>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld iNspire, brought to you by Pegasystems. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. And now that the dust has settled on the event, we wanted to have a little postmortem power panel, and I'm really excited to have three great guests here today. Adrian Swinscoe is a customer service and experience advisor and the best-selling author of a couple of books: "How to Wow" and "Punk CX." Adrian great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey Dave. >> And Shelly Kramer's a principal, analyst, and a founding partner at Futurum Research, CUBE alum. Shelly, good to see you. >> Hi, great to see you too. >> And finally, Don Schuerman who is the CTO of Pegasystems and one of the people that was really highlighting the keynotes. Don, thanks for your time, appreciate you coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Guys, let's start with some of the takeaways from the event, and if you don't mind I'm going to set it up. I had some, I had many many notes. But I'll take a cue from Alan's keynote, where he talked about three things: rethinking the customer engagement, that whole experience, that as a service, I'm going to say that certainly the second part of last decade came to the front and center and we think is going to continue in spades. And then new tech, we heard about that. Don we're going to ask you to chime in on that. Modern software, microservices, we've got machine intelligence now. And then I thought there were some really good customer examples. We heard from Siemens, we heard from the CIO and head of digital at Aflac, the Bank of Australia. So, some really good customer examples. But Shelly, let me start with you. What were your big takeaways of PegaWorld iNspire 2020, the virtual edition? >> You know, what I love is a focus, and we have talked a lot about that here at Futurum Research, but what I love is the thinking that what really is important now is to think about rethinking and kind of tearing things apart. Especially when we're in a time, we're in difficult economic times, and so instead of focusing on rebuilding and relaunching as quickly as possible, I think that now's the time to really focus on reexamining what is it that our customers want? How is it that we can best serve them? And really sort of start from ground zero and examine our thinking. And I think that's really at the heart of digital transformation, and I think that both in this virtual event and in some interviews I was lucky enough to do in advance with some of the Pega senior team, that was really a key focus, is really thinking about how we can re-architect things, how we can do things in ways that are more efficient, that impact people more effectively, that impact the bottom line more effectively. And to me that's really exciting. >> So Adrian, CX is obviously your wheelhouse. A lot of the conversation at PegaWorld iNspire was of course about customer experience, customer service. How do you think the content went? What were some of the highlights for you? And maybe, what would you have liked to hear more of? >> Well I think, thanks Dave, I actually really enjoyed it. I actually kind of thought was, first of all I should say that I've been to a bunch of virtual summits and I thought this was one of the best ones I've done in terms of its pace and its interactivity. I love the fact that Don was bouncing around the screen, kind of showing us around the menu and things. I thought that was great. But the things that I thought really stood out for me was this idea of the context around accelerating digital transformation. And that's very contextual, it's almost being forced upon us. But then this idea of also the center-out thinking and the Process Fabric. Because it really reminded me of, and Don you can maybe correct me if I'm wrong here, is taking a systems-thinking approach to delivering the right outcomes for customers. Because it's always struck me that there's a contradiction at the heart of the rhetoric around customer-centricity where people say they want to do the right things by customers but then they force them down this channel-centric or process-centric way of thinking. And so actually I thought it was really refreshing to hear about this center-out and Process Fabric platform that Pega's building. And I thought it's really exciting because it felt like actually we're going to start to take a more systemic look and take to delivering great service and great experience. So I thought that was really great. Those were my big headlines out of the summit. >> So Don, one of the-- >> Adrian I think-- >> Go ahead, please. >> Yeah, I think the whole idea, you know, and Alan referred to center-out as a business architecture, and I think that's really an important concept because this is really about the intersection of that business goal. How do I truly become customer-centric? And then how do I actually make my technology do it? And it's really important for that to work where you put your business logic in the technology. If you continue to do it in the sort of channel-centric way or really data-centric, system-centric way that historically has been the approach, I don't think you can build a sustainable platform for great customer engagement. So I think that idea of a business architecture that you clued in on a little bit is really central to how we've been thinking about this. >> Let's stay on that for a second. But first of all, I just want to mention, you guys did a good job of not just trying to take a physical event and plug in into virtual. So congratulations on that. The virtual clicker toss, and you know, you were having some fun eating your eggs. I mean that was, that's great. And the Dropkick Murphys couldn't be live, but you guys still leveraged that, so well done. One of the better ones that I've seen. But I want to stay on your point there. Alan talked about some of the mistakes that are made, and one of the questions I have for you guys is, what is the state of customer experience today, and why the divergence between great, and good, and pretty crappy? And Alan talked about, well, people try to impose business process top-down, or they try to infuse logic in the database bottom-up. You really got to do that middle-out. So, Don I want to come back to you. Let's explore that a little bit. What do you really mean by middle-out? Where am I putting the actual business logic? >> Yeah, I think this is important, right. And I think that a lot of time we have experiences as customers. And I had one of these recently with a cable provider, where I spent a bunch of time on their website chatting with a chatbot of some kind, that then flipped me over to a human. When the chatbot flipped me to the human, the human didn't know what I was doing with the chatbot. And that human eventually told me I had to call somebody. So I picked up the phone, I made the phone call. And that person didn't know what I was doing on chat with the human or with the chatbot. So every time there's a customer, I'm restarting. I'm reexplaining where I am. And that to me is a direct result of that kind of channel-centric thinking, where all of my business logic ends up embedded in, "Well hey, we're going to build a cool chatbot. "And now we're going to build a cool chat system. "And by the way, "we're going to keep our contact centers running." But I'm not thinking holistically about the customer experience. And that's why we think this center-out approach is so important, because I want to go below the channel. And I want to think about that customer journey. What's the outcome I'm trying to get to? In the case of my interaction, I was just trying to increase my bandwidth so that I could do events like this, right? What's that outcome that I'm trying to get to and how do I get the customer to that outcome in a way that's as efficient for the business and as easy for the customer as possible regardless of what channel they're on. And I think that's a little bit of a new way of thinking. And again, it means thinking not just about the customer goal, but having an opinion, whether you are a business leader or an IT person, about where that logic belongs in your architecture. >> So, Adrian. Don just described the sort of bot and human experience, which mimics a lot of the human experience that we've all touched in the past. So, but the customer journey that Don talked about isn't necessarily one journey. There's multiple journeys. So what's your take on how organizations can do better with that kind of service. >> Well I think you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, actually during the summer I was talking, I was listening to Paul Greenberg talk about the future of customer service. And Paul said something that I think was really straightforward but really insightful. He said, "Look, organizations think about customer journeys "but customers don't think about journeys "in the way that organizations do. "They think discontinuously." So it's like, "I'm going to go to channel one, "and then channel three, and then channel four, "and then channel five, and then