OutSystems, makers of a powerful low-code app development platform, today unveiled the next generation of its visual development environment, Project Neo.

OutSystems provides a visual, model-based development environment that permits developers to rapidly design apps by providing drag-and-drop capabilities to reduce repetitive work. The platform also uses artificial intelligence and templates to predict the next steps, suggest solutions and validate work patterns to automate development.

“OutSystems is breaking the boundaries of traditional software development,” said Paulo Rosado, founder and chief executive of OutSystems. “With Project Neo, we’ve architected a platform that allows any development team to build any app at internet scale.”

The new Project Neo platform takes all of the power of the previous low-code app development platform and combines container- and Kubernetes-based cloud architecture capabilities hosted on Amazon Web Services, so any company can rapidly build and deploy cloud-based apps at scale.

The objective of the new OutSystems platform is to provide the tools needed for businesses to develop apps that combine containers and Kubernetes along with cloud technologies, for example serverless, database autoscaling, event and messaging-based orchestration.

“Developers should be the artisans of innovation in their organization, but they are mired in complexity that stifles their ability to innovate and differentiate,” said Rosado. “Instead of using their talents to fix, change and maintain code and aging systems, you can give them industry-leading tools that unleash their creativity on your business, and achieve massive competitive advantage.”

Project Neo provides a lot more than just powerful development tools. It also automates DevOps processes, manages cloud runtime, auto-documents code, resolves code dependencies, performs regression testing, enforces code standards and keeps the entire project updated at a managed level. All that enables developers to make critical changes to apps within hours rather than days or weeks, including critical changes each day.

Thanks to the platform’s cloud-native build, Project Neo is also automatically updated to the latest cloud technologies without impacting apps already in production. That means that any cloud hosting that’s being used by customers will automatically be updated to the current state of play smoothly.

The cloud-native nature of the platform also allows apps to scale with demand and absorb sudden interest spikes. Developers can build with confidence that their app will remain available even during a surge in usage by permitting it to scale to hundreds of millions as organizations and apps grow.

The new platform is also designed to permit large-scale simultaneous development across large application portfolios without interruption. This is a must for large teams working in projects where hundreds of developers are working on fixing bugs and adding functionality to the same app while pushing them out into testing and production.

According to Statista, the global low-code market has been growing over the past few years and was valued at $13 billion in 2020 and is expected to rise to approximately $47 billion by 2025. The driving force behind this is the democratization of development availability aimed at enabling non-technical staff to be part of ideation, implementation and deployment of apps.

Project Neo is slated for official launch in 2022 but is now available for public preview. Once launched, the next-generation platform will accompany OutSystems 11, the current version of the company’s platform. The company will continue to invest in OutSystems 11 alongside Project Neo to give customers options for cloud-native, multi-cloud and on-premises solutions.

Developers can sign up for a trial of OutSystems 11 free and register to preview Project Neo on the OutSystems website.

Image: OutSystems