What needs improvement with PegaRULES?

PegaRULES should provide a more drag-and-drop interface to make it a low-code, no-code product.

There is room for potential improvement in the performance of PegaRULES, as well as the need to address any existing security concerns. It should be noted that working with an older version of Pega, rather than the latest 8.x versions, may limit certain capabilities and leave room for vulnerabilities that could benefit from increased attention. Furthermore, the user interface (UI) could be a candidate for enhancements. It is worth mentioning that newer versions of Pega may have introduced improvements in these areas.

The UI has always been the weakest part. These days, the competition with Salesforce is with respect to the outreach of handling the process. That has been one of the challenging factors. So, mostly, it's about the UI, which I believe is because Pega is dependent upon a third-party application, be it React or Angular, to have a UI. At times, the performance can be a major issue, which is something they're working on. So, performance can be a concern sometimes. Their support could also be better. In terms of additional features, I have no requirements.

Customers expect more out-of-the-box solutions. Right now, Pega is a platform on which you can build anything; as a platform, it's very powerful. However, what customers also expect is a quick turnaround. That is one area where they can improve. If they could create more business-friendly, customer-friendly solutions in the areas where customers traditionally use Pega, that would be helpful. That way, the same solution can solve similar problems for other customers, and it is more plug-and-play. They are building in process mining. They acquired a technology company in Brazil, so they're bringing process mining over into the product. Process mining will help the customers to do continuous business implementations since they will find challenges to help adjust processes. That is one thing that we're looking forward to.

In theory, business rules tend to be something that business users can use. What I mean by that is that I don't know whether it always works out that well because the problem in banking specifically is that you need auditing and you need some kind of control. So, even if you're doing rules, there has to be an approval process. You can do all that in Pega, but it is not exactly everything that the vendor says it is. I've spent some hands-on time with the platform, and you can do those things, and it is all low code, but is it as easy as they make it sound? No. That's my two cents. For example, if I want to do something, there is no way to switch from low code. I just want to do a simple If-Then-Else rule, but I have to go through their low-code tool and do dragging and dropping. I'm a development person, and in my opinion, even some business users could do this easier. There is no way to go back and forth to an editor where I can just type in an If-Then-Else rule, which would be much faster than drawing in their low-code editor. They don't support that. They lead you too much. It depends on your level of expertise, but in some cases, it is just not that easy to use. I don't like their whole deployment pipeline. It is very closed in nature. You have to use their pipeline to push things out to production. It is a turnkey solution, and I'm not a big fan of that. That was one of the things that we liked better about Salesforce. With Salesforce, we could use our own deployment tools or we could use a third-party deployment tool. Pega is a pretty closed system. It is closed in the sense that the deployment pipeline and some of the things that you do go through their tool. They don't integrate with GitHub, Azure DevOps, and so forth, which are really effective for versioning. I just don't like that.

Containerization should be improved in relation to Pega because Camunda is deployable in the containerization deployment process. Pega is trying to move in that direction, but that will have to improve slightly.

We would like to have a better ability to customize PegaRULES. In Pega, it is very important to have good overall system performance. As such, the performance should be improved. Better automation would be helpful because I would like to see all of the manual intervention removed.

From a room for improvement point of view, what I've seen is that many customers want solutions that directly meet their requirements so while Pega has somewhat vertical solutions on Pega customer service and sales automation, industry and customer experts expect more out-of-box solutions to be readily available on Pega. It is the same for additional features - the customer expects more business solutions to be directly available on Pega. For example, when I say business solutions, Pega could have a business solution on customer service, a business solution on sales automation. Pega may not have a proper business solution for LOS, or Loan Origination System. These are common business solutions which could be made available in the solution, it would be very good if they could focus on the direct business solutions which customers expect over here.

PEGA claims that they provide a LOW-CODE-PLATFORM which is easy to use - even for "citizen developers" (i.e. business employees). bla bla. If you really want to use all the features out of this platform, you definitely need a lot of experience and a lot of training. In all of my projects there were many obstacles to solve which weren't simple and which could not be solved by "citizen developers" but only by Lead System Architects with 5+ years of PEGA experience. You can compare PEGA with SAP - if you really know how to use both of them, it can make the difference. If you are only interested in developing automated micro services / processes, than there are far better options. I would like to have a lightweight version of the solution, something like Appian or Outsystems that is much more focussed on process core features. If you set up your first projects and you see that you need more functionalities, than it would be great to upgrade to the PEGA platform. For me PEGA is sometimes like the MS Office package. In the past you had the core functionalities like Word and Excel, and you were fine with that. Now you have a complete suite starting from SharePoint and Teams and whatever, but in most cases you don't need all the features because you just have a certain purpose where you need the best software. CONCLUSION: The PEGA platform is an outstanding product for those companies that are really willing to use it as a BPM PLATFORM throughout the whole company. The many features and OOTB functionalities makes it very valuable for many different use cases. Those companies that are willing to setup a BPM program for a couple of years will definitely benefit from PEGA.

The solution needs to invest more in its technology. For public and private clouds, for example, the development environment is slow. Saving events should take one to two seconds, max, and because you are making changes often, the slowness cuts down on productivity because we have to wait for things to save before continuing. The UI could be slightly improved.

The UI needs improvement. The product itself does not have too many issues, but implementing Pega solutions is a bit of a challenge due to the way code is handled, and in general the quality of partners available with Pega specialisation could be improved.