Working at Pega #LifeAtPega
Last January I started a new job in Pegasystems as a Solutions Consultant. The position is based in LATAM (Mexico City). Even though I have prior experience in other IT firms, none of them have the innovative products or work culture that Pega has.
So far, it is the most challenging, yet fun and rewarding job I have ever had.
As a Solutions Consultant you are part of the sales team. You work alongside with an Account Executive. Both roles are responsible of understanding future and current client business challenges. Based on those needs, you propose a solution.
An Account Executive leads the numbers. A Solutions Consultant leads the technology. My duty is to understand the business challenges of the customer. I need to understand their business and technology needs.
On a day-to-day basis I interact with clients, lead POC's and presentations. These POC's demonstrate the company's product capabilities. Most of the time, these presentations happen with an Account Executive or with another Solutions Consultant.
Describing what Pega does may be tricky. It is most likely that you, the reader, have interacted with Pega at some point without knowing it.
Pega started with an Enterprise BPM platform. Since 1983, the platform has evolved and also the company. Alan Trefller's (Pega's CEO) idea is to change the way people build software.
Today, Pega offers a platform, called Pega Infinity. What makes Pega Infinity different is that it unifies customer engagement and automation in a single platform.
What does this mean? If your company needs a faster and better way to build enterprise software, Pega can do it. If your company needs a better way to engage with customers, Pega can do it. You need both? Pega can do it. If you want your customer interaction to interact directly with your software, Pega can also do it! And one particular advantage is that you can do all this in a single unified platform.
The unified platform offers ease of use, among many other things. Development happens in a web-based "studio". Pega empowers non-developers to create powerful applications. A skilled developer will also find Pega friendly. And business people. And managers. And enterprise architects. And everyone.
Unified is a broad term. Another advantage of having a unified platform is that all of Pega capabilities work together from the beginning. Pega has marketing, CRM, robotics, software design capabilities and much more.
Pega is used in many large enterprises. That is why you have already interacted with it without knowing it before.
Developing software this way is a huge change of paradigm for me. Pega is a low-code/no-code platform. This means you build an application in a visual manner, mostly through models, without using code. When your create an app using Pega, the platform itself writes its own code.
Software design in Pega happens in a similar fashion to a BPM or a Workflow Manager, but it is much more than that.
You start by designing a process. The platform is designed in a way in which you can use Design Thinking to model your process. Once the process is modeled, adding forms, SLA's or routing work is very easy. Automations like sending emails is just a few clicks away. Once you create your app, you design it once and it is already mobile ready, without changing anything.
Routing work is aided with an extremely efficient AI. This AI has RPA, Natural Language Processing, analytics (both predictive and adaptive).
With this toolset, creating outstanding applications is possible. I have seen some applications developed in Pega that if I have developed them in a "traditional" way, it would have taken months or years. I have seen these kind of apps happen from idea in weeks, sometimes even days.
Once the app is created, it can be deployed in the cloud of your choice, or on premises.
Telling this message to business people or other developers is challenging. If you happen to be in a company where Pega is an option, be sure to give it a try!