My view of Pegaworld 2021

Pegaworld Inspire 2021 was a virtual event on May 4^th this year. This year, the event was much slicker and more orchestrated than last year, when Pega had to pivot very sharply at the last minute due to lockdowns. The ability to plan a virtual event properly certainly showed this year with slick videos from Alan Trefler strolling along extolling the virtues of Process Fabric whilst laying down the foundations for the messaging for the rest of the event – “Crush complexity”. Pega used Pegaworld to launch Process Fabric this year.

Process Fabric was the big new offering from Pegasystems to surface distributed process management. Their CTO Don Schuerman highlighted that ‘distributed cloud’ is one the the 5 tech trends that Pega see as shaping the future. Having applications deployed across multiple clouds that manage processes across organisational silos is going to be a challenge. Process Fabric will help enterprises that have applications using different technologies to bring information together in one place allowing CXOs to understand where there are gaps or bottlenecks across process silos. This will identify opportunities where process transformation can be applied to drive improvements in customer experience or operational efficiencies.

Elsewhere at Pegaworld, Hyperautomation and personalisation were key topics. Hyperautomation is very interesting. Our clients are being pushed to constantly do more with less. For example, I was talking to an Account Executive last week who told me that a restructure at a client has reduced mid and senior management by 50%. At the same time, this client has embarked on an ambitious journey to transform their customer engagement. Hyperautomation could really help in this situation. Hyperautomation is the confluence of several technologies such as AI, Machine Learning, RPA and Low Code all coming together to create transformational customer experiences. Imagine being able to use natural language interfaces complete a job application on a recruiter website or via Alexa, use AI/machine learning to assess the experiences of the candidate and match it against a job profile and then assess the likelihood of that applicant making a shortlist. You could then create the back end data record for the applicant, place them on a priority list for a human consultant to shortlist and put forward for the next best action. All without a developer writing a single line of code.

In other sessions, Pega made a big deal about the continuation of their journey to become a far more partner friendly company. Hayden Stafford, Pega President for Global Client Engagement talked about how Pega have made progress this year in changing their sales approach and understand the needs of both clients and partners. They have focused on listening to Enterprise Partners like Capgemini as well as understanding how they can work more collaboratively with other vendors e.g., Adobe. For me, it showed that Pega have understood that clients’ problems cannot be solved by only one ISV or that a single ISV cannot address everything that a client may need. Partnerships with other ISVs and Enterprise Partners will help Pega get to be a $5bn revenue company.

From a marketing perspective, the most promising presentations were around who Pega CDH and Adobe could work together to create omnichannel seamless experiences, always presenting the next best action for a customers personal circumstances. This really is personalisation at scale brought to life. The promise here is realtime 121 personalisation. We are working an a demonstrator that will show our clients how this can be made possible quickly using an Pega/Adobe integration. I’m really looking forward to seeing this come to life.

Ketan Patel

Ketan Patel has over 20 years experience working in digital agencies and start-ups. At Capgemini, Ketan is focused helping clients transform digital customer experience.