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IBM Operational Decision Manager vs Pega Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 6, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Operational Decision Ma...
Ranking in Business Rules Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pega Platform
Ranking in Business Rules Management
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
82
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (3rd), Process Automation (2nd), Rapid Application Development Software (5th), Low-Code Development Platforms (7th)
 

Featured Reviews

Bhasker ReddyPIdintla - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution provides an efficient, comprehensive way to manage polices for all the applications.
We use ODM to set complex business rules. For instance, we deploy this solution for most of our banking customers because there are frequent changes in the policies and business rules. These are complex to manage for enterprise applications.  ODM provides an efficient, comprehensive way to manage…
Balaji  Choda - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective wwith good automation and enhanced UI flexibility
Initially, the Pega Platform was used as a BPM tool. Now, it is not limited to BPM. We can use it for CPM, GRM, and various other functions. We also utilize robotic automation, including desktop automation and process automation The Pega Platform helps in integrating a lot of manual data and…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Its ability to use decision tables to codify the rules and manage them better."
"The business owns the rules and they're taken away from IT, so business doesn't need to ask IT to implement them, and IT doesn't need to implement them. So the business owns their decisions and their rules, and therefore, finally, they take proper ownership, and model and maintain them properly."
"It reduces operating costs because you are taking some of this work out of the high cost IT people, freeing them up to work on new initiatives and getting them out of maintenance mode. Now, the business people are the ones making business decisions on what needs to change. They are hands on making these changes."
"ODM's most valuable features are that it's easy to define and divide business rules, and it can handle very large numbers of transactions per second."
"The most valuable features are the Decision center, a web UI that allows us to make direct edits to our policies or rules; the Rule Execution Server, which allows us to analyze the rules and performance; and Rule Designer, where you can write rules and decision tables."
"The effects of allowing business users to update business rules instead of IT are business users have a closer relationship with what rules they need and are able to make those rules a lot quicker in the tools that ODM provides than if an IT person had to do it, and do it in code, requiring compiling code and deploying it."
"With ODM as a centralized rules engine, it's easy to track. You can version the rules in the ODM engine itself."
"It's easy to build, easy to adopt for the business. Business can change those rules. I think IBM has done a good job in re-architecting the product with Decision Center as its centralized view, where the business can make changes to the rules dynamically."
"The ability to define processes, build reports, and get insights or analytics on data is most valuable. It is a powerful platform."
"The workflows are the most valuable features, particularly for us, because we were attempting to automate processes by utilizing workflows to provide a hands-off comparison between the bot and the human."
"Fast prototyping."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of deployment."
"The solution is operating well overall."
"It is quite configurable, which is the most exciting feature. We can easily configure it as per our needs."
"The technical support of Pega BPM is very good."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its quick setup. Nowhere else you can create a good-looking application this quick. It's a fairly robust system."
 

Cons

"It hasn't totally helped our decision-making."
"I think there should be a facility for business to really create rules from scratch. The only part for IT should be to make sure the platform is stable, the technology platform, but everything else, the business should be able to create those rules."
"ODM could be improved with better integration with other platforms."
"I think it's stable, but if they could beef it up a little bit for bigger businesses, that'd be great, because we have so much in there. We have products that we have to split up because they are too big for it to handle sometimes. But that's just in development, within ODM. Again, processing has been fine, but I wish things were a little bit beefier."
"An area for improvement is that the documentation for ODM is huge and not very clear."
"The solution's licensing cost needs improvement."
"There is some promise of how decisions could take advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence. That has been slow to develop. It is still not clear where the market will take it, but that is something that I am looking forward to down the road."
"The platform is good. Its footprint is a little heavy. Other than that, the product works great."
"The UI needs improvement."
"The unit testing needs to improve, as well as the user interface."
"I believe they simplify the application development. It is still complex. The learning is not easy, it takes time compared to other products on the market."
"Pega should work on redefining their model and creating a demand for their skills."
"Implementation is a challenge due to the handling of the code"
"What should be included is some UI features and maybe some integrations. This includes documentation on how the UI works."
"The extensive availability of ready-made gadgets in Pega BPM is a double-edged sword. While it offers convenience, it also leads to a steeper learning curve."
"It should have integration with non-relational databases. A lot of databases are non-relational, and as a company, we are planning to move to NoSQL or open-source databases. It would be good if we are able to install and use Pega on a NoSQL database. They can also try to tailor or organize the company a bit differently and go more towards the microservice concept. I would like Pega to develop machine learning and intelligent AI algorithms. They have a good foundation in terms of the model and the stuff that we are using for some customers, and it will be good to onboard as many machine learning algorithms as possible."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It will definitely improve the cash flow of our clients, thereby it will improve the cash flow to us."
"It was not a large cost. It was a one-time cost."
"We have a client who had a three-month ROI on this tool, just in additional sales, from sort of the next best action of what product that they should offer to their clients. ROI can be very quick with this product."
"We made a lifetime purchase. We purchased it by number of PVUs for our stage and product environments."
"ODM's pricing could be more competitive as there are open-source business rules engines that are becoming standard."
"It is an expensive solution."
"I would rate the product's pricing a six out of ten."
"The price is a bit expensive."
"This upgrade process is very expensive; although I haven't been on the sales team responsible for the pricing, I know it costs millions of dollars."
"The price could be lower."
"The licensing model from Pega BPM is too complex and is more expensive than other solutions, such as SAP. The overall price of the solution depends on the use case."
"Licensing is expensive. You need to wisely select between per user and per case."
"They have both on-premise and cloud licensing. If you are a small to medium company, go for the cloud option because that eliminates a lot of the setting up of your DevTest and performance environments, multiple environments, because you can buy that from Pega with the cloud option. So your setup time really goes down. If you're a large company, then you're better off putting it within your company. You have other skill resources within your company to create environments."
"The price of this solution, including installation and configuration, is comparable to competing vendors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Insurance Company
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Is Pega BPM easy to work with and can beginners utilize this software?
You do need some preparation to be able to use all functions of Pega BPM. However, all users of this platform are in luck as it comes with good documentation and you can learn pretty much everythin...
Have you encountered any issues while using Pega BPM and were you assisted by the company?
My company has been using this tool for years and the only issue we have had, if you can call it that, was while setting it up. When we were setting it up initially, we had some drawbacks and could...
When you consider the features and benefits of Pega BPM, would you say this product is fairly priced?
Pega BPM can be considered overpriced for some; it all depends on the size of your company and the requirements of your customers. Sure, there are products out there that do the things that Pega B...
 

Also Known As

IBM Operational Decision Management, ILOG JRules, IBM ODM
Pega BPM, Pegasystems, SmartBPM, PegaRULES
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Odyssey Transportation & Logistics Corporation, Swiss Customs, Athletes' Performance, L_elo, Versicherungskammer Bayern
The State of Maine, ANZ, Coca-Cola, Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), ME, New South Wales, OptumRx, Texas Department of Transportation, UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Operational Decision Manager vs. Pega Platform and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.
823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.