Pegasystems

One vendor that has helped many top-tier service providers succeed in the B2B market and become more agile is Pegasystems, a company that serves large businesses in multiple markets, including financial services, healthcare, insurance, and communications. Its flagship product, Pega 7, brings marketing, sales, CPQ, ordering, and customer service solutions to the communications market. A quick perusal of Pega’s website reveals that “6 of the world’s top 10 Communications and Media companies, including Verizon, Vodafone, Sprint, Warner Bros. and Telstra rely on Pega to deliver a superior customer experience, improve customer retention, and drive operational efficiency.”

Pipeline recently met with Kenneth Benner, director, industry principal - communications, Pegasystems, and learned that EE, Sprint, Oi, Telecom Italia and NEMs like Cisco are also customers. What attracts such market-leading companies to Pega? The answer, again, lies in agility. Unlike rip-and-replace solutions or huge integration projects, Pega is essentially a layer that sits atop existing systems that is model-driven (it doesn’t require coding) and process-centric.

“The Pega app and platform start quickly, rapidly scale, and add value quickly,” says Benner. A customer first identifies a specific process for acceleration, say ordering. The customer then established a command and control later and pulls data from existing systems, and the process is automated, end-to-end. Compared to other solutions, the velocity of Pega is impressive. Initial deployment and value is typically realized within 90 days, and the customer can easily add new processes over time.

Cap Gemini recently put Pega to the test, and the results were nothing short of amazing. Compared to a business application developed in a traditional Java environment, Pega was 6.4 times faster. Once a solution is implemented, change management is 8 times faster with Pega versus Java. These advantages become even more apparent when bringing an application to the mobile environment. Cap Gemini found that “going mobile” is forty times faster with Pega than Java!

"The ability to adapt and change and be agile is very, very important,” said Lanny Cohen, CTO of Cap Gemini. “We refer to that as the ability to sense changes and sense opportunities and be able to respond to those very quickly.”

Winning with agility in the B2B market 

Agility really is the new competitive differentiator. Businesses today must move fast and adapt to rapidly changing demands or become irrelevant. Enterprise buyers are increasing their ICT spend, but express a desire for higher quality proposals, engagement across all channels, easier customization, more powerful self-service portals, better order and service visibility, and good old-fashioned creativity. CSPs must transform as well, to be able to service these customer needs and win in the B2B market.

“We believe that the leading companies going forward are the ones that can move fast,” said Lanny Cohen.

Pipeline holds the same belief, and thus advocates for solutions like Pega 7. Because it is process-based, a CSP can engage with Pega to address one pain point, quickly realize value, and then move on to another challenge, all while continuing to offer seamless service to its customers. Unlike many traditional solutions, Pega 7 allows CSPs to keep their current systems in place while transforming its processes to meet the needs of the modern business customer. By engaging with Pega, CSPs can rapidly sense and respond to opportunities, accelerate new service delivery, easily make changes, rapidly scale offerings, and capitalize on process repeatability to expand into new geographies and verticals.