 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Pegaworld Inspire. Brought to you by Pegasystems. Hi everybody, welcome back. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage Pegaworld Inspire 2020. Karim Aginal is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Product at Pegapekasystems. Karim, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Hi Dave, thanks for having me. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I wish we were in, in, you know, face to face at your big show, but this is going to have to do, you know, a little different this year doing, doing the virtual event. You're used to a big stage, big audience, lots of clapping and buzz. How's it been for you, this sort of virtual pivot? It's been different. It's definitely been different, especially since last few years when we had it in Vegas. So it was a big Vegas show. Now we're in my living room, not the same vibe, but nevertheless, we have a lot of new products and new stories to tell, new experiences to share with the clients. So we're focusing on, on those aspects. And I'm excited to get into that. But I mean, your whole raison d'etre is you get built for change. And obviously we've been thrown this curveball more than a curveball, like knuckleball. Maybe talk about what you're seeing your customers do in terms of being able to rapidly adapt to this new abnormal. Yeah, so we've seen obviously across the globe, right? Not just with Pega, not with just our clients. We've seen a tremendous amount of change. We've seen change in how we work, how we communicate, how we collaborate, how we get into meetings. And a lot of our clients, of course, had to quickly adjust to these recent changes as well in these last couple of months. And in many cases, they had to make technology choices. And we're pretty excited that basically Pega technology has been on that, you know, top shelf of technologies that our clients chose to leverage in this time of crisis. They chose to use the technology to better engage across their organization on the work that they do. They use the Pega technology to actually digitize how a lot of the work that gets done in the organization, they use it as a COVID-19 response. They use it to engage directly with their consumers. So it's been on the, as I said, on that top shelf of technologies that they had to leverage to adjust and transform. So it's been very busy, Dave. Well, obviously a lot of companies have been hit and some industries have been very hard hit. You know, kind of shut down, but I want to pick a couple of examples. So let's start with healthcare. I mean, they've been hit like no other. Frontlines, do you have some examples that you can share or any example in healthcare, how they pivoted? I mean, have they been able to even spend time on anything that's not like emergency? Maybe you could share some of your experiences there. Absolutely. Actually, a lot of the other healthcare organizations that we're working with, you know, the frontline workers obviously, they're the way that they engage has changed quite a bit. But also the people that work in the corporate in the back office and the technology, they have changed as well as they had to really respond to the changes in the scale of their operations, changes in how they engage with their customers with the other organizations that they work with and how they operated their processes. We did have one of the customers that I talk about, HCA, one of the Pega customers. They basically implemented a Pega solution just in a couple of days and rolled it out into production just a couple of days to keep track of their employees, the volunteers that work with them to keep track of people who are impacted by COVID-19 and they have about 200,000 people that they need to manage the availability in the schedules and they decided to use Pega technology to be able to manage that across the enterprise which has been a great experience for us to work with them. So, Krim, how would that work? So they're an existing Pega customer, they spun up a new module, they sort of developed it themselves. Did you guys help them? Describe how that sort of became real. Sure, so we actually have a couple of different examples of these types of applications that went live in the last couple of months from the healthcare organizations, we had it from some organizations the telecommunications industry, we had states governments and different public sector companies. It works differently for each one of them but it all starts with really having somebody, having a clear idea on exactly what they want to actually do. What do they want to keep track of? What do they want to operate? What do they want to be able to actually get done? And having somebody that had that vision and being able to articulate that in the Pega's construct to automate it, to define the process, to define what they're going to keep track of, to define the germus of those things that they're going to keep track of and a lot of the clients that have custom centers of excellence in their organizations with Pega experts, some of our clients work with our great set of partners who have come up with ideas and brought them into these organizations and we also get pulled into a couple of these implementations and like I said Dave, we've always talked about being built for change and this was a time of crisis, this was a time of change and Pega's technology is perfectly structured to be able to get things quickly done and up and running but what it really needed at all times is somebody to actually have the vision and it builds to make a decision and go execute on it and we know that the people are there, we