back to channel two. "And then back to channel five again." And they expect those conversations to be picked up across those different channels. And so I think what we've got to do is develop, as Don said, build an architecture that is, that works around trying to support the different journeys but allows that flexibility and that adaptability for customers to jump around and to have one of those continuous but disconnected conversations. But it's up to us to try and connect them all, to deliver the service and experience that the customers actually want. >> Now Shelly, a lot of the customer experience actually starts with the employees, and employees don't like when the customer is yelling at them saying, "I just answered all those questions. "Why do I have to answer them again?" So you've, at your firm, you guys have written a lot about this, you've thought a lot about it, you have some data I know you shared on theCUBE one time that 80% of employees are disengaged. And so, that affects the customer experience, doesn't it? >> Yeah it does, you know. And I think that when I'm listening to Don's explanation about his cable company, I'm having flashbacks to what feels like hundreds of my own experiences. And you're just thinking, "This does not have to be this complicated!" You know, ten years ago that same thing that Don just described happened with phone calls. You know, you called one person and they passed you off to somebody else, and they passed you off to somebody else, and you were equally as frustrated as a customer. Now what's happening a lot of times is that we're plugging technology in, like a chat bot, that's supposed to make things better but we're not developing a system and processes throughout our organization, and also change management, what do I want to say, programs within the organization and so we're kind of forgetting all of those things. So what's happening is that we're still having customers having those same experiences that are a decade old, and technology is part of the mix. And it really shouldn't be that way. And so, one thing that I really enjoyed, speaking about employees, was listening to Rich Gilbert from Aflac. And he was talking about when you're moving from legacy processes to new ones, you have to plan for and invest in change management. And we talk about this all the time here at Futurum, you know technology alone is never the answer. It's technology plus people. And so you have to invest in people, you have to invest in their training in order to be able to support and manage change and to drive change. And I think one really important part of that equation is also listening to your employees and getting their feedback, and making them part of the process. Because when they are truly on your front lines, dealing with customers, many times dealing with stressed, upset, frustrated customers, you know, they have a lot of insights. And sometimes we don't bring them into those conversations, certainly early enough in the process to help, to let them help guide us in terms of the solutions and the processes that we put in place. I think that's really important. >> Yeah, a lot of-- >> Shelly, I think-- >> If I may, a lot of the frustration with some employees sometimes is those processes change, and they're unknown going into it. We saw that with COVID, Don. And so, your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the environment employees are working in is changing rapidly. We've got a customer, a large telecommunications company in the UK where their customer service requests are now being handled by about 4,000 employees pulled from their marketing department working distributed because that's the world that we're in. And the thing I was going to say in response to Shelly is, Alan mentioned in his keynote this idea of design thinking. And one of the reasons why I think that's so important is that it's actually about giving the people on the front lines a voice. It's a format for engaging the employees who actually know the day-to-day experiences of the customers, the day-to-day experiences of a customer service agent, and pulling them into the solution. How do we develop the systems, how do we rethink our processing, how does that need to plug into the various channels that we have? And that's why a lot of our focus is not just on the customer service technology, but the underlying low code platform that allows us to build those processes and those chunks of the customer journey. We often refer to them as "microjourneys" that lead to a specific outcome. And if you're using a low code based platform, something that allows anybody to come in and define that process, you can actually pull employees from the front lines and put them directly on your project teams. And all of a sudden you get better engagement but you also get this incredible insight flowing into what you're doing because you're talking to the people who live this day in and day out. >> Well and when you have-- >> So let's stay on this for a second, if we can. Shelly, go ahead please. >> Sure. When you have a chance to talk with those people, to talk with those front line employees who are having an opportunity to work with low code, no code, they get so excited about it and their jobs are completely, the way they think about their jobs and their contribution to the company, and their contribution to the customer, and the customer experience, is just so wonderful to see. And it's such an easy thing to do, so I think that that's really a critical part of the equation as it relates to success with these programs. >> Yeah, staying close to the customer-- >> Can I jump in? >> Yeah, please Adrian. >> Can I jump in on that a little, a second. I think Shelly, you're absolutely right. I think that it's a really simple thing. You talk about engagement. And one of the key parts of engagement, it seems to me, is that, is giving people a voice and making them feel important and feel heard. And so to go and ask for their opinion and to help them get involved and make a difference to the work that they do, the outcomes that their customers receive, and the overall productivity and efficiency, can only have a positive impact. And it's almost like, it feels self-evident that you'd do that but unfortunately it's not very common. >> Right. It does feel self-evident. But we miss on that front a lot. >> So I want to ask, I'm going to come back to, we talked about people process, we'll come back to that. But I want to talk about the tech. You guys announced, the big announcement was the Pega Process Fabric. You talked about that, Don, as a platform for digital platforms. You've got all these cool microservices and dynamic APIs and being able to compose on the fly, so some pretty cool stuff there. I wonder, with the virtual event, you know, with the physical event you've got the hallway traffic, you talk to people and you get face-to-face reactions. Were you able to get your kind of real-time reactions to the announcement? What was that like? Share with us please. >> Yeah, so, we got well over 1,000 questions in during the event and a lot of them were either about Process Fabric or comments about it. So I think people are definitely excited about this. And when you strip away all of the buzzwords around microservices and cloud, et cetera, I think what we're really getting at here is that work is going to be increasingly more distributed. We are living proof of that right now, the four of us all coming here from different studios. But work is going to be distributed for a bunch of reasons. Because people are more distributed, because organizations increasingly are building customer journeys that aren't just inside their walls, but are connected to the partners and their ecosystem. I'm a bank but I may, as part of my mortgage process, connect somebody up to a home insurer. And all of a sudden the home buying process goes beyond my four walls. And then finally, as you get all of these employees engaged with building their low code apps and being citizen developers, you want to let the 1,000 flowers to bloom but you also need a way to connect that all back together. And Process Fabric is about putting the technology in place to allow us to take these distributed bits of work that we need to do and weave them together into experiences that are coherent for a customer and easy for an employee to navigate. Because I think it's going to be really really important that we do that. And even as we take our systems and break them up into microservices, well customers don't interact with microservices. Customers interact with journeys, with experiences, with the processes you lay out, and making sure we can connect that up together into something that feels easy for the customer and the employee, and gets them to that result they want quickly, that's what the vision of Process Fabric is all about. >> You know, it strikes me, I'm checking my notes here. You guys talked about a couple of examples. One was, I think you talked about the car as sort of a mobility experience, maybe, you know, it makes me wonder with all this AI and autonomous vehicle