Pegaworld 2016: Hitting on All Cylinders

The growth of the crowd over last year is impressive at over 20%. It should surprise anyone as Pega has over 420 solid clients including their original two clients. Pega continues to expand and desires to be 800M by the end of the year. A company that keeps expanding it's marketing opportunities while improving the product each year to the tune of 150M on R&D, is sure to grow nicely. The conference started out with a bang literally as we were entertained by a drums surrounded DJ Ravidrums who pounded down the hits one after the other. Then the real performer came to the stage.

Alan Trefler pounded his drum on it's all about the Customer and it's all about the Model. Taking care of both of these key digital participants will future-proof your organization. He now believes that by leveraging Pega, 98% of an application / process can be managed in a model which is far superior to dealing with code. In fact he believes that a good portion of that model can be managed and changed by business professionals and has the case studies to back him. A stable future for adaptable digital behavior will be enabled by the Pega layer cake approach that supports distributed behavior, outcome / goal driven behavior, an easy to use UX and constraints / guardrails. Combined with the strong analytic capabilities and next best action in Pega, this will allow applications, processes and cases to gather insight and apply appropriate actions while transforming in an evolutionary manner.

 Two interesting case studies were presented to prove the point. One on the evolution of healthcare driven by the Pega / Phillips partnership and Allianz's ability to handle bi-modal speeds. Jeroen Tas, of Phillips, dramatically described the kind of future healthcare possible with a new digital approach that move s from reactionary to proactive care. Also he shared how home care and device extensions on a cell phone could change to real time testing and predictive interventions. Phillips believes that Pega will allow and enable this radical transformation to the vision he painted.

Dr Brigit Konig, from Allianz, explained how they dealt with high performance back end systems with predictive customer situations and the agility to adapt. They again are looking to Pega to take a slow and deliberate organization to the digital future.

Kerim Akgonal then talked through Pegas rational for buying OpenSpan and applying robotic automation to legacy systems initially by talking through address changes across multiple legacy systems. OpenSpan has performance mining for other opportunities. Kerim then went through Pegas marketing and sales applications in light of  and making light of several Pega internal examples. It was a hoot as usual from Kerim.

I attended a breakout session on IoT realities that has assembled a panel of key organizations with significant IoT experience moderated by Bruce Williams of Pega. Represented were GM, the Transportation Management Center of New South Wales (Sydney) and Cisco. OnStar / GM talked about the kind of finite data that can be used in new ways now that cars were now network hot spots including real time measurement of performance that might indicate a need to service. Sydney traffic management was discussed in detail to deal with emerging traffic issues leveraging sensors, traffic and situations. Cisco talked about the importance of instrumenting the shop floor in new ways. All agreed that IoT leverage was in it's infancy and that IoT would reach into unexpected parts of organizations and peoples lives. .

The last session I attended was a walk around the technical pavilion where there were booths for partners, industries, and product components and future applications of UX and the IoT. It was expansive and crowded.

Net; Net:

Pega has significant momentum and was giving their customers reasons to believe Pega was powering it's way into the digital world with significant applied horsepower