know the technology is there and that's how a lot of the results got done. Yeah, very fast decisions had to get made. Another example is that we've been tracking the telecom space and the whole work from home pivot has really put stress on distributed networks, you know, the traditional corporate networks, now everybody's at home, we've all experienced this whether it's video calls, et cetera, you know, the kids are at home, at school, sometimes gaming so the internet is, it didn't blow up luckily but Bill, major change in the telco industry. Absolutely, and how lucky we are to actually have access to all this technology to all this internet capacity and yeah, it's been a big change, obviously the demand on their business has increased quite a bit in the telecommunications industry, one of our clients that basically had contact centers in other countries where the agents actually didn't have an opportunity to go into the contact center and they couldn't actually enter the building, they weren't even allowed to be out on the street so while this is happening, right, while basically the agents are not able to go to work, at the same time, the volumes are increasing through the roof, right, there's a tremendous amount of urgency and higher level of the volumes of requests coming in from the end customers, the end consumers coming in, right, it's basically, you know, a perfect storm of things happening so what our clients have done is a couple of things, one, they created new sets of processes and they created an army of volunteers from within the business to be able to respond to customer requests from home and two, they really completely ramped up the pace of taking processes and making them self-service available on the mobile apps, on the website, on the IVR because customers have, you know, the consumers have a sense of urgency, they need an answer, they need something get done quickly and they want to be able to, you know, avoid waiting online for four hours, right, we saw that, we saw a lot of the websites that says, hey, if you call our web, if you call our contact center, you know, some companies put up these messages, it's going to be so many hours, so our clients were able to take the processes that they have defined for their contact center agents and actually push them to self-service channels, like the mobile channel, like the, you know, the web self-service channel, as well as chat and chatbot channels to be able to get the answers that the consumers need quickly and get their work done, respond to them quickly while in this time of amazing change. Yeah, so that enables, you know, scaling self-service is critical. You know, I want to ask you about digital transformation, it's a theme of Pegal World Inspire. We've been a lot of talk, you know, last three, four years about digital transformation. Frankly, a lot of lip serve. I think it was Satya Nadella said we've, you know, accelerated, we've pulled two years of digital transformation into two months. But again, you guys are all about digital and digitizing processes, so I wonder if you can talk about, you know, that theme of the show, kind of what it means to you and your client? I think it's been amazing. I think, like you said, there's been a lot of talk about it, like several years, and there have been lots of initiatives, but I think it was missing the urgency that it needed to be able to get moving and get things done. We have had so many discussions, so many people have talked about what do we need to do? Do we need to do it now? Can we basically wait, you know, long meetings and long delays on making decisions to actually move forward? And this just basically changed all that, right? There's no more the question of, you know, do we need to go through digital transformation everybody knows, it's a yes, we had to do it, no question about it. There's no more question of, can we do it? Yep, we know we can do it. Do we have the technology, do we have the people? Yep, got it. All that is in place. Now really, the thing that we're seeing people succeed in is it builds to make a decision to move forward, to move forward aggressively. And having now proven that the people and the technology is there and that they can get done, and it really basically requires decisiveness and leadership. Yeah, I think, you know, the word you use urgency because there was a lot of complacency eating up this, but the good news was that there was also a lot of experimentation going on. So, you know, COVID obviously accelerated that urgency. Ana Glyce from Siemens is an example of somebody who spoke during your keynote, big industrial exposed with a, you know, huge supply chain, which, you know, for years, some of that's been really opaque and digitized that. Now you get greater transparency. What were the key learnings from her discussion? Right, so, you know, Ana and the team have done a spectacular job. And, you know, like I say, they didn't need a worldwide pandemic to get going. And they basically approached there systematically with a great plan. And what they basically were able to do is really do that, you know, another thing that people have done a lot of lip service in the past is, you know, IT and business collaboration. They actually executed brilliantly from that perspective where the IT organization, technology organization, sort of delivered on top of the Pega platform, delivered the platform to be able to manage all the technical aspects of business applications that all the processes that Siemens needed. And in different departments and different divisions were able to leverage those assets and be able to quickly get applications up and running and