Pegasystems Inc. is an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It develops software for customer relationship management and business process management. Pega is a powerful low-code platform that builds agility into the world's leading organizations so they can adapt to change. Kerim Akgonul, Chief Product Officer, Pegasystems, tells us more.
An industry veteran with a career spanning over 30 years, Kerim is an advocate for building software that makes the underlying technology transparent and serves the needs of the business. He kickstarted his career at Pega as a Software Engineer and has grown to become the Chief Product Officer at the company. He spearheads the company’s suite of CRM applications, including Pega Customer Service, Pega Marketing and Pega Sales Automation, as well as its Case Management, Decisioning, Mobile, and BPM software.
Kerim is currently focused on leveraging technologies such as mobile, cloud, AI, and analytics to support business users and believes that this focus on business impact has contributed significantly to the company being honed with several industry accolades of leaders in CRM, Low-Code, Case Management, and BPM.
Excerpts from an Interview:
DQ: Please tell me about the innovation in the Pega’s portfolio and its role of India?
Kerim Akgonul: Pegasystems primarily develops solutions to assist large enterprises in their digital transformation journeys. We bring to the market three primary solutions: 1:1 Customer Engagement, Intelligent Automation, and Customer Service, and our products are firmly integrating with these solutions. We also offer products catering to the needs of vertical industries like BFSI, healthcare, and the public sector. The capabilities that are included in these solutions focus on our low-code platform that has embedded AI-based decisioning and workflow automation in it. A lot of the innovation that comes into the market is in the space of AI as well as in driving automation and addressing concerns in our customers' digital transformation journeys.
India forms one-third of our total employee base and our Indian arm is critical to how we operate in terms of digital capabilities, innovation, technology, and engineering. We have teams of developers, engineers, product managers, designers, and architects based in India who are focused on every single aspect of what we bring to market.
DQ: How are you developing the qualified professionals to fill these roles?
Kerim Akgonul: We have several initiatives like our university relations programs and robust internship programs that help feed into the ecosystem. Through that, we see the younger talent become more familiar with our technology. We are also able to attract some highly skilled talent from within the industry. We are primarily based in Hyderabad and Bangalore in India, and have several distributed teams. However, our brand, capabilities, and the types of organizations with which we collaborate assist us in attracting highly skilled individuals into the company.
DQ: Can you tell me about the local technology and the trends that are in India?
Kerim Akgonul: All our applications, whether it is in 1:1 customer engagement, intelligent automation, customer service or robotics, or AI, regardless of the solution that we bring to the market - take a low-code approach for an easy onboarding and implementation process for customers opting for Pega. Our products use a low-code approach to make it easier and faster to develop business applications. We are seeing a tremendous amount of demand from enterprises to drive automation and intelligence into their organizations.
DQ: What is the rise of shadow IT and what it means for the future?
Kerim Akgonul: Shadow IT is any IT project that is built or managed without the organization's approval. Because organizations have limited resources, the rise of shadow IT is entirely driven by the tremendous amount of demand from businesses to be able to complete their work. Each of these organizations has the technical resources to meet that demand. As a result, we are seeing an increase in shadow IT. Thus, Shadow IT occurs when someone in a department creates or purchases a solution that has not been approved by the IT organization, and the IT organization attempts to control all of these solutions.
The idea behind low-code is to make it easier, faster, and simpler to keep up with business demand while avoiding the problems associated with shadow IT projects. Shadow IT is here to stay because it is valuable. Instead of attempting to prevent it, we should manage and legitimize the challenges it brings.
Deepak Visweswaraiah: Shadow IT is going to stay. This is because businesses will create the applications they require. IT organizations have now adopted this low-code platform to create a set of guidelines for establishing a center of excellence for how internal applications are developed. They share that across the organization, anyone who wants to build an application can use those guidelines and prescriptions to build an application, even if it is not entirely built by the IT organization. This is also assisting with the adoption of some of the shadow IT.
DQ: Can you name some clients who are using this low-code and shadow IT technology in India?
Kerim Akgonul: Our primary clients are global corporations, including many of the world's largest banks. We are a US-based company with many customers in US. We also have a strong presence in Europe. I would classify those who use Pega and those who use shadow IT as two distinct types of organizations. Every business has some form of shadow IT. IT organizations are attempting to avoid it. Organizations, particularly larger enterprises, use Pega by having their IT department provide Pega as a low-code service to their businesses. These teams can now use these solutions to meet the demands of the business without going off and buying solutions outside of the company's list of compliance and technologies.
DQ: What are your growth plans and future plans for Pega and expansion of product portfolio?
Kerim Akgonul: We are fully committed to delivering AI-based technology that will transform how organizations directly engage with consumers - many of the capabilities surrounding Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are heavily focused on this. We will push our innovation in areas to empower an organization to understand what a customer or a consumer need at every point of interaction. We are heavily focusing on low-code app development, workflow automation, case management, and robotic process automation to deliver end-to-end process automation within organizations. We are seeing changes in how consumers interact with the businesses with which they do business.
We are also seeing an increase in digital customer engagement, and customer service is becoming more important. One of the most recent innovations is Voice AI, which allows customer service representatives to listen and use Artificial Intelligence to understand, textualize, apply natural language processing, and understand the intent and sentiment to provide faster and better service. We are also integrating capabilities such as process mining directly into the Pegasystems solution set.
DQ: And how do you differentiate the local automation and the traditional coding ecosystem? Low-code will be surpassing the traditional coding in future. What is your thought about that?
Kerim Akgonul: It will outperform traditional coding because low-code allows citizen developers, business analysts, and people without an engineering degree to be productive in developing, rolling out business applications, and avoiding on-the-keyboard writing code using products like Pega to configure and construct applications. According to analysts like Gartner, the number of applications that organizations are looking to develop is enormous. You see huge numbers, and there is no way for organizations to keep up with that demand using traditional coding approaches, which is why I believe low-code will easily replace manual-coded applications.
DQ: And what is your approach for a successful clientele. How do you approach to get a successful client and make their journey successful?
Kerim Akgonul: We ensure that we are communicating with both the IT departments and the business units of the organizations with which we do business. We ensure that we understand the IT department so that it can push its standards throughout the organization for compliance, security, authorization, authentication, data privacy, and encryption. We want to make sure they understand the capabilities of the Pega platform, which allow them to put compliant solutions into production and then use that as the foundation for the business to build business applications that leverage all of the standards that it provides. Hence, IT must be able to leverage all of these elements to deliver and provide that foundation. This allows the business to build on top of it knowing that they have secured all of the requirements and data, met all of the privacy requirements, and can provide solutions to their users quickly. That is a clear focus of ours in terms of how we drive success in our customer base.
- Will this affect the current number of software developers, or is it going to embrace their role?
Kerim Akgonul: There is plenty of work, opportunities, and exciting things for software developers to do. In our experience, it allows the actual software engineers and software architects to focus on the most critical and sophisticated needs of the organizations, thereby accelerating their ability to deliver powerful solutions to the organization. As a result, they move faster and can concentrate on the most important issues at the same time.
DQ: And I have a last question. What are the tech trends in India and globally in 2023?
Kerim Akgonul: In 2023, organizational strategies will be aligned to tackle business resiliency, revolutionize customer engagement, and opt for sustainable solutions. Low-code will continue to remain in the spotlight. Conversations around privacy will anchor through 2023 in India and globally. We will also witness how regulation will shift from a focus on personal data, to regulating AI itself and the role of AI predicting outcomes becoming a standard in every aspect of technology in India, Europe, the US, and across the globe.