in and out of these ports, built its own terminal management system using OutSystems, which is now installed in 74 terminals around the world.

Citizen developer

Success stories such as these inspired OutSystems to emphasize the role of the citizen developer even more. More than ever, IT development is the result of the close collaboration between the business and the IT department. Two new OutSystems tools will only further enhance this collaboration. At NextStep 2019, OutSystems showed the soon to be launched Experience Builder. The tool contains templates with pre-built functionalities, allowing the citizen developer to quickly define the general flow of a new application, just dragging and dropping whatever he or she needs.

Once the lay-out is ready, OutSystems automatically generates all the necessary components. Is that the end of classic IT? Not quite. Of course, you still need a bit of an IT background to know what you are doing in OutSystems. The truth of the matter is that you don’t need to be a full-blown software developer to lay out the flows of the application you have in mind. But an application is much more that some screens. We need to think about performance, security, scalability, robustness, … A citizen developer is not always aware of all these extra requirements. So it still a good idea to have the application validated by an experienced developer or architect.

Easy access to development

The second major announcement from NextStep 2019 we like to highlight here is the OutSystems Architecture Dashboard. When developing an application – even using a low-code tool such as OutSystems – it remains extremely important to keep the architecture in mind. Architecture Dashboards bundles a number of existing tools and adds a few extra functionalities, making suggestions on how to improve your application’s architeture. Once again, the tools makes application development more accessible for business and ‘regular’ IT profiles, instead of being the exclusive domain for IT architects.

Next year will be even better

2019 was a record year for Providit, delivering successful projects for customers such as LCM, OZ, Partena, Duvel Moortgat and SD Worx . As a result, we had the honor of receiving the Partner of the Year Award at NextStep 2019. Our customer Fujitsu GPMO also received an award for the Selfoss services portal that we developed using OutSystems. Of course, we are more than proud to be acknowledged as a successful OutSystems partner. But at the same time, we know the best is yet to come…

 

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