stuff going on, at what point is owning and driving your own vehicle really going to be not the norm anymore? But you talked about this totally transformed, sorry to use that word, but experience around autos. And certainly financial services is maybe a little bit more near-term. But I wonder Shelly, Futurum, you know, you guys look ahead, how far can we actually go with AI in this realm? >> Well, I think we can go pretty far and I think it'll happen pretty fast. And I think that we're seeing that already in terms of what happened when we had the Coronavirus COVID-19, and of course we're still navigating through that, is that all of a sudden things that we talked about doing, or thought about doing, or planned doing, you know later on in this year or 2021, we had to do all of those things immediately. And so again, it is kind of like ripping the Bandaid off. And we're finding that AI plays a tremendously important role in relieving the workload on the frontline workers, and being able to integrate empathy into decision making. And you know, I go back to, I remember when you all first rolled out the empathy part of your platform, Don, and just watching a demo on that of how you can slide this empathy meter to be warmer, and see in true dollars and cents over time the impact of treating your customers with more empathy, what that delivers to a company. And I think that AI that continues to build and learn and again, what we're having right now, is we're having this gigantic volume of needs, of conversation, of all these transactions that need to happen at once, and great volumes make for better outcomes as it relates to artificial intelligence and how learning can happen more quickly over time. So I think that it's, we're definitely going to see more use of AI more rapidly than we might've seen it before, and I don't think that's going to slow down, at all. Certainly, I mean there's no reason for it to slow down. The benefits are tremendous. The benefits are tremendous, and let me step back and say, following a conversation with Rob Walker on responsible AI, that's a whole different ball of wax. And I think that's something that Pega has really embraced and planted a flag in. So I think that we'll see great things ahead with AI, and I think that we'll see the Pega team really leading as it relates to ethical AI. And I think that's tremendously important as well. >> Well that's the other side of the coin, you know. I asked how far can we go and I guess you're alluding to how far should we go. But Adrian, we also heard about agility and empathy. I mean, I want an empathic service provider. Are agility and empathy related to customer service, and how so? >> Well, David, I think that's a great question. I think that, you talk about agility and talk about empathy, and I think the thing is, what we probably know from our own experience is that being empathetic is sometimes going to be really hard. And it takes time, and it takes practice to actually get better at it. It's almost like a new habit. Some people are naturally better at it than others. But you know, organizationally, I talk about that we need to almost build, almost like an empathetic musculature at an organizational level if we're going to achieve this. And it can be aided by technology, but we, when we develop new muscles it takes time. And sometimes you go through a bit of pain in doing that. So I think that's where the agility comes in, is that we have to test and learn and try new things, be willing to get things wrong and then correct, and then kind of move on. And then learn from these kind of things. And so I think the agility and empathy, it does go hand in hand and it's something that will drive growth and increasing empathetic interactions as we go forward. But I think it's also, just to build on Shelly's point, I think you're absolutely right that Pega has been leading the way in this sort of dimension, in terms of its T-switch and its empathetic advisor. But now the ethical AI testing or the ethical bias testing adds a dimension to that to make sure it's not just about all horsepower, but being able to make sure that you can steer your car. To use your analogy. >> So AI's coming whether we like it or not. Right, Shelly? Go ahead. >> It is. One real quick real world example here is, you know, okay so we have this time when a lot of consumers are furloughed. Out of work. Stressed about finances. And we have a lot of Pega's customers are in the financial services space. Some of the systems that they've established, they've developed over time, the processes they've developed over time is, "Oh, I'm talking with Shelly Kramer and she has a "blah-blah-blah account here. "And this would be a great time to sell her on "this additional service," or whatever. And when you can, so that was our process yesterday. But when you're working with an empathic mindset and you are also needing to be incredibly agile because of current circumstances and situations, your technology, the platform that you're using, can allow you to go, "Okay I'm dealing "with a really stressed customer. "This is not the best time "to offer any additional services." Instead what we need to ask is this series of questions: "How can we help?" Or, "Here are some options." Or whatever. And I think that it's little tweaks like that that can help you in the customer service realm be more agile, be more empathetic, and really deliver an amazing customer experience as a result. And that's the technology. >> If I could just add to that. Alan mentioned in his keynote a specific example, which is Commonwealth Bank of Australia. And they were able, multiple times this year, once during the Australian wildfires and then again in response to the COVID crisis, to completely shift and turn on a dime how they interacted with their customer, and to move from a prioritization of maybe selling things to a prioritization of responding to a customer need. And maybe offering payment deferrals or assistance to a customer. But back to what we were talking about earlier, that agility only happened because they didn't have the logic for that embedded in all their channels. They had it centralized. They had it in a common brain that allowed them to make that change in one place and instantly propagate it to all of the 18 different channels in which they touch their customer. And so, being able to have agility and that empathy, to my mind, is explicitly tied to that concept of a center-out business architecture that Alan was talking about. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And, you know, this leads to discussion about automation, and again, how far can we go, how far should we go? Don, you've been interviewed many many times, like any tech executive, about the impact of AI on jobs. And, you know, the typical response of course is, "No, we want augmentation." But the reality is, machines have always replaced humans it's just, now it's the first time in terms of cognitive function. So it's a little different for us this time around. But it's clear, as I said, AI is coming whether we like it or not. Automation is very clearly on the top of people's minds. So how do you guys see the evolution of automation, the injection of automation into applications, the ubiquity of automations coming in this next decade? Shelly, let's start with you. >> You know, I was thinking you were going to ask Don that question so I'm just listening and listening. (laughing) >> Okay, well we can go with Don, that's-- >> No I'm happy to answer it. It's fine, it just wasn't what I expected. You know, we are really immersed in the automation space. So I very much see the concerns that people on the front line have, that automation is going to replace them. And the reality of it is, if a job that someone does can be automated, it will be automated. It makes sense. It makes good business sense to do that. And I think that what we are looking at from a business agility standpoint, from a business resilience standpoint, from a business survival standpoint, is really how can we deliver most effectively to serve the needs of our customers. Period. And how we can do that quickly and efficiently and without frustration and in a way that is cost effective. All of those things play into what makes a successful business today, as well as what keeps employees, I'm sorry, as well as what keeps customers served, loyal, staying around. I think that we live in a time where customer loyalty is fleeting. And so I think that smart businesses have to look at how do we deepen the relationships that we have with customers? How can we use automation to do that? And the thing about it, you know, I'll go back to the example that Don gave about his cable company that all of us have lived through. It's just like, "Oh my gosh. "There's got to be a better way." So compare that to, and I'm sure all of us can think of an experience where you had to deal with a customer service situation in some way or another, and it was the most awesome thing ever. And you walked away from it and you just went, "Oh my gosh. I know I was talking to a bot here or there." Or, "I know