Process Application Platforms 2016: Pegasystems

This report assesses the capabilities of Pegasystems’ Process Application Platform, and also examines the partners and intellectual property that Pegasystems can offer customers exploring associated technology implementations. This assessment report forms part of a series of reports from MWD Advisors which assesses business process application technology offerings – technology-related capabilities which support organisations wanting to design, develop, deploy, monitor and optimise partially- or wholly-automated business processes.

We strongly encourage you to read this report in conjunction with our accompanying Assessment Framework report at https://www.mwdadvisors.com/2016/10/25/process-application-platforms/

Summary

Pegasystems’ Pega 7 Platform is a highly sophisticated Process Application Platform. While the company is working to appeal to a wider range of client needs (leading with Pega Express), the fact remains that nobody should be buying the Pega 7 Platform today solely to automate vacation approvals. Its contracts are priced accordingly, but the technology is very sophisticated in a couple of key ways that should be particularly important to anyone pursuing process improvement or automation in a demanding business context. Firstly, it allows you to create sophisticated, dynamic process applications with advanced case management and analytics-driven features; and secondly it enables you to deal with complex and demanding change and variation requirements across large programs of work.

Support for different types of work

Automated work: There’s strong support at both design time and runtime for automated work scenarios – with good error handling and integration facilities, and the addition of Pega Robotics further strengthens its hand. With its rules- and analytics-based foundation it’s also no surprise that decision automation is a very strong capability. The new Live Data capability further simplifies application integration.

Transactional work: The fact that Work Objects, rather than Flows, are the central modeling concept in the Pega platform sets a foundation for very flexible transactional work support. Sophisticated organisational modeling, calendaring, document management integration via CMIS and the power of Visual Business Director are all big contributors.

Exploratory work: Over its past couple of releases the Pega 7 Platform has become extremely capable in support of exploratory work scenarios, with sophisticated Case Management support at design time and runtime. Pega also goes further than others in providing very useful monitoring and optimisation features.

Rapid prototyping / quick-start

Pega Express is for prospects and customers wanting to carry out rapid prototyping exercises, run quick proofs-of-concept, and so on. It’s based on the full Pega 7 Platform, but does a great job of specialising and narrowing the toolset so that even relatively non-technical business analysts can deliver first-cut applications quickly. Pega Express applications are built on the same platform and can be easily extended and finalised in the full platform when appropriate.

Change management

Change management is perhaps the area in which the Pega 7 Platform offering excels most impressively – particularly with the optional Virtual Enterprise Repository. The ability to manage application and asset change and variation across projects and programs, at a large scale, is a market-leading capability.

User experience options

With the current set of platform releases, Pegasystems has focused a lot of effort on simplifying application user experience design. The inbuilt responsive UI framework is easy to build on and test with, and there’s much sophistication if you’re looking for full-blown mobile app experiences. There’s also an extensive API that enables you to build completely custom experiences or embed Pega functions into existing apps if you want.

Deployment options

Most customers use Pega’s Cloud for dev/test. The company also offers virtual, private, public and hybrid cloud options and is pushing hard to make its cloud more suitable for a wider range of customers. Partner-led managed hosting services are part of the picture.

Inside Pegasystems’ platform

Pegasystems’ Pega 7 Platform addresses all design, construction, deployment and management aspects associated with Process Application Platforms. The platform is now on version 7.2.1.

As mentioned above, the company doesn’t just sell its platform; it continues to make market-leading investments in applications – hardening what it previously called ‘industry frameworks’ into a portfolio of ready-to-use applications for industries that span scenarios around marketing, sales, service and operations. Currently around 25% of Pegasystems’ R&D expenditure is given over to developing and maintaining this application portfolio.

Key tools and capabilities

The Pega 7 Platform comprises a set of tightly-integrated tools, each of which has a very clear role to play – and there is little functional overlap between them. The platform brings together four main capabilities:

BPM and Case Management. The Pega 7 Platform addresses the full lifecycle of BPM and Case Management initiatives with its core capabilities, addressing discovery and analysis functionality (Direct Capture of Objectives), web-based design and development tools (the Design Studio), a Java-based runtime process application server, and process monitoring, dashboarding and administration tools. Support for automated work, transactional work and exploratory work are all delivered through the same core Pega concepts; only the ways in which you configure and bring these concepts together in your applications differs.
Business rules. The heritage of Pega technology is its rules engine, with today’s BPM and Case Management features constructed atop this foundation. It’s not surprising, then, that the ability to define, execute and automate complex, context-sensitive sets of business rules which can influence almost any behaviour you define in a Pega application is a core capability of the platform.
Robotics. With the 2015 acquisition of robotic automation vendor OpenSpan, Pegasystems gained server-based/unattended Robotic Process Automation (RPA), agent-facing Robotic Desktop Automation (RDA) and Workforce Intelligence technologies.
Pega Mobile. The core platform supports hybrid and responsive mobile web design, with optional components from former Antenna Software mobile app development and delivery including MDM (mobile device management), native SDKs, testing, offline support, and enterprise app store

Also related to the core Pega 7 Platform, Pegasystems offers:

Customer Decision Hub. This is a combination of predictive and adaptive analytics together with a big data repository of customer interaction. The Customer Decision Hub includes:
- Decision Strategy Manager. A web-based tool that brings together predictive analytics and next-best-action technology and delivers reusable decisioning components that can be integrated with process and case applications.
- Event Strategy Manager. A web-based tool, following the same design metaphors as Decision Strategy Manager, that enables analysts to specify event stream processing functionality which filters and correlates external events that need to be responded to by Pega applications.
- Visual Business Director. An optional component used by, analysts to create rich performance visualisations and simulations to assist in uncovering potential optimisation opportunities.
Pega Business Profiler. A web-based strategy mapping tool, built using the Pega platform, that you use to define hierarchies of business strategies, initiatives, strategic technologies and process improvement initiatives; and present dashboards and scorecards that show progress on portfolios of initiatives. An open API enables external systems to update these dashboards and scorecards.
Federated Case Management. This is a set of optional facilities that combines three elements:
- Provides process participants with a consolidated work queue that aggregates worklists across multiple processes or applications. Allows users in one system to open, view and work cases in other systems seamlessly.
- Provides access to a single virtualised repository federated across existing implementations. Developers can choose which assets to promote to the shared repository, giving a good degree of change control and support for reuse in large, global technology implementations.
- Provides an enhanced set of performance data export options for customers wanting to use third-party analysis tools when exploring process performance data or wishing to populate data warehouses.

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