Alan Trefler, Founder and CEO, Pegasystems Inc, in conversation with Pankaj Maru, talks about the company’s technology, its business plans and competition in the BPM space.
Excerpts…
Can you brief us about Pegasystems’ technology vision?
Our direction of technology is very well aligned with our market strategy. Despite the global slowdown in major markets and economies, in the first 6 months of this year, we already have grown by 25% year-on-year. We address major issues of businesses and try to be closer to customers and their business processes. Given the challenges in economy as well geographical changes, there’s a lot of pressure on IT in organizations as they are trying to reduce the spend on IT and ripping out many backend processes.
However, our systems actually help them improve their business processes without having to rip out their old IT architecture and processes. Actually, our models are built for changes and challenges. Compared to our competitors like IBM or Oracle who are also present in the BPM space, we are clearly the leaders in BPM as per Gartner’s and Forrester’s studies.
Like other players are you looking at acquisitions in the BPM space?
We are more focused on business process management (BPM) and customer case management and services, unlike our competitors that are offering BPM solutions through their acquisitions of other product companies. In the past 30 years, we have acquired very few companies whose technology can coexist with our core technology, unlike our competitors.
For instance, we had acquired a company Chordiant that is into predictive analytics but we not buy a company unless it coaligns with our coretechnology. We built software products based on one model or architecture, while our competitors like IBM, Oracle or SAP have multiple platforms, which creates difficulties and confuses customers. We need to have a common architecture and technology.
Our core strength is to link business and technology and make them collaborate on processes and drive business models. We are the only company in the BPM and CRM space that makes Java based models that drive efficiency. Recently, we bought Antenna – a 250 people company to improve our mobile technology with our core platform.
Don’t you think Pegasystems has been a late entrant into the Indian market?
We look at India to build our additional capabilities through the local talent. India is a terrific place for talent and we believe strong engineering foundation is central to our business. Hence our focus is to build the engineering foundation in India. Here we see a lot adoption of enterprise technology and architecture as people understand technology and know how to use it. We are not actively looking at sales in India as of now but will consider may be it in next one or two years. Right now, we look at India more from a talent and technology development point of view.
From inception to now, our focus has been to develop a strong team in India which can in turn develop excellent software. Within India as a market, the sectors which will be of our interest are BFSI and manufacturing. Traditionally, we started with the financial sector, when it used to be 100% earlier, but now we look at other sector like manufacturing and government. Manufacturing sector revenue wise contributes close to 40%.
Recently, Pegasystems launched version 7 of your software platform. How different is it from Pega 6.3?
Millions of man hours have been spent in the development of Pega 7. It’s been built to work for large or big systems and by far is bigger than other companies’ products (IBM or Oracle). These companies have similar BPM and CRM products but they need 12 different products to match our product. Also, we have tremendous competitive advantage against those companies as we work on a single architecture rather than multiple ones and our product comes with the ability to be built and grow further.