I was doing this, but that solved my problem. "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't believe it was so easy! "I can't wait to buy something from this company again!" You know what I'm saying? And that's really, I think, the role that automation can play. Is that it can really help deepen existing relationships with our customers, and help us serve them better. And it can also help our employees do things that are more interesting and that are more relevant to the business. And I think that that's important too. So, yes, jobs will go. Yes, automation will slide into places where we've done things manually and repetitive processes before, but I think that's a good thing. >> So, we've got to end it shortly here but I'll give you guys each a last opportunity to chime in. And Adrian, I want to start with you. I invoked the T-word before, transformation, a kind of tongue-in-cheek joking because I know it's not your favorite word. But it is the industry's favorite word. Thinking ahead for the future, we've talked about AI, we've talked about automation, people, process and tech. What do you see as the future state of customer experience, this mix of human and machine? What do we have to look forward to? >> So I think that, first of all, let me tackle the transformation thing. I mean, I remember talking about this with Duncan Macdonald who is the CIO across at UPC, which is one of Pega's customers, on my podcast there the other week. And he talked about, he's the cosponsor of a three year digital transformation program. But then he appended the description of that by saying it's a transformation program that will never end. That's the thing that I think about, because actually, if you think about what we're talking about here, we're not transforming to anything in particular, you know. It's not like going from here to there. And actually, the thing that I think we need to start thinking about is, rather than transformation we actually need to think about an evolution. And adopting an evolutionary state. And we talked about being responsive. We talked about being adaptable. We talked about being agile. We talk about testing and learning and all these different sort of things, that's evolutionary, right? It's not transformational, it's evolutionary. If you think about Charles Darwin and the theory of the species, that's an evolutionary process. And there's a quote, as you've mentioned I authored this book called "Punk CX," there's a quote that I use in the book which is taken from a Bad Religion song called "No Control" and it's called, "There is no vestige of a beginning, "and no prospect of an end." And that quote comes from a 1788 book by James Hutton, which was one of the first treaties on geology, and what he found through all these studies was actually, the formation of the earth and its continuous formation, there is no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. It's a continuous process. And I think that's what we've got to embrace is that actually change is constant. And as Alan says, you have to build for change and be ready for change. And have the right sort of culture, the right sort of business architecture, the right sort of technology to enable that. Because the world is getting faster and it is getting more competitive. This is probably not the last crisis that we will face. And so, like in most evolutionary things, it wasn't the fittest and the strongest that survived, it was the ones that were most adaptable that survived. And I think that's the kind of thing I want to land on, is actually how, it's the ones that kind of grasp that, grasp that whole concept are the ones that are going to succeed out of this. And, what they will do will be... We can't even imagine what they're going to do right now. >> And, thank you. And Shelly, it's not only responding to, as Adrian was saying, to crisis, but it's also being in a position to very rapidly take advantage of opportunities and that capability is going to be important. You guys are futurists, it's in the name. Your thoughts? >> Well I think that, you know, Adrian's comments were incredibly salient, as always. And I think that-- >> Thank you. >> The thing that this particular crisis that we are navigating through today has in many ways been bad, but in other ways, I think it's been incredibly good. Because it has forced us, in a way that we really haven't had to deal with before, to act quickly, to think quickly, to rethink and to embrace change. Oh, we've got to work from home! Oh, we've got 20 people that need to work from home, we have 20,000 people that need to work from home. What technology do we need? How do we take care of our customers? All of these things we've had to figure out in overdrive. And humans, generally speaking, aren't great at change. But what we are forced to do as a result of this pandemic is change. And rethink everything. And I think that, you know, the point about transformation not being a beginning and an end, we are never, ever, ever done. It is evolutionary and I think that as we look to the future and to one of your comments, we are going faster with more exciting technology solutions out there, with people who are incredibly smart, and so I think that it's exciting and I think that all we are going to see is more and more and more change, and I think it will be a time of great resilience, and we'll see some businesses survive and thrive, and we'll see other businesses not survive. But that's been our norm as well, so I think it's really, I think we have some things to thank this pandemic for. Which is kind of weird, but I also try to be fairly optimistic. But I do, I think we've learned a lot and I think we've seen some really amazing exciting things from businesses who have done this. >> Well thanks for sharing that silver lining, Shelly. And then, Don, I'm going to ask you to bring us to the finish line. And I'm going to close my final question to you, or pose it. You guys had the wrecking ball, and I've certainly observed, when it comes to things like digital transformations, or whatever you want to call it, that there was real complacency, and you showed that cartoon with the wrecking ball saying, "Ehh not in my life, not on my watch. "We're doing fine." Well, this pandemic has clearly changed people's thinking, automation is really top of mind now at executive. So you guys are in a good spot from that standpoint. But your final thoughts, please? >> Yeah, I mean, I want to concur with what Adrian and Shelly said and if I can drop another rock quote in there. This one is from Bob Dylan. And Dylan famously said, "The times they are a changing." But the quote that I keep on my wall is one that he tossed off during an interview where he said, "I accept chaos. "I'm not sure if it accepts me." But I think digital transformation looks a lot less like that butterfly emerging from a cocoon to go off happy to smell the flowers, and looks much more like accepting that we are in a world of constant and unpredictable change. And I think one of the things that the COVID crisis has done is sort of snapped us awake to that world. I was talking to the CIO of a large media company who is one of our customers, and he brought up the fact, you know, like Croom said, "We're all agile now. "I've been talking about five years, "trying to get this company to operate in an agile way, "and all of a sudden we had to do it. "We had no choice, we had to respond, "we had to try new things, we had to fail fast." And my hope is, as we think about what customer engagement and automation and business efficiency looks like in the future, we keep that mindset of trying new things and continuously adapting. Evolving. At the end of the day, our company's brand promise is, "Build for change." And we chose that because we think that that's what organizations, the one thing they can design for. They can design for a future that will continue to change. And if you put the right architecture in place, if you take that center-out mindset, you can support those immediate needs, but set yourself up for a future of continuous change and continuous evolution and adaptation. >> Well guys, I'll quote somebody less famous. Jeff Frick, who said, "The answer to every question "lives somewhere in a CUBE interview." and you guys have given us a lot of answers. I really appreciate your time. I hope that next year at PegaWorld iNspire we can see each other face-to-face and do some live interviews. But really appreciate the insights and all your good work. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Vellante and our coverage of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. Be right back, right after this short break. (lighthearted music)

