Enterprises around the world had to take quick actions to reinvent themselves and survive the unprecedented business disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, agility is not a new requirement in the business world.

The application development platform provider OutSystems Inc. has been growing over the years by addressing companies’ need for speed to innovate, according to Paulo Rosado (pictured), chief executive officer of OutSystems.

“The cycles of innovation have been compressing in the past years, and every year there is a further compression,” he said. “Businesses are coming back to developers, are coming back to IT … and all of them have this need for speed, for very high productivity.”

Rosado spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the NextStep 2020 event. They discussed how OutSystems has helped developers to work in this fast-paced environment, the company’s concerns about security and scalability, and how to build an architecture that remains modern over time. (* Disclosure below.)

Security and scalability are main concerns

To enable its strategy focused on speed, OutSystems has been conducting numerous researches on the anatomy of building applications and working to understand what are the most common typical patterns, according to Rosado. The company has also been investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning to create artificial bots that can help developers more quickly build and scale applications with fewer hiccups.

Among the company’s primary concerns in this process are security and scalability. “A lot of our innovation also comes along with this notion of building these applications right — you have to be fast but not at the expense of lack of security, lack of scalability, lack of availability, non-observability,” Rosado pointed out.

These issues only gain in priority as companies scale software projects.

“All these things you don’t really pay attention to when you just want to create an app and put some functional requirements, design something,” Rosado said. “But when you’re scaling from 20 users to 1 million users, you need to make sure that you can do that. When you’re exposing a portal to the external world, you need to make sure that you’re not going to be attacked by hackers.”

Architecture must remain modern

An important goal for OutSystems is to build an architecture that can always remain modern for customers, even if the underlying technologies change, according to Rosado.

“One of the things that OutSystems has always done [is] we design our platform from day one with the perspective that we knew the underlying technology — name it web stacks to Kubernetes, to on-premise virtual machines, to containers, serverless technologies, micro application servers, all of these things – was going to dramatically change in the next years,” he pointed out.

This perspective has proved correct, as the technology world continues to change at a rapid clip. Keeping up can be problematic for enterprises seeking a certain degree of stability yet still want to be on the precipice of enterprise-ready tech.

“The OutSystems platform allows you to build your applications at the layer where we can replace the underlying technology without having to rewrite the application,” Rosado explained. “And because of our technology, you can basically just republish or re-upgrade our platforms and automatically your applications will run on the next best-of-breed technology.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the NextStep 2020 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for NextStep 2020. Neither OutSystems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE