At PegaWorld, Pega provides citizen developers with compliance guardrails

© 2019 Wikibon Research | Page 1

At PegaWorld, Pega provides citizendevelopers with complianceguardrails by, James Kobielus

June 4th, 2019

Everybody is a potential enterprise application developer, given the right tooling abetted by a workbench that

enforces development best practices. Though the term “citizen developer” implies someone lacking in

professional discipline, that’s not necessarily the case in practice. Many knowledge workers are skilled

professionals who will apply by-the-book enterprise development practices if they’re given sufficient […]

At PegaWorld, Pega provides citizen developers with compliance guardrails

© 2019 Wikibon Research | Page 2

Everybody is a potential enterprise application developer, given the righttooling abetted by a workbench that enforces development best practices.

Though the term “citizen developer” implies someone lacking in professional discipline, that’s notnecessarily the case in practice. Many knowledge workers are skilled professionals who will apply by-the-book enterprise development practices if they’re given sufficient guidance, preferably inline to the toolingat their disposal.

The democratizing potential of low-code development toolsWikibon sees augmented programming as a key enterprise development trend, referring to model-driven,visual, and other “low code” approaches for accelerating developer productivity. Augmented programmingdrives automated code generation through high-level development abstractions, especially the use ofmachine learning and other artificial intelligence approaches.

Vendors have converged on the augmented programing arena from practically every direction. This is dueto the strategic importance of making their core developer users more productive and also to ensure thatthey are well integrated into enterprise DevOps and governance workflows.

Owing to its longtime focus on model-driven development, Pegasystems Inc. has been at the forefront ofaugmented programming for many of its 36 years of existence. Within its Pega Platform, the vendor haslong provided a sophisticated set of tools for low-code, model-driven, visual development.

Pegasystems is a longtime industry visionary vendor on these and other intelligent automation topics, witha keen emphasis on low-code tooling. So it was no surprise this week when Pegasystems prioritized thistheme in the product announcements at its annual developer conference in Las Vegas.

Pegasystems builds enterprise-grade controls into low-code toolsBefore more than 5,000 attendees in Las Vegas, Pegasystems launched Enterprise Low-Code Factory, anew development tool that is due to be available by the end of third quarter of 2019 and which is anintegral component of the vendor’s AI-powered omnichannel Pega Platform. Enterprise Low-Code Factorygives a new generation of non-traditional, lower-skilled enterprise developers the tools to boost theirproductivity without sacrificing the software quality, consistency or compliance features needed to standup their apps as production-grade enterprise assets.

The tool accomplishes the latter by embedding the following framework of controls — also known as“guardrails” — for guiding enterprise-wide app development and operationalization by users of all skilllevels:

Accessibility controls: Guardrails must be integral to the developer workbench experience. In thisregard, Enterprise Low-Code Factory’s dashboard gives users quick access to the apps they usemost, the apps they are building and the ecosystem of approved apps built by others to enable bettersoftware reuse, as well as links to education resources.Governance controls: Guardrails require consistent, repeatable enterprise governance workflowsand decisioning responsibilities. The new solution gives stakeholders the ability to define approvalsover which apps get greenlighted for development, what features they should include, which appsget released under what circumstances, who gets to use the apps and who can revise them overtime.Reuse controls: The fast path to compliance is always ensuring that developers reuse the latest,greatest, company-approved development templates. In this regard, the new solution presentsdevelopers of all experience levels with pre-defined, easily modifiable and always up-to-date apptemplates for quick deployment.

At PegaWorld, Pega provides citizen developers with compliance guardrails

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Team controls: Engagement in a broader DevOps environment is key to developer compliance, andthis is integral to the Enterprise Low-Code Factory. The new solution supports collaboration and acontinuous feedback loop among developers, information technology personnel and other enterprisestakeholders.Skills controls: Staying on the same page in education and training is key to enterprise compliancein all areas. Enterprise Low-Code Factory provides unified access to educational resources forbuilding users’ skills in low-code tools, and techniques., including specially-designed PegaAcademy courses, video tutorials, help documents and Pega Community articles.

Pegasystems’ continued growth in sales, revenues and business adoption will depend on positioningEnterprise Low-Code Factory and its other augmented programming tools as productivity accelerators fordevelopers of all skill levels. Likewise, it will need to expand the range of use cases — including real-timesentiment analysis and robotic process automation — that this tool can support.