>> Announcer: 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 of PegaWorld iNspire 2020. Kerim Akgonul is here. He's the senior vice president of product at Pega, Pegasystems. Kerim, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi Dave. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I mean I wish we were face-to-face at your big show, but this is going to have to do. A little different this year 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 virtual pivot? >> It's been different, it's definitely been different, especially since the last few years 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 those aspects. >> Yeah, I'm excited to get into that, but I mean your whole raison d'être is you guys build for change, and obviously we've been thrown this curve ball, more than a curve ball, knuckle ball. 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 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 organizational work that they do. They use the Pega technology to actually digitize how a lot of the work that gets done in their organization. They use it as a COVID-19 response. They use it to engage directly with the consumers, so it's been on, as I said, the top shelf of technologies that they had to leverage to adjust and transform, so it's been very busy, Dave. >> Obviously a lot of companies have been hit, and some industries have been very hard hit in the shutdown, but I want to pick a couple of examples. Let's start with healthcare. I mean they've been hit like no other, front lines. 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 emergency? Maybe you could share some of your experiences there. >> Absolutely. Actually a lot of the healthcare organizations that we're working with, the front line workers, obviously, the way that they engage has changed quite a bit, but also the people that work in the corporate, in the back office, in 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 basically 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 working with them. >> So Kerim, how would that work? So they're an existing Pega customer, they spun up a new module, they sort of developed it themselves. You guys helped 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 in the telecommunications industry, we had state 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 to have that vision and being able to articulate that in the Pega construct to automate it to define the process, to define what they're going to keep track of, to define the journeys of those things that they're going to keep track of, and a lot of the clients that have 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 you said, Dave, we always talk about being built for change, and this is a time of crisis. This is 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 the ability 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 we've been tracking the telecom space, and the whole work-from-home pivot has really put stress on distributed networks, the traditional corporate networks. Now everybody's at home. We've all experienced this, whether video calls, et cetera. The kids are at home, at school, sometimes gaming, so the internet, it didn't blow up, luckily, but still major change in the telco industry. >> Absolutely. 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 on the streets, out on the streets, so what they did, and 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 levels of volumes of requests coming in from the end customers, the end consumers coming in, right? It's basically 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, consumers have a sense of urgency. They need an answer. They need something to get done quickly, and they want to be able to avoid waiting on line for four hours, right? We saw that, we saw a lot of the websites that says, "Hey, if you call our contact center," 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 pushed them to self-service channels like the mobile channel, like the web self-service channel, as well as chat and chat bot 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 scaling. Self-service is critical. Yeah, I want to ask you about digital transformation. It's a theme of PegaWorld iNspire. There's been a lot of talk the last three, four years about digital transformation. Frankly, a lot of lip service. I think it was Satya Nadella said we've accelerated. We've pulled two years of digital transformation into two months, but again, you guys are all about digital and digitizing processes, so kind of I want to know if you can talk about 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 in 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? 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 do we need to go through a 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 the ability 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 the word you use, 'urgency,' because there was a lot of complacency leading up to this, but the good news was there was also a lot of experimentation going on. So COVID obviously accelerated that urgency. Anna Gleiss from Siemens is an example of somebody who spoke during your keynote. Big industrial exposed with a huge supply chain, which for years some of that's been really opaque, and digitize that, now you get greater transparency. What were the key learnings from her discussion? >> Right, so Anna and the team have done a spectacular job, and like I say, they didn't need a worldwide pandemic to get going, and they basically approached theirs systematically with a great plan, and what they basically were able to do is really do that, another thing that people have done a lot of lip service in the past is 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 a platform to be able to manage all the technical aspects of business applications that all the processes that seems 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, automate their processes, and deliver tremendous amount of operational efficiency into the organization. >> Now Kerim, of course, is the head of products. I want to get into some of the product discussion, some of the hard news that you have at PegaWorld. This notion of the Pega Process Fabric, I mean the metaphor is very strong. You think about digital, you think about a fabric. But what do we need to know about the Pega Process Fabric? >> Dave, 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 enterprise has to jump through 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, working across all these applications, and of course it's very easy to make mistakes. And whenever you have an environment that's built out 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 any 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. >> Yeah. >> 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. 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 through 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 all of these efforts and provide that experience to the user. >> So Kerim, what's the secret sauce there? Is it a combination of using APIs to those applications, and machine intelligence, and machine learning? >> There's a little bit of many things. The key is, one, we basically come with standard connectivity to standard enterprise solutions. We come prepackaged with connectivity to Pega environments within the organizations, as we have many customers that have deployed dozens of different 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, to be able to manage the routing and the experience for the end users. >> Okay, and the prioritization is something that's determined by business rules, is that correct? Or how does that all work? >> 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 and the routing and sort of collating things together that are associated with the same work streams and for the same customers. >> When Alan Trefler started Pega it was right around the time I started in the industry and AI was 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 realtime AI. >> Right. >> What do you mean by that, and what's so special about your AI? >> Well, our realtime AI is real, so that's one of the main specialties, but look, there's a lot 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 realtime, real realtime AI. Let me give you an example. If you are 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, I'm sorry, banking clients, for example, used their customer data in the UK, NatWest, used their customer data and identified people that work for the National Health Services and provided realtime programs that are specifically tailored for them, right, 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 realtime 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 realtime interactions. >> Wonder if I could ask you about one of the trends in the marketplace, and you're seeing it in the equity markets, these private equity robotic process automation. People, I think, sometimes misunderstand you, and I've said, I've reported a number of times that RPA's just 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, have poured in. How do you look at RPA? Where does it fit in the Pega platform? >> Yeah, so RPA's 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 it's going to touch are old. They've been around for a very, very long time. 