being able to dramatically increase the speed of innovation while at the same time dramatically reducing the cost of getting these things done and running them. So basically they built that environment where IT provided the technical aspects as a service to business applications so that they can quickly get things done, you know, automate their processes and deliver tremendous amount of operational efficiency into the organization. Now, Karim, of course, as the head of products, I want to get into some of the product discussion, some of the hard news that you have at Pega World is this notion of the Pega process fabric. I mean, the metaphor is very strong. You think about, you know, digital, you think about a fabric, but what do we need to know about the Pega process fabric? I, it's a great solution that I believe corporations, especially enterprises need to be able to make their staff more effective, streamline their work, getting them to a world where they don't have to personally navigate through dozens of different applications just to achieve an outcome. Because whenever you basically have a situation where an employee of an art enterprise has to jump through, you know, six, 10, 12 different applications just to be able to get something done for the customer, there's a tremendous amount of efficiency that's lost, there's a tremendous amount of training that's required to be able to actually get people to be able to manage all these, you know, working across all these applications. And of course, it's very easy to make mistakes. And whenever you have an environment that's built up like that, it inevitably gets exposed to the customers. And they basically, their experiences realize that there's a lot of jumping around. The process fabric is around bringing an experience to the users that is basically a single experience, even though work is coming from many different applications in the organization, right? You talk to enterprise in anywhere in the world and you basically name any enterprise software company and they'll tell you, yeah, we got that. They have it. They have Microsoft, they have Salesforce, they have ServiceNow, they have Pega, they have it. And users, employees have to juggle through all of these systems to be able to actually get their work done. The job of process fabric is to actually bring all these tasks, bring all this work that the workers and then on behalf of the customers have to get done and weave them together into a single experience so that they don't have to jump around. They, there's much more efficiency, get work done fast. And the organization then also has control around how the work is prioritized across different systems, how the work is managed to how it gets assigned, how to handle key customers and be able to see all the work that we're doing on behalf of them across all the different systems and be able to actually bring a home for all of these efforts and provide that experience to the user. So, Karim, what's the secret sauce there? Is it a combination of, you know, using APIs to those applications and machine intelligence and machine learning? There's a little bit of, there's a little bit of a, you know, many things. It's the key is one, we basically, you know, come with standard connectivity to standard enterprise solutions. We come pre-packaged with connectivity to Pega environments within the organizations as we have many customers that have deployed dozens of different, you know, Pega applications. We come with a standard open API approach to be able to provide connectivity. And then we use our decisioning capabilities and process capabilities to manage the prioritization, be able to manage the, you know, routing and the experience for the end users. Okay, and the prioritization is something that's determined by business rules. Is that correct? Absolutely, absolutely. So the idea is to be able to leverage the business rules capabilities of the Pega platform to be able to handle the prioritization, the routing and, you know, sort of collating things together that are associated with the same work streams and for the same customers. You know, when Alan Treffler started Pega, right around the time I started the industry in AI was, you know, the hot buzzword and it took a while to get here, but it feels pretty real right now. How do you look at machine intelligence and the role that it plays? You've used the term real, real-time AI. What do you mean by that? And what's so special about your AI? Well, our real-time AI is real. So that's one of the main specialties. But look, there's a lot of basically technology out there. There's a lot of great technology out there with great use cases that can look at historical sets of data and be able to actually generate predictive models from them. And those are great. Those are very, very valuable. But we believe that especially when we're directly engaging with customers that is not enough that you need actually real-time, real-real-time AI. Let me give you an example. If you were basically running some predictive models against a set of customer data, say basically in January and February and using them in March, you will not get the right results that are basically for each individual customer because things have changed dramatically between February and March. You couldn't make decisions about a customer based on what happened in their activity in January based on what's today. One of our telecom, one of our banking clients, for example, use their customer data in the UK and at West, use their customer data and identified people that work for the National Health Services and provided real-time programs that are