Pegasystems Unifies BPM, Rules, Predictive Analytics in Cloud, On-Premise 
Pegasystems is adding predictive analytics to its Pega BPM business process management offering for on-premise and cloud. The upgrade aims to allow business users to quickly identify, meet, anticipant and learn from customers’ needs – and in the process increase customer loyalty and upsell revenues.
Pegasystems is adding predictive analytics to its Pega BPM business process management offering for on-premise and cloud. The upgrade aims to allow business users to quickly identify, meet, anticipant and learn from customers’ needs.
By bringing predictive and adaptive decision-making components to business users, Pega intends to help companies develop more intelligent recommendations for the next-best-action to maximize customer retention, as well as cross-sell or upsell opportunities. To understand the business cases and the extension of Pega’s BPM architecture, IDN speaks with two Pegasystems’ executives.
Pega’s architecture allows IT and business users to leverage a fully-unified environment of BPM, rules, analytics and responsive infrastructure to act on, and even predict, customer needs, Russell Keziere, Pegasystems’ senior director of product marketing, told IDN.
Pega’s latest BPM extension leverages its mission-critical SOA and cloud architectures, Kerim Akgonul, Pegasystems’ vice president for product management told IDN. The upgrade also reflects an emerging new role for SOA and cloud IT professionals, he added.
“Today’s IT and SOA professionals need to think of themselves as change agents that use adaptive and intelligent technologies to allow business users to set their own solutions,” Akgonul said. “Among our customers, we’re seeing IT [professionals] also moving into a business architect’s role, where they are more focused on revenue growth, improved customer service or efficiency in operations.”
“Bringing a solution that easily unified BPM, rules and analytics allows IT to let business users participate and build their own application, rather than hand-off everything to an IT person,” l Keziere added.
Inside How Pega’s BPM Architecture
Looks To Help IT Become ‘Change Agents’
Pegasystems’ CEO and founder Alan Trefler described how Pega’s latest offering lets IT become a “change agent,” by letting business users tap into real-time and predictive data to get closer to customers and generate additional business opportunities.
“Customer centricity has become a key strategic goal for the majority of our clients. They are looking to take a multi-channel, ‘customer-in’ approach to eliminate silos and inefficiencies, so they can rapidly seize new business opportunities and outperform the competition,” Trefler said in a statement. “Central to improving customer experience is being able to predict, present and operationalize the next-best-action with advanced analytics.”
Pega’s integrated approach drives what company officials call “predictive decisioning,” which takes BPM to a more agile and proactive state, where BPM and the related components become more valuable than the sum of all their integrated parts. “We have unified the entire environment, so as you build a process-centric application you also can use predictive algorithms to make sure you meet a customer’s needs, or leverage an upsell opportunity,” Akgonul said.
Under the covers, Pega’s latest BPM offering integrates service of record, SOA, ESB, and even the rules engine to govern all the integration tasks – and guide them to a customer outcome, Akgonul told IDN. This latest version delivers them in single, unified environment so that organizations don’t face the traditional software pitfalls of multiple points of integration, multiple testing environments, or multiple tools for governance, risk, or compliance, he added.
“The beauty of all this integration is that it is in fact under the covers, You can be abstracted for infrastructure and still drive a business solution that builds customer satisfaction, sustains your current processes, changes as needed and maintains all data integrity,” Akgonul said.
As an example, while the customer is still on the phone, rather than work from a pre-scripted offer list, the system can suggest what Akgonul called “the right next offer” based on characteristics of that customer and analytics from other customer calls.
"We have unified the entire Pega BPM environment, so as you build a process-centric application you also can use predictive algorithms to make sure you meet a customer’s needs."
Kerim Akgonul
VP, Product Management
Pegasystems
Pega’s enhanced architecture brings one other important agility feature. “For the most part, in BPM you think about solving a serial process, that is do A, then B, then C and so on,” Keziere said, but that approach can be too rigid when it comes to meeting the varied needs of customers.
“Most BPM is out there constrained by BPMN, which does not handle dynamic ad hoc case management, or by BPEL, which doesn’t handle business analytics very well,” he added. “Most BPM stops at the end of the enterprise. With this release, we take BPM right out to the customer, and then adapt.”
Pega BPM’s latest update also adds collaboration features to allow teams to work in real-time on shared cases, as well as accommodate ad-hoc case work.
Other notable Pega BPM upgrades include
- Unified predictive and adaptive decisioning – Combines advanced business analytics with real-time adaptive self-tuning. This helps guide intelligent conversations with customers for retention, cross-sell/upsell, and risk management.
- Thin-client modeling options – Provides business users with tools to handle end-to-end process models, UI integration and business events – all without coding and lower training.
- Business event-driven interactions – To let business users define and trigger time or pattern-driven changes to forms, reports, or cases.
One analyst found Pegasystems’ approach to BPM-out-to-the-customer effective. “Killer apps for ‘next best actions’ are targeted offers that customer service agents make to influential customers or marketing campaigns that a product team revises on the fly to prevent failure,” according to a recent Forrester Research report. “CRM professionals should integrate recommendation-engine technologies into all customer-facing processes [to drive next best actions … to maximize the return on sales, marketing, and customer service.”