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, a process that runs on the desktop and to be able to sort of execute that process inside that old system automatically. And that saves time and saves money, and there's basically 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 does it 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 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 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've got a platform that is an end-to-end platform. That's really what you mean by the end-to-end is that systems view, correct? >> Well, 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 that sit 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'll 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 we've got uncertain times. We've talked the gamut of digital transformation, but what advice would you give to 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 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 Kerim, 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. Be right back right after this short break. (smooth music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld Inspire brought to you by Pegasystems. Everybody welcome back to PegaWorld Inspired 2020 this is theCUBE and I'm Dave Vellante, we're here with Adam Field who is the head of innovation and experience at Pegasystems. Adam thanks for coming on, how are you doing man? >> It's my pleasure Dave, I'm doing well how are you? >> Good thank you, I'm excited we're talking innovation, we're talking to innovation hub but to start with your role I love the title, what do you do? Give us the background story. >> Yeah I get that question quite a bit so, I've been with Pega a little over 15 years now and I've held many roles, but currently as head of innovation and experience we have a team I like to call them Creative Misfits, if you will, we sort of bridge that gap between technology and creative, we do research on emerging tech and try to understand how our clients might use it, how it's going to change the future of work, that's the innovation side, on the experience side, we do things like for these PegaWorld events, we match we where art meets tech and we build these experiential things that people come and see at our events, we build all the demos and all the production that you see on the main stage, so we kind of touch a lot of different things around the future of where technology is going. >> Well, I can see, obviously you're innovative, you've got the awesome set up there, the great mic and sound, (laughing) fantastic you look good So and now you've been involved in previous PegaWorld both from behind the scenes and out front speaking obviously this is completely different, how did you prep differently for PegaWorld 2020 virtual versus what you normally do? >> Yeah right so this will be my well 16th I guess PegaWorld and obviously this one stands out as the most different normally we'd be in Boston today, we would have been, you know, working on our stage production and on a floor that's 170,000 square feet big with dozens of booths and hundreds of demos, and obviously this was completely different, but as far as prep goes, I remember the day we learned that early March, this was going virtual and after a few moments of sadness, the team really came together, and I remember the first thing we talked about is we're not going to take a three day event and try to put it all online. Let's--we know people's time is valuable, let's figure out how to take just what's important and get it out to people so that they're inspired to move forward and engage with Pega, so I think that's really been the biggest change in how we've prepped. >> Well, I think that's a great point because obviously theCUBE has been very much involved in these virtual events and. >> Right. >> People send out the note, hey we've made the tough decision to go virtual that's easy decision you really had no choice. >> That's right. >> The tough decision is what do you want to preserve from the physical and understanding that you can't just pop physical into virtual and you got to create a whole new content program, I think Robert Scoble wrote a post on, if you saw it he talks about, hey you better go out and hire Beyonce, oh you can't afford to be for Beyonce? well you better make your content interesting. So to me Adam, that's the tough part, help us understand how you thought that through and what the outcome actually is. >> Yeah, that's right. We didn't have Beyonce, but we did have the Dropkick Murphys, so that was pretty cool and they did a concert for us, so that's been great. But again a lot of people talk about all this free time that they have and I know I have two young kids who are schooling at home now, a job that's busier than it's ever been. I've tried to join a lot of these virtual events and frankly I have gotten overwhelmed, so we took two days and we boiled it down in a two and a half hours, and what we decided to do is we looked at all the areas which we go to market and how people design and deliver their apps, and some of the tech like Pega cloud that they use. And we went to our, I went to my extended team and I said, normally you have 75 booths, we're going to boil that down to 25, let's work together to figure that out. Normally your demos might be 20 minutes when someone walks up, we want to make them seven. But I think the biggest thing that we did, we said what we don't want to lose is that interactivity, and so we had online dozens of Pega experts we could ask questions live, Alan was online doing answering questions live. We made sure that we included live components, our host, Don Sherman was live from his house. We didn't just pre-record everything because then, why would anyone come join when they could just go watch it, 30 minutes later on your YouTube channel? >> See that's innovation to me is having that combination of live. Obviously, you've got to do some stuff a prerecorded, but having a live component adds a dimension, it's challenging, but that's pushing the envelope and I love it. The other thing is, Adam is roles. The roles are different in a virtual event, are they? You're not doing site inspections Like you said, you're not dealing with 170,000 square feet. How did you guys rethink the roles for virtual? >> Yeah so, there were some teams whose world was completely upended. You know, when this all went virtual, the people that do exactly what you were just talking about, dealing with hotels and vendors and things like that, and I got to tell you, one of the most events called PegaWorld Inspire and not to sound too cheesy about it, but one of the things that was really inspiring was to see how everyone stepped up and said, truly, how can I help? And what was really neat about it is we saw different skill sets come out of people that, maybe they hadn't had the opportunity to flex before where they might've worked on one thing that was no longer needed because of the change in the format, and they jumped into become copywriters or liaisons between cause now we have new vendors in this tech world that we didn't have that we turned around in just a matter of weeks. We had people like on my team who normally last year, build this massive physical exhibit containing mirrors and lights, that became video producers, to produce some of these live videos that we did. And one of the things was really impressive, you asked earlier about how did we prep differently and what changed? We looked in the marketplace for different tech and how to bring our CEO and our host and our head of product and everyone together live in split screen, and when you're a big studio you know, and you have that equipment ready to go, that's easy, but when you're just getting average people in their homes and you want to put all that together, we're finding some of the tech in the marketplace just wasn't there. My team built some new video chat technologies that they actually use to produce this in real time, so that was really impressive to me how we turn that around and really innovated not only the things that everyone sees, but all the stuff behind the scenes to. >> See again I think this is what's amazing to me is as I learned more and more about Pega interview Alan earlier. >> Sure. >> Pega is all about being able to adapt to these changes. So a lot of the processes we are using in virtual events, they're unknown. In normally software right through the history of software is okay, here's how the software works. Figure out how to fit your process into it, very rigid. >> That's right. >> Today you know, the last three months with this lockdown in this coronavirus have been completely unknown, and so that's sort of one of the hallmarks of your company, isn't it? >> That's right and we've had the tagline Build For Change for really long time, and I will tell you, I remember in that first meeting again, when we learned this was going virtual and someone stood up and they said, guys we're about to live our tagline. And people really do believe in that, 'cause we go to our clients every single day and say, change is what's going to make you special changes is what's going to make you different, now's your opportunity, seize that change and run with it. And so we said, look, we can't change the world right now, we know