Why I am at Pega Systems

As you know, OpenSpan was acquired by Pega Systems recently. Proud of the founders, the management and the OpenSpan team, I am now very excited to be a "part of Pega" and their incredible teams. What a great fit.

I for one have always been passionate about application development done right and the subsequent importance of the end user experience. It is critical in the race to remain competitive, not just from what customers see, but also how cost effectively enterprises can serve those customers.

However, over the years, more and more legacy systems have become unchangeable or stretched to their limits to the point where many of them are beyond legacy - they are antique! Don't get me wrong, they can and do work but the business models in IT to support these old applications has run it's course and it is no longer acceptable for enterprises to ignore them and expect to remain competitive. To be quite honest, if they don't transform, over the next few years, I see it hard to see how they will survive!

Pega systems brings me back to my rapid application development days but on steroids. Where you are able to quickly build and easily change applications to match business requirements. But more than that even, the Pega 7 platform is a combination of all things phenomenal in application development ; it's fast, has the right visual tools, it's open, it can be deployed in cloud and on-premise, it's secure, it's flexible, you can build/adapt code quickly, without "coding", it allows instant creation of standards that drive reusability that is critical for long term maintainability  - and the applications built can run on any platform! The Pega 7 platform is core to any business that wants to transform - To me, Pega is transformation.

So how does the OpenSpan Robotics play in this space? First, it allows us to bring together amazing product teams but second, it allows Robotics (RPA and RDA) to be at the critical start of the transformation journey whilst living and breathing with it. Robotics is tactical, no-one will argue with that, delivering great ROI, quickly and without question, enabling businesses to be agile now. Just imagine, having this agile Robotics engine that starts the transformation journey and then runs along side it for as long as necessary why the full transformation journey takes place. Need to rapidly bring one of those antique applications into the transformation journey whilst you build out it's replacement in Pega? Use the Pega robotics. Want to have a robot or two execute an entire process or single task that runs across 1, 5 or 20 of those antique applications? Use the Pega robotics. Want to have a robot or human continue a task or process that is an integral part of  your BPM, Case management or new development strategy? Use the Pega robotics.

You see, Robotics has been waiting for Pega and I'm excited by the future, I am excited for what this brings to the Robotics space and transformation journey combined.