Pega Offers Optimistic Outlook, New Opportunities for Customers at PegaINspire

While he couldn't have foreseen hosting a virtual conference two years in a row because of COVID-19, Pegasystems CEO and founder Alan Trefler told the virtual audience at the PegaWorld INspire conference Tuesday that he is inspired by what he saw from how his company and its customers handled the disruption.

"We are building back stronger than before," Trefler said. "Collectively, we will be stronger in the future. It's a more distributed world. Our processes now extend beyond our four walls to our partners. We have more freedom to innovate."

But there's also added complexity, from additional regulatory compliance, more complex back-end systems from vendor companies and their partners, Trefler cautioned. "But with the right infrastructure and the right approach, we can crush complexity."

Too many companies pay lip service to customer-centric technologies, then build by channel, Trefler added. With that type of architecture, changes need to be manually replicated across channels.

"Building from the bottom up has never worked," Trefler said. "You need to build from the center out."

That's why the Pega Customer Decision Hub is at the center of the company's technology. That low-code technology enables Pegasystem users to have the solutions that work for them without needing to get down into the weeds of solution development, Trefler said.

Trefler announced the company's new low-code capabilities in the Pega Infinity platform, one of three innovations Pegasystems announced at the event.

To keep up with the pace of digital transformation, organizations need low code with both back-end and front-end design capabilities so anyone can create differentiated apps with modern user experiences (UX) for customers and employees, the company said.

Available by the end of second quarter, the new Pega Platform capabilities combine Pega's app-authoring capabilities with out-of-the-box UX capabilities and open APIs to enable users to configure and design their apps in the same low-code platform. Built-in industry standards are designed to enable developers to integrate new UXs into their front ends.

"These new features in Pega Platform represent a significant step change in the evolution of low-code app development," said Kerim Akgonul, chief product officer of Pegasystems. "For the first time, organizations can use low code to not only build bullet-proof process automation apps but to also easily complement their own developed apps with elegant user interfaces, all done in the same tool. This allows enterprises to spend less time building and more time driving key business outcomes that matter."

Among the benefits enabled through the new Pega Platform are the following, according to PegaSystems:

• The payload is reduced 75 percent, so less code is transferred back and forth.
• An extensible library of reusable design templates in App Studio based on proven best practices enables business users to focus on modeling and configuring the application while the design layout is intuitively rendered as they build.
• Context-aware APIs.

The low-code capabilities will be added in Pega Infinity version 8.6, which will be available at the end of the second quarter. That new version empowers business users to deliver differentiated user experiences with development capabilities that deliver digital transformation at scale.

Digital transformation is needed, but too many initiatives have been stymied by siloed projects, unconnected systems, and complicated deployments that slow time to value and miss expectations, according to Pegasystems.

The newest version of Pega Infinity includes many features designed to increase the speed, scale, and flexibility of the platform, enabling employees to work smarter to drive impactful outcomes.

Among the highlights of version 8.6 are the following:

• AI-powered process optimization: A combination of intelligence and automation to intelligently triage millions of incoming customer requests, transactions, and other events at enterprise scale for fast and effective event resolutions;
• Workflow orchestration across applications: Previously on a limited trial basis, Pega Process Fabric becomes available to all users so employees can manage work with a unified worklist that consolidates tasks from Pega and non-Pega apps in a single location.
• New streamlined capabilities in Pega Customer Service.

"Even after their incredible adaptations in the pandemic, businesses have accelerated into an even more advanced stage of digital transformation," Trfler said. "Now is not the time to rest. They must find even more ways to improve efficiencies, meet evolving customer needs, and leverage data for insights. Pega Infinity can help equip them with the tools they need to meet these challenges by becoming faster, smarter, and more effective than the competition."

To further help customers with their digital transformation efforts, Pegasystems launched Pega Partners, a streamlined partner program that includes new benefits and resources designed to bring more agility to its growing ecosystem. The program is designed to enable Pega clients to identify and collaborate with the right pre-qualified partners across a range of technology and industry solutions. The program includes a new Pega Partner portal and the enhanced Pega Marketplace.