we got to go virtual, all we can do is change the type of event that we do, we're not going to do the standard event that we think every one else is going to do, let's do it differently and today was a pretty good example, I think we achieved that. >> I think a couple of things from a challenge standpoint, you mentioned the chat, how do you get people to engage? You had to sort of invent something. >> Yeah. >> And then really think it through for virtual. And I think the other is tech people come to these events, they want to touch the tech. And so you've got you know the innovation hub, it's where people get to play with the technology. You got to take us through how you thought through that and. >> Right. >> What the outcome is. >> Yeah, so that is the toughest part, and I got to tell you, you know all of this being said, I'm looking forward to someday being able to get back and meeting my clients in person, and I'm the type, when I see you on the floor of the innovation hub, I run by a booth and high five you for all the great weeks of hard work, you know? And I love to see people's faces, they see the demos and that's tough not being able to see them smile and get that moment of wow. But what was interesting was it really helped us hone our messages. I think we really realized when I went to everybody and said you don't have 20 minutes, you have seven minutes, here's a template, to follow, to be able to tell your story better, and people started thinking in that mode of storytelling, and what was interesting was lot of people came back to me and said, actually you know what? I can tell that story in a much more crisp way and really show people what they need to see in a in a much faster timeframe. And what it really allowed us to do was find those bits that we thought were most important, find those demos that we think are most important and just, you know bubble those up. One of the things we also did too, we took the opportunity to say you know what, we're going to be online, I watch my kids. My kids are avid gamers whether I like it or not, and they. >> Yeah. >> Watch these Twitch streams, and we thought well, we should be able to do that with even corporate software. So we had these live build sessions where we took some of our developers and I said you're going to be put on the hot seat for 15 minutes on script and we're going to let people just guide and direct you. And they were a little nervous at first, but they went off great, and it was a new format we had never tried before. So if we keep doing these types of different things and we just embrace the moment that we're in I think people will really really come to it and get some value out of it. >> I mean that's awesome, you've got to keep your audience engaged, and so you do lose, you don't have a captive audience, so you lose some time in terms of how much you can you know? how much Kool-Aid injection you can give him. I mean take 20 minutes down to seven minutes. But so you do lose some of that, but what do you gain with virtual? >> Well, I think one of the things that you obviously gain is you can be more widespread, so yeah, you know this event reached tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries. I did an event first week of April, so you can imagine you know, we had two weeks to turn on and I was supposed to be in London and Amsterdam presenting in soccer stadiums. And instead we made that a one hour virtual event and we thought, well, we're just going to get people from the London market and from the Netherlands market, and it turned out, we got people from all over the world to join. So one of the benefits to this is the reach, so we're able to reach a lot more people. I'd say one of the other just things that we realized after tours we're creating a lot of content, we filmed all of this as we were rehearsing, and we're going to put it up online later, so now we have all this great content that anyone can use and go view later, so that was sort of you know, unexpected outcome as well. >> Right yeah, you lose the airline miles, but you gain. (laughing) as I want to going to say you gian the post. >> I don't mind not traveling as well. >> Yeah I here you but, but you do gain that post and I think with physical events, people always at the end of it, it's like, I've never given birth, but I've witnessed that many times. but people feel like, okay, I got to just chill out now for a couple of weeks, and then when they come back, now they're swamped, they've got to catch up. And I think people are realizing, wow, there's a real opportunity maximize the post event here, post nurturing peep streaming out content and continue that engagement, that is a plus of these virtual event. >> Oh, for sure, and you know we started early on deciding how are we going to do, what are we going to do is follow ups you know? That European event that I talked about once again instead of taking all these different markets and trying to replicate it, we did one one hour event. But then because we were in the early days of COVID and some of our clients weren't able to get recorded and speak, we did subsequent webinars in the weeks following them, and the attendance was fantastic. So it allowed us to plan ahead and you know, have a lot of followup activities that we're starting to launch right now as soon as the event ended. >> How do you feel about the outcome for Pega? Do you think it was better, worse, the same or just different? >> I'm going to go with different you know, like I said I get energy I love being up on stage in front of 5,000 people, I love meeting my clients in person, I love the energy of being with my colleagues, but you know it is what it is, We had to do it, and I think what we really embraced it, so I'll say it's just a different way of doing things, but you know I do look forward to the day that I'm able to go meet my clients again and get back on stage and produce some really great things and once again being able to physically see our attendees go oh, when they actually see the software in person, that's the most rewarding thing for me. >> It's going to be interesting as we come out of this I mean, very clearly things are going to be different probably going to have hybrid for some time. Maybe even indefinitely but I'm interested in some of the learnings, some of the things that you think will be permanent, some of the advice. And one of the things I always say to people is don't start with what software are we going to use in there? Your software platform, think about the experience that you want to work backwards from there but what are other advice would you give for given your experiences? >> Right. >> You're so right about that point, I remember interviewing a lot of vendors that we were going to use to bring this online and we were telling them what we wanted to do, and some of them said no one's ever asked about that before we can't do that, so you're a hundred percent right about that. The advice I will say, and the thing I do worry about a little bit is, at first people were a little bit more accepting if maybe the video quality wasn't as good, or you know the content was like any old webinar. As months ago on expectations are going to be higher, people are going to have attended a lot of these things so you're going to have to keep upping the game. And I think the advice I would give is try to take what's great about an in person event and put it online but don't try to replicate the event and put it online. And some of the best things about in person events are just the live nature of it, take the risks, do some live stuff. People will really appreciate that, you'll get a lot of credit for that. The interactivity is what's important about a live event, so as best you can, figure out how to make sure there's some interactivity. Now in the early days I think it's going to be some live Q and A as we move on, it'll be real private rooms with experts that you're able to have one-on-one chats and go through and bounce around and be able to talk to people you know, just like you would accept, between two cameras instead of in person. So I think everyone is months go on. they just going to have to up their game. I think that's great advice, you're absolutely right up your game, up your brand, get a good camera, get good sound, and it's going to just, help your personal brand and your company's brand. Adam. >> We learned what it was like to try to ship microphone and camera equipment around the world (laughing) overnight so we're experts at that, if you you've got any questions. >> Well, I mean what a difference it made, so Adam, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your experiences. You guys, have one of the best that we've seen at the Virtual Event Platform so congratulations on that and really appreciate your contribution (mumbles). >> Thanks it's my pleasure, great to talk to you today (mumbles). All right, keep it right there buddy, this is theCUBES coverage of PegaWorld Inspire 2020 the virtual event, will be right back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Producer: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of