60% of Pega developers are in India

Pegasystems organized its first ever Pega Developers Conference 2013 in Hyderabad recently where it claimed to have hosted over 1,700 attendees. The conference was designed to meet the significant demand for knowledge sharing from the growing community of Pega designers and developers in India, and has brought together delegates from some of the world's largest organizations.

Alan Trefler, Founder and CEO, Pegasystems, who was present at the conference, gave insights into his company through the conference. Trefler is also a Chess Grandmaster who went on to be crowned co-champion along with International Grandmaster Pal Benko, who was rated at 2504, and placed ahead of Grandmasters such as Walter Browne, Michael Rohde, and Nicolas Rossolimo. Excerpts

In what direction is Pegasystems moving, given the technology trends?

The company is very well aligned to the technology trends that are shaping the business environment. Pegaystems continues to outsmart the global gloom with 25% YoY growth in the first half of the year 2013. The reason we are growing at this pace is because we address major issues the organizations around the world are suffering from. Today organizations are looking at ways to get closer to their customers and to make difference with innovative approaches in their business
processes.

Traditionally if you see tech giants such as Oracle and SAP, they could not stand firm with their BPM offerings while Pegasystems has kept it up. What helps you stay in the BPM space?

Pegasystems is clearly the leader in the BPM space. In the Gartner Magic Quadrant report, Pegaystems is the only vendor that has kept its focus intact in the BPM space while many other players have lost focus. For last 13 years, the company has stayed focused though it has learnt some lessons as well. We did not allow acquisitions to defuse our focus and to confuse our ideology we started business with. Although the company has acquired businesses to enable its existing offerings. While you may have seen that many companies acquire business that overshadow their original business ideology. I call such companies Frankenstack (Frankenstein) vendors. Like in the movie a lot of dead bodies are stitched together to work, a lot of acquisitions certainly derail their focus.

Since Pegasystems has done quite a few acquisitions in the past few years, how would you justify the acquisitions?

We've acquired companies that helped us go further in the BPM and CRM direction. For example, in 2010, we bought a company Chordiant Software which had the expertise in predictive analytics domain. We did that acquisition to empower the Pega offering and added the predictive analytics capability to our solutions. Similarly, our recent acquisition of a Bengaluru-based mobile application developer Antenna Software has been done keeping in mind the growing need for mobile capability for enterprise software applications such as Pega 7. The Antenna-Pegasystems combination will provide benefits including a faster time-to-market and increased flexibility in end-to-end mobile application development, powerful mobile application and device management, and mobile backend-as-a-service coupled with BPM, case management and advanced decisioning.

The difference between us and IBM is that we keep heads of the companies we acquire, so that we could leverage the strength of the acquisitions and integrate the technologies into our product architecture.

How do you see Pega Developers Conference 2013? What role has it in the company's growth trajectory?

This is the first Pega Developers Conference in India at the Hyderabad International Convention Center (HICC), designed to meet the significant demand for knowledge sharing from the growing community of Pega designers and developers in India. It has brought together 1,600 delegates from some of the world's largest organizations. The two-day conference offers practical immersion in the latest and most advanced features of the Pega Build for Change platform. We've endeavored to provide a platform where developers can be part of the Pegasystems' ecosystem. The conference coincides with the release of Pega 7, which we think is a quantum leap in the BPM space.

One of the reasons to organize this conference was to go closer to Pega's ecosystem which is largest in India with 12,000+ developers.

Globally Pega Ecosystem consists of approximately 20,000 people, out of which 12,000 are in India. Many of them work with system integrators while the rest of them with Pega's customers. Our partners are enhancing our ecosystem base through constant hiring from premier institutions and putting them through a rigorous 3 months program to raise them to senior architect levels.

In addition, we are also investing considerably in scouting for talent through hiring from premier institutes, training people with our Pega Academy and even through internship programs.

How serious are you about India? Are you also looking at India from sales point of view?

In the last 14 months in India we have grown from 500 to 800 staff as on date including Hyderabad and Bengaluru operations. The Indian headcount will be at 900 by the end of this year (December 2013) out of which 600 would be alone in Hyderabad whereas 300 would be based at Bengaluru. India is a terrific place for talent and we believe that strong engineering foundation is central to our business. Hence our focus is to build the engineering foundation in India.
We are not actively looking at sales in India as of now. However, it can be an option in next couple of years. Since our inception, we have looked at India as destination to develop a strong engineering team which can develop excellent software. No doubt, many of our international customers have operations in India and are using our software for quite sometime. So we have indirect sales presence in India.

How do you plan to compete against Oracles and SAPs of the world who might try to eat your business in their existing customer base?

Oracle and SAP have not shown effectiveness in the BPM space, proof of which lies in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Gartner has thrown them out from the list. What these players tried to do is they tried to sell spreadsheets and excel in the name of BPM whereas we offer a software that really addresses the issues in the processes. Perhaps this is the reason our customers show confidence in us. Furthermore, more than 65% of our customers use SAP. Our continued focus on innovation and approach to solve issues have kept us ahead.

BPM is the next generation of CRM which looks at data, process and case management holistically helping the customer to benefit from it.
Pegasystems thus looks at the business requirements from the BPM prism. Though I don't like the term BPM, since it is the next generation of CRM which aims to solve problems and ROI.

How difficult is it to find talent for a product company in India given most of the engineers come with a mindset around services?

I believe the people who work in the services company can take pride in their work. But they don't own the result. At product companies like Pegasystems, engineers know that they are building the future. This feeling might appeal to some but to others it might not.