specifically tailored for them. So that's basically being able to actually leverage the power of AI and be able to change how you engage with customers. They looked at customer data who might be at financial risk due to the crisis and actually changed programs and payment programs for them because things have changed dramatically in the timeframe. Our AI leverages predictive models based on historical data, which is great, but actually also adds on top of it the ability to evaluate real-time data based on the real context of the end customer at this point in time, at this point on their experience on the website, on the IVR, on the mobile app, and be able to determine the best way to engage with that customer at that moment in time and be able to deliver that one-to-one personalized experience. And this has been basically one of the major capabilities of Pega Technology that's how we differentiate in the marketplace in our ability to actually drive the AI capabilities in real-time interactions. What if I could ask you about one of the trends in the marketplace and you're seeing it in the equity markets, at least private equity, robotic process automation. People I think sometimes misunderstand you and I've said, I've reported a number of times that RPAs is a small part of what you guys do. But at the same time, you're seeing a lot of energy in the marketplace, money, billions of dollars, billions, yeah, I have poured in. How do you look at RPA? Where does it fit in the Pega platform? Yeah, so RPA is absolutely a part of the overall journey. We look at things from an end-to-end automation perspective. Essentially, we need to do something for a customer on behalf of a customer to get an outcome delivered to a customer. And there's a process associated with it. And this process is frequently going to touch through a bunch of different systems. And some of these systems that it's gonna touch are old. They've been around for a very, very long time. And they're basically, they're a pain point for a lot of organizations. What RPA does really well is it basically lets you put a robotic process, essentially process that runs on the desktop and to be able to sort of execute that process inside that old system automatically. But, and that saves time and saves money. And there's a basically creating a clear ROI associated with it. But it doesn't eliminate that old technology. It just puts essentially a veneer in front of it so that the end user doesn't have to key into some old application. It just doesn't on their behalf. We think that's a part of an end-to-end process automation. And as you go through different steps, you might have to execute these robotic process automations. But it's not digital transformation. You're not really transforming it, right? You are basically eliminating that pain point for a time being and it will become a problem maybe for the next person that has to deal with it. We believe that robotic process automation and is a great way to automate stuff. But each one of those elements need to go through that transformation as a part of the modernization digital transformation journey. So it's that systems view that you would stress. And obviously you've always taken a systems view. You got a platform that is an end-to-end platform. That's really what you mean by the end-to-end is that system view, correct? Right, what we mean really by end-to-end is a customer comes in and they have a need and we basically get them what they come in here for. And whatever is in between, whatever processes and systems and integrations and technologies necessary in between, that's sort of the second part of the story. The main important part is work that needs to get done, we get the work done. And we will do anything in between. We'll do integrations, we will do routing, we will do automation, we'll do business rules, we'll do AI, we'll do robotic process automation, anything that is necessary to basically drive that outcome, drive efficiency, faster response times and better customer experience. Okay, so those are the key metrics. You just answered that other question. Last question then is you've got uncertain times. We've talked with the gamut of digital transformation, but what advice would you give the customers given this uncertainty? How should they be best prepared? I think it's most important really to pay attention to the end consumers and look at it from a perspective of empathy. What is the end consumer worried about right now? What is difficult for them? What is it that they need from your organization? Given their current circumstances and make sure the experience that your corporation provides to them is the right experience. This is, I think, a time for a lot of corporations to build some incredible loyalty with their end customers, with the consumers. This is an amazing opportunity to basically have great engagement and to be able to have people realize that yeah, they were there for me. It was a good experience. It was an easy experience. It was a seamless experience. And I would mostly emphasize on that empathy factor. Make sure that we understand what's going through, what's happening in their lives, what they need and as when they engage with the corporation, make sure that we provide a seamless experience to them. I think that's a great point. We're not going back to the customer experiences of the 2010s. We're entering a new decade. And Karim, thanks so much for your insights and coming on theCUBE to share them. My pleasure, thanks for having me. You're welcome and thank you for watching, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Pegaworld Inspire 2020, right back for this short break.