Process Application Platforms 2017: 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.

Summary

Pegasystems’ Pega Platform is a highly significant Process Application Platform offering. The company is working to appeal to a wider range of client needs (leading with Pega Express and the Pega Cloud), and it’s now possible to get started on a project quickly (and at increasingly modest cost). Nevertheless the Pega Platform remains most compelling when used to address big challenges. The technology is very sophisticated in a couple of key ways that will be particularly important if you’re pursuing process automation in a demanding business context. Firstly, it allows you to create sophisticated, dynamic process applications with advanced case management, predictive analytics and AI-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 Live Data data virtualisation 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 modelling, calendaring, document management integration via CMIS, Box and SharePoint Online and the power of Visual Business Director are all big contributors.

Exploratory work: Over its past couple of releases the Pega 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 is in fact a special view of the full PegaPlatform, that makes is safe and easy for relatively non-technical business analysts can deliver first-cut applications quickly. Pega Express applications can be easily extended and finalised in the full platform when appropriate.

Change management

Change management is perhaps the area in which the Pega Platform excels most – and the recent addition of Agile Studio, PegaUnit and Pipeline Manager (for DevOps and CI/CD) pushes things further. 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

The company also offers a choice of virtual, private, public and hybrid cloud options and is pushing hard to make its Pega Cloud the first choice for a wide range of its customers. Partner-led managed hosting services and private client-managed clouds are also a part of the picture.

Inside Pegasystems’ platform

Pegasystems’ Pega Platform addresses all design, construction, deployment and management aspects associated with Process Application Platforms. The platform is now on version 7.3.1.

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