Powering Digital Core Systems with Light Business Processes

OutSystems customers are doing amazing things with our low-code platform, and listening to them talk about what they have done is a really cool part of my job. Over the years, they've built a wide variety of solutions with OutSystems.

For example, there’s European Bank BPI, who delivered a great digital experience for customers with an app for mobile banking. And the UK’s NHS Practitioner Health Programme, which digitized operations with an automated patient booking system. Not to mention Atos, who underwent a complete digital transformation by building a new management system, overhauling its legacy platform and streamlining its functionality with this new digital core system. This is just a small cross-section of the customers who are able to drive innovation, agility, and performance for the business.

Of all the use cases, building digital core systems can be the most challenging. These systems need the highest levels of reliability, availability, security, and scalability. OutSystems is designed to enable these important non-functional requirements easily because it is built with enterprise-grade technology and has a time-tested architecture crafted to enterprise standards.

That’s how insurer AXA made brokers and customers happy (and reduced costs) by building an insurance portal for brokers in three months using the OutSystems low-code platform. And, it’s how a development team of two at Randstad developed and deployed a system that consolidated multiple, highly-complex manual processes with a custom-built application and front end for medical staff payroll processes.

All of our customers have taught us a thing or two - and they are also not shy about asking for things, either. Some have come to us to see if we had a way to improve the speed of very high levels of event processing, such as payments  So, as part of our continued investment in non-functional requirements and our continuous delivery of innovation, we recently made an exciting announcement. OutSystems now has a new capability that supports very high scalability for lightweight business processes using advancements in sequential database queuing technologies.

In a nutshell, when enabling light process execution, you allow simpler processes that don't need tracking to run much faster; this increases the event processing throughput. This lighter execution mode is useful for event-driven processes that handle several thousand events per day, such as event brokers, and that require scalable database queueing, which is complicated and difficult to do from scratch.

For all the technical details on what we built, check out this blog post, which also demonstrates how, by using this light business process approach, a sample application was able to process 400,000 payments in as little as 14 minutes. For development teams building new digital core systems that need to handle massive amounts of fast-running processes, this is a game changer.

At OutSystems, we continue to work to abstract away the complexity, even for complex core systems development. So, whether you need to scale a mobile app to millions of users or scale a core system to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions, OutSystems has you covered.

For all the technical details on what we built, check out this blog post, which also demonstrates how, by using this light business process approach, a sample application was able to process 400,000 payments in as little as 14 minutes. For development teams building new digital core systems that need to handle massive amounts of fast-running processes, this is a game changer. https://www.outsystems.com/blog/posts/pump-up-the-volume_scalable_database_queueing/

Dan Juengst is Principal Evangelist at OutSystems.