With many Indian companies constantly on the lookout for resources to build applications with higher speed and efficiency, OutSystems offers low code solutions with technical agility and the support that enterprises need today. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal spoke to Mr. Subrato Bandhu, Regional Vice President at OutSystems. He elaborated on how Indian businesses can partner OutSystems to leverage low code for faster and efficient operations. He also spoke about OutSystems’ business plans, offerings, products and future plans.
DT: How do you see the enterprise application development market in India? What factors are fuelling this growth
Subrato: During the pandemic, the market for enterprise applications expanded exponentially. The need for corporate applications increased significantly around the world as businesses became aware of the value of having the most recent and updated business software. Given the evolution of various COVID-19 strains, the significance of enterprise applications in the healthcare sector has never been greater.
Enterprise application is used to combine all areas of a business’ operations and activities like accounting, finance, human resources, inventory management, manufacturing, marketing, sales and resource planning. Linkages between customers, business partners, and suppliers are provided through advanced enterprise software to maximise income while preserving high customer happiness.
Growth of the enterprise application market is dependent on of business-oriented enterprise applications development, which can be installed on numerous platforms across corporate networks and utilised for crucial business requirements. Enterprises may reduce uncertainty and make data-driven business choices by combining enterprise application solutions with machine learning models. Enterprise applications are ideal for facilitating simpler business communication, enhancing operational effectiveness, and generating fresh prospects for market expansion.
DT: Brief about OutSystems offerings in the Indian market.
Subrato: OutSystems is a high-performance low-code platform that helps organizations achieve serious productivity, and create serious apps while driving continuous innovation. Every aspect of OutSystems is designed from the ground up to help organizations develop, deliver, and evolve strategic applications that drive innovation at the pace that business requires. The platform not only helps organisations rapidly build new applications that are scalable, secure, and reliable, it also ensures that solutions are secure, resilient, cloud-ready, and built to scale.
With OutSystems, developers are able to design and assemble applications quickly without having to worry about coding syntax or language structure. This dramatically reduces the time required for building applications - and that speed helps promote agility. We also help our developers adapt applications to meet their organisations' latest challenges at unprecedented speed. Whether applications require updates to workflows, user experience, back-end integration, support for new mobile devices, or new infrastructure technology, changes can be made fast, while also meeting all the security, scalability, and reliability requirements and supporting differing cloud infrastructures.
Our platform includes a rich collection of AI-powered tools and automation that enables scenarios such as this. Applications can be moved across ‘development’, ‘test’ and ‘production’ environments with a single click, and at the same time, IT can provide robust controls over who gets to manage those movements from environment to environment, as well as when and how that is accomplished. Furthermore, we have a suite of tools that can be used to manage every aspect of each environment’s parameters as well as monitoring the health and performance of each deployed application or module.
DT: Which sectors are adopting low-code-based applications? How do you help them in having an effective digital journey?
Subrato: Our customers span various industries including banking, media, insurance, energy, , government, and financial services – all of which are looking to transform and digitise their operations and processes to become agile.
One of our customers who have benefited from this adoption was Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management and automation and provider of integrated efficiency solutions that combine energy, automation, and software for its customers. In order to maintain the level of innovation output for customers, Schneider Electric required additional agility and efficiency in their business processes, capabilities, and operations. This also included smart and modern applications that could be developed, deployed, managed, and changed in line with changing demands. Schneider discovered that their IT landscape was fragmented, with numerous instances of duplicate apps that used non-standard architecture and poor security practices. There was not only a need for speedy development, but also governance to manage the lifecycle and quality of applications as well. Schneider Electric set about creating a "Digital Factory" to accelerate, standardize, and improve the development processes. The end result? Developers had produced 30 internal business apps in about 40 percent of the time it had previously required with traditional development. The platform sped the development process by a factor of 2x and saved 650 days of effort in the first year alone. Schneider Electric has now deployed several large enterprise applications that foster efficiency in the supply chain, sales and marketing, workforce and HR administration, finance, portfolio management, manufacturing management, and many more. A large portion of these applications replaced legacy Lotus Notes apps. While most of the applications are responsive web apps, there are mobile apps too. Schneider's IT team completed most applications in about ten weeks of development time.
Financial services also stands to gain from such development platforms. Edelweiss Group is one of India's leading diversified financial services companies that provides a broad range of financial products and services. They utilised OutSystems to build their Loan Origination System (LOS). A big part of how it functioned involved data capture, or CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) operations and workflows. OutSystems gave their development team the tremendous agility needed to rehash both systems in line with dynamic market conditions and regulations. Edelweiss adopted a platform-based approach to process any kind of loan and built a library of configurable widgets and analytical scorecards. It empowered their development team to roll out new features in a matter of weeks instead of months. The configuration capabilities of the platform allowed the business teams to change onboarding and underwriting parameters at will without depending on the IT team.
DT: Can you share a few trends you foresee for this technology?
Subrato: It is clear that in the post-pandemic future, work will look different: hybrid, digital-first and cloud-first transformations are on par for course now. While COVID-19 has caused many disruptions, it also presented opportunities for digital innovation and differentiation initiatives. As a result, demand for applications to support new business needs is increasing.
NASSCOM reported that India’s SaaS revenue is set to jump 6X to $13-15 billion by 2025. The increased digital consumption (and corresponding demand) has led the Indian SaaS market to grow 1.5X compared to the global market.
High-performance low-code application development enables organisations to meet this demand. By using visual, model-driven development and AI-powered tools, developers quickly and easily build, deploy as well as manage software that makes a difference. With this technology, organisations can evolve, adapt and update their applications as seamlessly as business imperatives shift. Just as DevOps moved the needle by focusing on development processes rather than IT and networking teams, new technology for high velocity development allows an organisation to design and create applications much more quickly and efficiently. High-performance low-code development technologies can also aid in the process of creating bridges between legacy and modern applications, or, in some instances, replacing legacy systems entirely.
DT: How do you sell your solutions in the market? Please share your channel network strength if you have.
Subrato: In recent years, it is clear that the partner / channel ecosystem has become the backbone of India’s digital economy. As a global leader in high-performance low-code application development, OutSystems is constantly working with local partners and customers to get them future-ready for digital India. Enterprises are embarking on their digital journeys for better customer experience, acquiring new customers, which leads to an incremental revenue stream. And to acquire customers at a lower cost, enterprises need to have nimble technology.
Currently, we have more than 400 partners worldwide, and we serve customers in over 87 countries and 22 industries. We also have more than 600,000 community members.
Our customers and partners can redefine their digital transformation by selling and delivering our modern application platform to transform their customers into business disruptors. As an OutSystems partner, customers and partners can sell and implement a single full-stack, full-lifecycle platform. With one platform, they will deliver omnichannel customer experiences, agile and scalable operations, and legacy modernizations. We also provide our partners the ability to transform customers in 3 different ways:
Deliver: As a partner, sell and deliver omnichannel customer experiences, agile and scalable operations, and legacy modernizations.
Build: Apply your industry and technical expertise to build solutions and assets that accelerate sales and customer time to value.
Run: Build a product and sell it to many customers as an independent software vendor, or craft a tailored service for a single customer and manage it as a managed service provider.
OutSystems is committed to providing a strong partner and channel ecosystem to support the demands for low-code / modern app development platforms for our customers as we transition towards endemic living where the hybrid work model is here to stay.
DT: What is your focus for 2023?
Subrato: Our focus for 2023 is to make our customers successful by achieving high performance across their teams and building the exact software they need for their businesses. We do this across the globe with customers in every continent.
