(Leo the Lion at the MGM Grand, location of PegaWORLD 2017. Photo credit: Derek Jensen.)
Pegasystems Inc. (Pega; Cambridge, Mass.) announced the latest release of the Pega Platform this week at PegaWORLD, held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The vendor characterizes the Pega Platform as delivering enhanced intelligence, agility, and control that allows clients to accelerate application development and enhance customer experiences. The new version includes new AI, collaboration, and integration capabilities, aimed at helping the vendor’s clients more quickly build and deploy better applications to power their digital transformation initiatives.
The new version stresses Pega’s emphasis not on core systems or digital per se but rather the end-to-end customer journey, according to Thomas Harrington, Director, Industry Principal – Insurance, Pegasystems. “Today, as InsurTechs are putting increasing pressure on insurance carriers, we’re focused on how to take the suite of elements in the customer journey—sales, marketing, customer service, underwriting, claims, etc.—and layer on capabilities such as AI and robotics,” Harrington comments.
Thomas Harrington, Director, Industry Principal – Insurance, Pegasystems.
Pega pitches its application development platform as driving superior customer engagement and operational excellence by combining industry-leading case management, BPM, robotic automation, AI and decisioning, mobile, and omni-channel UX on a unified platform. Enhancements and new capabilities in the current release also benefit all Pega customer engagement applications, including Pega Marketing, Pega Customer Service, Pega Sales Automation, and related industry apps, according to a vendor statement on the new release.
Pega reports the following “key enhancements” to the Pega platform in the new release:
Improved collaboration with the new Real-time Notification Framework that allows internal and external users to stay informed on the latest project activity in Pega Platform—such as new changes to apps in development or new discussions between project members.
Enhanced AI control and visibility with the new AI Studio to create and control predictive models from one central location.
Expanded oversight via the new Robotic Automation Console, which makes it easier to deploy and manage all automation—including attended and unattended robotics—in a single interface.
Smarter customer email processing by applying AI to understand the customer’s intent and automatically create new cases to be serviced in the appropriate case type.
Better integration with third-party DevOps tools such as Jenkins, JFrog, and Selenium via new plug-ins for seamless connections.
Additional cloud choice for third-party clouds platforms with new support to deploy Pega Platform on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Microsoft Azure, and AWS.
The new release also includes other major Pega Platform capabilities made available earlier in 2017, including the following, as described by the vendor:
Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant: an AI-powered bot that turns applications into smart assistants on any channel – from SMS and email to Facebook, Alexa, Slack, and more.
Pega Agile Workbench: a new visual application development tool that provides a foolproof way for business and IT to better collaborate and bring better software to market faster.
Pega Workforce Intelligence unified within Pega CRM applications—enabling businesses to optimize their sales and customer service effectiveness with desktop analytics, machine learning and robotic automation.
The new release exemplifies a PegaWORLD keynote theme of “Making it Real,” enabling clients to pursue realistic improvements with emerging and maturing technologies, according to Harrington. “Clients are asking how they can start small and build functionality and capacity,” he says. “We’re providing them with capabilities to add value, enabling them to begin to tackle problems and apply data in new and unique ways suited to their business challenges.”