Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Portugal: Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems (Part 6)

Sramana: When you tried to sell the platform, what were the top use cases against which you were closing deals?

Paulo Rosado: Portals, dashboards, and mobile apps. Those were our primary use cases. We found that those had to be integrated together and 60% of them had to have mobile interfaces.

Sramana: Is there a particular domain where more of these problems are popping up?

Paulo Rosado: They are coming up everywhere. In insurance the core place is in claims processing and agent networks. However, if you look at what we are doing as systems engagement, you will find demand everywhere. We have a couple of secondary use cases as well, such as very large migration projects. There are a lot of old systems, which are technological dead and which the customer must change. We get a lot of interest from CIOs because over half of their IT budget spent is outside of their control.

Sramana: When you entered the United States, what competition did you face?

Paulo Rosado: We did not face any competition that did exactly what we did. We faced incumbent operations. The most common response we received is that what we were promising was too good to be true.

Sramana: How did you tackle that objection?

Paulo Rosado: Through POCs. There is no other way. It is hard and you have to show it to win confidence. We also became very good at opening up the problem with our free version. We let people go and experiment with the technology. People don’t realize how big the product is until they start experimenting.

Sramana: Today you have been in the market for 13 years and you have a lot of customers. How do you position your product today?

Paulo Rosado: We continue to position from two fundamental categories. One category is High Productivity Application Platform as a Service, which includes products like Force.com. In enterprise platform as a service, we can be complementary to an Azure or other solution. It is a nice place to be.

There is another market that we think will merge with this one, which is High Productivity Application Development for Mobile. We believe that the world is going to be an Omni channel world.

Sramana: Where are you today in terms of use cases?

Paulo Rosado: They are the same ones that we have been using for the past several years.

Sramana: You have been in business for 13 years. Where are you at in terms of revenue now?

Paulo Rosado: One of the things that we like at this point is the increasing amount of demand. The structure of the company in terms of teams and cash capacity give us the capabilities of a $30 million company. We are at that stage of capability and size. We have about 75 employees.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Global Enterprise Software Company from Portugal: Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems
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