 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Pegaworld Inspire, brought to you by Pegasystems. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Pegaworld Inspire 2020. With me is Alan Trefler, who's the founder and CEO. Alan, it's great to see you. I'm sorry we're online. I wish we were face-to-face. Well, someday I hope we'll have that opportunity, but this is the way things are getting done these days for sure. I mean, you got to be a little bummed. You're an amazing speaker. I've seen you at conferences before. You have a deep voice, super inspiring, pun intended, I guess. So before we get into the Pegaworld and some of the takeaways that we expect in the event, for those in the audience, maybe not familiar with Pegasystems, tell us about Pegas. Well, Pegas is the leading provider of software that helps companies make smart decisions and get work done. It's used by many of the world's largest brands to create what's called a customer engagement engine with their clients, so that they're able to really do a terrific job of creating the next best action, next best offer, knowing how to keep those customers engaged. And then once those customers are engaged, how to drive the correct work to completion so it can be effective and efficient and highly automated. And that's something with the recent crisis more important than ever. And I think that it's important to help people understand. I mean, you started this company 37 years ago and your book, Build for Change, you talked about the early days of computer programming and assembly language where we were loading registers and so forth and then talked about the progression of computer programming languages and even higher level languages, but you made the point of the book that it just didn't get to the point where businesses could actually interact with the computers. And that's really what Peg is all about is having essentially a layer that you can communicate to in business terms. Well, it's all designed to be able to put business people back in control of their technology. You know, what I found was amazing when I started Peg up was that while other industries were making things easier for people to take advantage of automation, computer software seemed to be going in the wrong direction. And while I'll tell you now, we were well over 30 years later, it's gone massively in the wrong direction. It's enormously complicated. The whole way people design and build systems is completely separated from the people who are actually going to be using it. Stuff is passed over to programmers, comes back and no one can look under the covers. We're entirely about creating a transparency there where the business people can actually work directly with IT to model their business. And from that model, our software literally writes the code. You know, Alan, again, that's something you talked about in your book and you talked about the reasons why. Your rogue systems, shadow IT, et cetera, et cetera. You're right. It has gotten more complex. And as a result, and we're living this now with the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of organizations just aren't in a position to really respond. They don't have that resiliency, but I'm really interested in how your customers have reached out to you, how you're helping your customers through this crisis. Well, it's been fascinating because it's really been a moment that's proven the importance of having technology that you build for change with because the change has been prevalent and immediate. And we've had the pleasure of being able to work with organizations who have rolled out in literally days important application. For example, the largest hospital system in the country actually, even the world, had over 200,000 employees who they needed to track and manage to make sure they knew their health, they knew their availability. We went from nothing to live in less than a week. And it's been mind-numbing. We've now released that COVID-19 tracker and manager for free to all of our client best. Well, I think it's important that, I always call it dog-fooding. Companies don't like when I say that, they say drinking their own champagne, fine. But you gave a number of examples on your earnings call. There was an APAC airline, which essentially you'd think would be shut down, but they're thinking ahead, recent customer, the Bavarian government. You have a number of industry solutions. And with the PPP and so many applications going into banks, maybe talk a little bit about some of the companies and some of your customers that were in a good position. And then maybe talk about the other side, maybe some folks that you see out there that maybe weren't in such a good position and maybe what they should be doing. Well, we've been fortunate in that our technology is so well suited to a lot of the problems that exist at this point. We give an organization a backbone. We give them the way to link together distributed workers so that work can be managed across an organization. It's so important now that so many people are suddenly working from home. And yet the organizations, our customers need to be able to distribute, manage, and automate that work. And that's something that's always been, of course, length of ours. So we've been able to do this in record time with some brand new clients like that Bavarian government example, which went live in five days and was so thrilled with what they got, that they actually put out a press release on their own. Loading packet, which I'll tell you, almost never happens without us asking, up to major customers in the banking