Workflow Automation, Digital Transformation Driving Opportunities For Pegasystems Partners

As part of the XChange Best Of Breed Virtual 2022 conference this week, Pegasystems product and channel executives detailed the capabilities of the company’s low-code development and business process platform and how partners can use it to develop a range of high-value solutions and services.

Workflow and business process automation, cloud modernization, digital transformation, improving the customer experience – these are all critical initiatives today for companies looking to stay competitive or to re-invent themselves.

Not surprisingly, providing the IT tools and services to help businesses undertake those initiatives has become important for the solution providers and strategic service providers who work with those businesses.

One IT vendor that’s developing the tools and technologies that make that possible is Cambridge, Mass.-based Pegasystems and its Pega Platform, a low-code application development system for quickly building and evolving AI-powered applications and business workflows to meet customer and employee needs and drive digital transformation.

[Related: Pegasystems Launches New Channel Program, Looks To Leverage Partners For Sales Engagements]

“A lot of organizations are now looking to Pegasystems to take legacy applications and move them into a case-management and low-code platform like Pega [Platform] to accelerate their cloud modernization and get it into Pega Cloud running on one of the large cloud providers today,” said Jason Masciarelli, vice president of New Channels & Ventures at Pegasystems, in an Executive Briefing session at the XChange Best Of Breed Virtual 2022 conference Tuesday.

(XChange Best Of Breed is provided by The Channel Company, the parent company of CRN and CRN.com.)

“Low-code” is a hot buzz phrase frequently heard today, noted Matt Healy, Pegasystems product marketing director, during the Executive Briefing session. But he noted that “automating business processes using low-code platforms has been our core mission” since the company’s 1983 founding.

The Pega Platform “is a low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation,” Healy said during a deep dive into the company’s technology. The development platform offers capabilities that span business process management and case management, robotic process automation, process AI, real-time intelligence, business rules, user interface design, and chatbots and virtual assistants.

A major area of focus for the Pega Platform is improving customer engagement. Using the platform, Healy said, businesses and organizations are developing applications and workflows that streamline operations, automate customer service, accelerate customer acquisition and onboarding, personalize customer engagement and resolve problem exceptions.

Pegasystems’ software is most widely adopted in a number of key industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications and manufacturing.

Healy noted, for example, that Vodaphone generated £100 million using the Pega Platform to increase the customer acceptance rate of higher value offers. Anthem health insurance realized a three-minute reduction in customer call time using Pega across 10,000 agents and 100 service processes. And TD Bank reported 70 percent faster dispute resolution time with the system.

In addition to the core platform Pegasystems offers more specific solutions such as the Pega Customer Decision Hub for “managing the customer experience” and “maximizing customer value,” which includes a number of leading technologies such as natural language processing, predictive analytics and voice AI – the latter able to adapt a system’s responses as new data comes in.

The Pega Platform also helps line-of-business people work with IT managers to improve internal business processes and workflows, especially with the company’s recent introduction of process AI capabilities that monitor workflows and help identify and resolve process bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

“The integration of that great workflow automation engine and the powerful AI-powered decision capabilities help organizations work smarter so they can embrace change and turn intelligence into action,” Healy said.

Pegasystems today has more than 200 channel partners who, collectively, are doing more than $3 billion in business around the company’s software. The company’s top-tier partners include Accenture, Capgemini, Tata Consulting Services, Cognizant, Coforge, Virtusa and Areteans.

“We’ve got a great list of global elite partner organizations. And then we’ve got more regional and vertically focused boutique partners also helping us in terms of our go-to-market and delivering solutions in the industry,” Masciarelli said. “There are also great innovation opportunities, to build solutions and take them to market.”

Partners engage in co-selling and joint go-to-market activities with Pegasystems and deliver a range of services including systems integration, consulting and solutions development, according to Masciarelli.

“As we’ve grown over the last 30 years, and especially in the last five years, I would say we’ve really invested in building out a robust partner ecosystem,” he said.

Masciarelli noted that many solution providers and strategic service providers use the Pega Platform to support their clients’ cloud modernization and digital transformation initiatives. “Using Pega [Platform] as a catalyst to really drive digital transformation is a great opportunity,” the executive said.

Many customer projects are multimillion-dollar, long-term engagements. “We have a very small professional services organization within Pegasystems and we really rely on our partners to deliver robust solutions for those clients,” Masciarelli said.

Pegasystems is scheduled to hold its PegaWorld virtual conference for customers and partners on May 24 and May 25 where the company is expected to unveil new AI and process automation capabilities for its products.