About Hubway Connect
Challenging times present a massive opportunity for digital transformation, and we are always looking for opportunities to reuse successful solutions while helping our customers solve problems. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we faced many challenges that had one thing in common: our customers needed to access their data fast! So many decisions needed to be made overnight, and they were under extreme time pressure to reinvent how they worked.
Our clients needed to make fast, data-driven decisions that supported their customers while meeting rapidly changing government restrictions and regulations. We facilitated many data pipeline implementations to make OutSystems data available for analytics and interoperability.
We identified an opportunity to create a product that could be deployed many times and deliver best practices in terms of APIs Management while protecting the most valuable asset of any business, its data.
Joao Melo, Head of Product Delivery, identified the opportunity and further developed it with Leonardo Fernandes, Head of Expert Services.
Being OutSystems MVPs and having worked for over 20 years in the software industry across 5 continents, they were able to develop a world-class product.
They combined what the platform had to offer with industry-standard technologies, like the OData protocol. It was a great addition to the OutSystems platform’s value proposition
Pedro Carrilho, Managing Director and Founder, a seasoned executive, who has worked with OutSystems for over 17 years, added to the idea by bringing his visionary perspective, turning it into a digital product. This opened the door for an innovation-led initiative.
The idea of adding a no-code approach to data exposure on top of the OutSystems platform was later assessed in the academic environment. Miguel Mira da Silva, Professor of Information Systems, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, had been researching compilers, connectors and interoperability and was the perfect partner for this endeavour.
Rita Fernandes, OutSystems Developer at PhoenixDX, built the first lines of code as part of her Master’s Thesis, which was well accepted and achieved the highest possible grade.
The concept was further developed and tested at one of PhoenixDX’s hackathons, where over 2 days, a team of expert developers created the building blocks of the prototype and validated the solution. Within a few months, the team commenced alpha and beta testing, involving developers, functional and data analysts enrolling a few select clients as early adopters. The feedback and insights from this period of testing added significant value to the product’s functionality and helped the team bring an MVP to market in record time.
Joao Melo and Aishwarya V, Product Manager, have been developing the product’s roadmap, incorporating end-users feedback, continually improving the product.
Now on its second release and with mature, stable and well-tested functionalities, Hubway Connect is a reliable digital product with a partner-first strategy looked after by Aaron Holesgrove, Engagement Manager and Business Development Representative. Hubway Connect allows OutSystems partners to shorten the time-to-market of the solutions they deliver to their customers with an added layer of security.