With that in mind, Wikibon was impressed with other announcements that Pegasystems made this weekthat deepen its low-code use cases and bring other components of its diverse solution portfolio into a low-code model-driven development framework. Separate from Enterprise Low-Code Factory, Pegasystemsmade announcements that allow citizen developers to apply additional guardrails for building various typesof intelligent apps in a model-driven low-code environment:

Customer empathy controls: Pegasystems announced the forthcoming Customer EmpathyAdvisor. This new solution — which will be available for all Pega Customer Decision Hub clients nearthe end of 2019 — helps enterprises to scalably boost “empathy” metrics in AI-assisted customerconversations. The new tool uses an AI-powered dashboard to analyze empathy metrics — includingrelevance, suitability, value, context, intent and mood — within an organization’s customerengagement channels. It enables engagement analysts within a broader app development practice topinpoint which next best actions create the most trust from customers and which hurt it. The solutionprovides an on-screen slider so that stakeholders can easily adjust empathy levels and see theimpact the change has on relevant key performance indicators. It also enables developers tosimulate and predict the monetary impact of more empathetic customer-engagement strategies ontheir bottom lines. And it enables developers to automatically deploy the best empathy strategiesthrough Pega Infinity and its suite of customer engagement software, all of which are powered PegaCustomer Decision Hub.AI DevOps controls: Pegasystems launched new APIs and connectors for plugging Amazon WebServices and Google AI DevOps platforms into Pega’s existing AI. The new Real-Time AI Connectors,which will be rolled out through the end of 2019, provide the Pega customers with the ability to build,train and deploy machine learning models in fully managed third-party cloud services, startingwith Amazon SageMaker, Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine and Google DialogFlow TextAnalyzer. The integrations allow Pega customers to take advantage of the accessibility, governance,reuse, team, and other controls that are baked into those third-party offerings. The connectors givecustomers the flexibility to complement Pega AI with new deep learning and machine visioncapabilities and alternative machine learning and NLP services from other vendors. These connectorsbuild from existing APIs for OCR and speech-to-text processing that bring other capabilities into thePega environment.

Chief Wikibon takeaways and caveats from PegaWorld 2019These latest announcements significantly deepen Pegasystems’ differentiation in the vast low-codedevelopment tool arena, and also in the DevOps segment focused on tools for continuous integration andcontinuous deployment of enterprise apps into cloud environments. With a “land and expand” strategyforemost, Pegasystems has built scalability into these embedded guardrails, enabling customers’ smallsingle-function apps, built in Pega tools, to grow into multifunction environments for omnichannel, real-timecustomer engagement.

At PegaWorld, Pega provides citizen developers with compliance guardrails

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Though Wikibon is positive on Pegasystems’ offerings and strategy, we have concerns about its ability toinnovate and partner effectively in the intelligent automation market.

First, Wikibon is disappointed that Pegasystems failed to align explicitly this low-code strategy to itsestablished products for chatbots and virtual assistants, mobility, and robotic process automation.These technologies — along with cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and containers — areimportant components in enterprise intelligent edge strategies, which Pegasystems has so far notaddressed comprehensively in its roadmap.

Also, we were hoping that Pegasystems would have incorporated a stronger data science DevOpsworkbench of its own into its low-code strategy. Considering that dozens of vendors now offer such tools intheir various portfolios, it was astonishing that Pegasystems hasn’t at least acquired one of manystrong machine learning pipeline automation offerings on the market and begun the process of integratingwith its low-code and app factory tools.

Furthermore, we were surprised that Pegasystems didn’t announce any further integration with its cloudpartners, most notably, Amazon Web Services, under its “Cloud Choice” program. Pegasystems hasachieved impressive uptake of its own managed cloud service.

Though the flexibility that it offers to host customer deployments of its solutions on any public or privatecloud platform is impressive, it would have made sense to discuss how — or whether — it plans tosupport hybrid and multicloud deploymentsof its digital transformation portfolio. More enterprises areadopting multicloud strategies, and will increasingly evaluate vendors on their support for managingcomplex data, workload, application, and networking capabilities across these infrastructures througha single visibility and control plane.

As it addresses these strategic challenges going forward, Pegasystems’ should retain its core focus onhelping customers balance experience metrics against the bottom-line impacts of intelligent processautomation. Pega’s focus on 360-degree journey modeling, and then using that to automate developmentand deployment of the enabling applications, is a key connective tissue in its go-to-market strategy. It is akey differentiator for the vendor for helping customers to align all their front-end engagement channelswith backend processes in a unified enterprise architecture.

Pegasystems’ customer-centric vision is embedded in its corporate DNA. Here’s what Leon Trefler, seniorvice president of global customer success at Pegasystems, had to say on Cube Conversations in May 2018on a wide range of omnichannel customer engagement topics, including contextual next best action,journey modeling and robotic process automation:

At PegaWorld, Pega provides citizen developers with compliance guardrails

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Former Wikibon analyst

James Kobielus@jameskobielusjames.kobielus@wikibon.org