industry, for example, which are really trying to control the flood of requests that are occurring. So we're pleased we can be that fast, but also handle things at massive scale. But you've also seen some exposures. You know, Bill Belichick exposed their weaknesses. What have you seen just in the broad landscape of some of the organizations, you know, maybe this financial, there's some balance sheet weaknesses, but there's also some infrastructure weaknesses. You know, IT, as you pointed out many times, is really the heart of competitive advantage today. What are some of the weaknesses that you see have that have been exposed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic? Well, I think what's great is that our clients have actually seen those weaknesses themselves and everyone has been scrambling to just make it literally one day, one week at a time. But now when they look at what we call their business architecture, not really a technology architecture, it's really how do you organize your business in a way that you can really make change happen fast, but you can still be reliable and scalable. And I think some of the bad things that are happening is some of these organizations are responding with these little point applications or just trying to muddle through. Even though they know that those will not be sustainable and may break under the load, we've been working with a lot of our clients to get them the outcomes, both really fast, but in a way that will be durable and fit in with a long-term architecture. And that's what we're going to be talking about more at Peggle World Inspire. Yeah, I think you're bringing up a good point. We've talked a lot on theCUBE about the dangers of paving the cow path, so to speak, and really trying to look beyond what's comfortable and which kind of brings me to my next question. I mean, a lot of people obviously very tactically focused right now, haven't had a lot of time to look beyond this pandemic, but we're starting to come out and we're obviously going to come out in waves and going to be maybe a longer cycle, but look beyond the near term, the next 20, 30 days. What do you see as how we come out of this and where companies should be focused? So what we're finding is, I think, really interesting is there's almost a dual track mentality at our client. There's how do I get through the immediate term? How do I get through this month, perhaps the next six months? But they're also understanding that the things that have made the immediate so difficult are actually fundamental long-term gaps that they need to fix. They realize that too often they have built their systems and their technology in silos, in disparate places that don't really have a center and don't really understand the true nature of work. And that's exactly what Pegas architecture does and doing that in conjunction with bringing business and IT together can actually be powerful for both the immediate term, but also be the right framework, the right architecture for the business in the long term. So I'll talk a little bit about some of the future challenges. I mean, people, many CEOs that I'm talking to are saying, look, it is what it is. We got to look at this as an opportunity. Where do you see the opportunities and tie that in to Pegaworld Inspire? What are people going to learn at Pegaworld to take advantage of those potential opportunities? Well, Pegaworld Inspire is going to be about both of the tracks that I mentioned. We're going to have actual Pegaclients who've implemented systems at radical pace in days or weeks that really have helped their business fundamentally to teach other organizations what's possible in the immediate term. And equally importantly, perhaps even more importantly, we're going to be announcing and releasing a whole new foundation for how the longer term future of organizations is about weaving together disparate systems and their people in ways that will give them that future flexibility. Sometimes we call it being future proof and bringing business and IT together in different ways so they can serve their customers better and be more efficient at the same time. So it's going to be a really exciting agenda on June 2nd when we hold the first virtual Pegaworld for two and a half hours that day. Yeah, I mean, Pegaworld's always been a great event. I mean, many thousands of people, I think you're talking five or 6,000 people at the live physical event. I'm sure you're going to meet many, many more or reach many more in a virtual setting. So that's June 2nd. Bring us home, Alan. Give us the final word. Well, the final word is go to pegadot.com and sign up for Pegaworld. It's free. It's going to be live Q&A with me. We'll be taking questions from what we expect will be 10 times anybody who's been to one of our physical events and lots of great customer stories. It's very much a Pegaworld about telling success to the mouths and the visions of our clients. And I think that's what's gotten at such incredible ratings. And it would be terrific with this now free virtual format for everyone to attend. You're always held a great conference by the percentage of customer content that's there. So really excited for Pegaworld Inspire, Alan. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and helping us preview the event. Best of luck. Thanks Dave, a pleasure. All right, thank you for watching everybody again, June 2nd. Pegaworld Inspire, go sign up. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll be covering that event. So go to thecube.net and check out all that coverage, siliconangle.com and we'll see you there.