BPM 2011: Pegasystems’ Enterprise-Class Cloud for BPM, CRM 
Integration Developer News continues its series on “BPM in 2011” with a look at how Pegasystems is supercharging cloud infrastructures to deliver enterprise-grade performance, management and security for cloud-based BPM and CRM. Enterprise-class clouds could account for one-third of total BPM sales by as soon as next year, Pegasystems executives say.
In 2011, Pegasystems’ Pega Cloud fabric will be a strong focus, as cloud-based BPM and CRM projects get more attention from large enterprises, Ben Frenkel, Principal for Pega Cloud Solutions at Pegasystems, told IDN. Pega Cloud’s architecture lets customers move back and forth between cloud and on-premise, and provides enterprise-level QoS, security, back-up, and support.
“We are focusing on entry points for very large customers, such as the Global 1000, and Pega Cloud’s efforts have been to layered on top of Amazon to deliver the part of a cloud fabric that enterprise customers want,” Frenkel told IDN.
That’s important because at least one-third of the $20 billion BPM market will be cloud-related between now and 2012, according to Frenkel. “So, to us, the enterprise-class cloud is essential.”
Clouds Conversation for BPM, CRM Has Shifted in 2011
“The conversation has shifted,” Frenkel said. “Most now include IT, and are less around how they should architect a solution, and usually focus around how we< can make them confident about putting sensitive data and information into the cloud.”
Customers want more than just a SaaS BPM on Amazon or other public cloud infrastructure. “Today, we often get asked by customers, ‘What does your cloud offer above what Amazon’s cloud does natively?’ This is not an idle question. They have real needs,” he said.
Prospects top three needs are: (1) integration (between on-premise and cloud systems), (2) avoiding vendor lock in, and (3) support for data security and/or policy compliance
“It was clear to us that any enterprise decision to move BPM or CRM to the cloud shouldn’t require IT to allocate more management, procure more hardware or app servers or build their own custom add-ons,” Frenkel said.
We are wrapping extra layers [around] the public cloud, so that the Pega Cloud solution feels and behaves like part of existing on-premise IT infrastructure.
Ben Frenkel
Principal for Pega Cloud Solutions
Pegasystems
Emergence of Enterprise-Class Pega Cloud:
A Private Cloud for the Public Cloud
“When we first worked with AWS, we saw there was more that the cloud could offer enterprise customers,” Frenkel told IDN. “But at that time, Amazon was happy providing their version of the cloud infrastructure to the marketplace.” So, Pega’s team took up the task, spoke with people with experience in banks, insurance companies and health care firms, and gathered best practices and wish lists from highly-demanding BPM and CRM customers.
As a result, Pega Cloud today provides what Frenkel calls “a private cloud for the public cloud.”
“We are wrapping extra layers around the customer’s implementation in the public cloud so that the Pega Cloud solution feels and behaves like part of their existing on-premise IT infrastructure. Our experience is that customers feel they get more control, performance and management and so feel very comfortable with this model,” Frenkel told IDN.
The use case for Pega’s “private cloud for public cloud” approach to providing BPM and CRM solutions is based in large part on companies’ needs for security and competitiveness. Once customers and prospects see they can avoid any cloud lock-in, the conversation then quickly turns toward integration between on-premise and cloud, Frenkel said.
Pega Cloud’s model-driven application architecture has many key enterprise-class enhancements designed to eliminate objections and encourage broad cloud adoption throughout an enterprise or organization. Among them:
- Enterprise-Grade Reliability The Pega Cloud infrastructure comes with a 99.95% uptime SLA. Further, all data is redundantly mirrored across several servers in real-time, which prevents data loss. Nightly backups are stored in at least three geographically distributed data centers, and to ensure connectivity these data centers use different Tier-1 carriers, power grids and onsite backup generators to ensure business continuity.
- Dynamic Scaling Pega Cloud is infinitely elastic — the entire application and infrastructure scales in real-time to meet current demand on a minute-by-minute basis.
- Rapid Enterprise Integration Pega Cloud integrates with backend systems through Web services such as SOAP, .NET, JMS, MQ Messaging and more. You can easily leverage information maintained in your data center in Pega Cloud applications as well as exchange messages with legacy systems.
“You don’t have to do something different to integrate with IVR, CTI or all those things,” Frenkel said. “The cloud integrates with existing on-premise applications and systems as if the cloud were an extension and part of the data center getting over the hurdles.” - Secure Stack with VPN, Encryption In addition, the Pega Cloud secure VPN allows tunneling of the full network stack from your data center. The VPN [virtual private network] secure tunnel ensures the entire stack is encrypted. This also addresses a major issue over security of ‘data in flight,’ Frenkel said. “Once the data is on the cloud, we also ensure data is encrypted at the file systems and database levels, so we feel we’ve designed a pretty strong solution for this.” Pega Cloud also added layers on top of Amazon’s cloud to ensure data is encrypted between servers in the data center and the cloud.
- Single-Tenancy Model Another notable architecture feature Pega Cloud offers customers is a single tenancy model to make sure each customer doesn’t need to share the infrastructure While most cloud-based SaaS providers use multi-tenancy architecture, (including Pegasystems SaaS), Frenkel said the multi-tenancy approach has limitations for Global 1000 companies.
“It could make sense for a G1000 to build out a multi-tenant solution to share with other divisions of the same company, but it’s definitely unattractive for them to share a database or an application server with a competitor,” he said. “So, with our single tenant model, customers won’t have to share infrastructure, but they can share with partners or internal departments only when they want to. - On Demand Data Pega Cloud also provides a continuous connection between on-premise and the cloud. “Our VPN is always up and the specific connections to the MQ or JMS service are done as part of the business process,” Frenkel said. Further Pega Cloud doesn’t persist any data. “In an on-demand basis, we grab the data and pull it into memory, execute rules against it, and when we don’t need that data anymore, we toss,” he told IDN.
- Application portability To provide customers the ability to move their applications seamlessly between the cloud and on-premise with no lock-in on either deployment option.
- Management & Visibility The Pega Cloud Manager Portal provides an easy to digest set of consolidated statistics around critical operations. It lets IT and business users see the requests created, how long the requests took to be fulfilled, all in a color coded grid (green yellow, red) by problem and SLA requirement. “We’ve provided as much visibility as humanly possible, to show not just the cloud operation at a high-level, but uptime across data integration operations,” Frenkel said.
Frankel joined Pega two years ago, after he studied disruptive technologies at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT), and wrote a paper on cloud computing. The three themes for his paper, perhaps not surprisingly, were integration, vendor lock-in and security.
“These three concerns are not hard to explain, and when combined they help to reduce customer questions about cloud adoption and risk,” Frenkel. For 2011 and probably beyond, these three keys will be major drivers of enterprise-wide implementations of cloud-based BPM and CRM, he added.