PegaWorld Inspire. Brought to you by Pegasystems. >> Hello, everybody. This is Dave Volante. Welcome back to our coverage of PegaWorld Inspire 2020. This is the preview show, and you're watching the CUBE. Stephanie lewis is here. She's the Senior Director of Community and developer relations or a programs actually at at Pega. Stephanie, good to see you. >> Thank you so much for having me Dave. I'm very happy to be here today. >> Yeah, so you know, let's get into it. I infer from your role that obviously all about community, which is critical developers are all about community, but talk a little bit more about kind of how you spend your time. >> Sure. So I am really excited about my role. I've been here for a year and a half, and I transitioned from the product world. So I really understand what developers need and how they use the product, and if we had just but developers don't know how to use them that it's kind of pointless. So I am truly passionate about ensuring that every individual understands how to use the product, and feels inspired to use the product and then also gives back to the community and builds a better ecosystem helping everyone around them to build better software. >> So product knowledge obviously crucial in this role. But developers they want access to the tools that they want to be productive. So tell us more about what you're finding that developers need. >> Let's say just in time, type of situation. So I'm going to plug my own agenda here as well, in addition to PegaWorld, but we're launching a brand new >> Great. >> Pega menu, which is where our developers get enabled and we are supporting them just in time. So we have the curated learning paths because picking your journey and your career path is critical, like where do you want to go? What credentials do you want to have? What job do you want to have? That's absolutely important. But when you're on the job, and you have a question, how do I do this? Or when do I use this? That's absolutely just as important, and I want to ensure that everybody can easily do that when they need it. >> So PegaWorld big show we had Alan on recently, we're talking about I mean, I just thought I said to him, you're going to miss that during your keynote, because he's such a great speaker, but you're also involved in the keynote. You're going to be interviewing Kerim, who's the head of products, and you guys going to be digging into that, obviously with your product background, but set that up for us, what should we expect? >> Sure. So there's a couple of different sessions that I want to highlight. One is Kerim is one of the biggest highlights in addition to Alan with the keynotes at the in person PegaWorld and we're going to continue that in the virtual aspect. So he's going to have his own standalone keynote, highlighting the product capabilities that people need to be aware of as they're enhancing their own digital transformation, and right now we're in a disrupted world. So he's going to talk about how our three key things of our products can really help companies not only adjust to the current environment if future proof. So he'll talk about those themes. He'll bring a customer on stage to talk about how they have used those, and then I'll also give a demo of the latest capabilities. That's just the beginning, and then at the end, I will be able to come on and put him on the hot seat. So ask him about the product roadmaps. I'm going to take questions from the community to be like, hey, Kerim, the community's asking about this, what do you think? And then we'll take questions live, that he'll have to answer at live during that session as well. >> And of course, you know, the thing about PegaWorld is it's got a lot of customer content in there. So I assume you're going to have some customers, some clients interacting as well. >> That's true. Yeah. So not only in the keynotes, when we bring customers on to talk about their stories and put the, you know, theoretical products capabilities to life with how they've used those. But then we also have, we've taken the tech pavilion, which is kind of where you go around and you see the different product capabilities. So we will have customers that are part of that as well as part of what are the breakouts where they will be telling their story, and talk about taking digital transformation and turn their business around. >> Love it. Product talk, architecture, roadmap, you know, showing off a little bit of the future. That's fantastic. So talk to me, like I'm a developer. Why should I go to this event? What's in it for me? >> So I think it's always important to understand the trends, right? As a developer, if you just take what someone tells you is a requirement, and you just go code that, then you're not a true engineer, or an innovator, right? It's not, it's in the problems that you're solving. So I think that is something to take to heart and that is something that you'll truly receive by coming to PegaWorld and hearing the end to end story. In addition to that, this tech pavilion that we've turned into the Innovation Hub is more than just looking at recorded demos, you'll be able to participate with product experts live coding and ask them questions. So you'll see them build an application, or build a chat bot or utilize a feature and ask them questions. To witch style, you are asked to participate, and then take that back to your job the next day, and utilize those new capabilities and the innovation that we're able to show you with this new virtual event. >> So Stephen, I got to ask you, you mentioned requirements, Docs, and a lot has changed there, right? I mean, it used to be, you'd have these big tomes and you'd hand down, you know, the edict from the business, talk about how that whole dynamic has changed. >> It has changed quite a bit with the Pega platform and the technology that we have across our products, because it's not just a like you said, it's the edict that you hand down and the developers just implement don't ask the why, and then don't get the opportunity to think about how to better that. So all of this is done now within the technology itself. So nothing is lost, and as you start to iterate on, why are you doing this? How is this good for the customer? What performance improvements? Or what are you trying to automate? And better all those questions are answered and then can be put right in there and allows developers to put their own innovation into the why, and the how, and the what, which I feel like will end up as a better result for the end customer and their end to end experience. >> So maybe this is a sign of progress, would be something to be optimistic about. Because six weeks ago, we did we started with COVID. That's all we talked about. Now we're going to end with COVID. I wanted to ask you about the whole work from home and remote workers. You know, developers are collaborative. They do a lot of whiteboarding. So how have you seen developers sort of responding to this pandemic and what kind of things are they doing to actually maintain that productivity and that collaborative spirit? >> So I've seen a couple of things there. One is utilizing some of the frameworks that we've put out for like the starter of some of the COVID tracking apps, we've put some of those out on our marketplace. So businesses, we've had several businesses use those and go live really quickly to just help respond to the pandemic, and operate and track the safety of their employees, and developers then have taken that in addition to what they need to do to progress their career. So they've used that then they've used our academy to continue their enablement as well as the collaboration. So we've got a great forum, a very active forum, where people are able to post questions and answer them and stay connected in this virtual environment. We've increased webinars, we just launched a virtual hackathon that's focused around doing good. So it's not just about hackathon to prove your skills and win the prizes, but we remind all the folks on how in the world respond to the situation. So we're trying to intertwine all of it because I think I truly believe that every person not only wants to progress their own career, but also give back and do good, and if you combine those two together, that's how you achieve the optimal results. >> Stephanie how about new developers coming into the Pega? you community platform? What's that experience like? Can you update us on that? >> Yeah, I'm glad you asked. Because we just launched some very new like I'm new to Pega, what do I need to do? So we've got the curated courses, which we're going to call missions around those, but we also have a trial. So if you just want to figure out and get your feet where you're not quite sure what this Pega thing is, sign up for the trial, and then we have guided tours. So it shows you what the different capabilities are and really guide you through that experience, and then if you are experienced, you can skip those tours and like, No, I know and I don't. I just want to dive in. But for those new people, we have those curated tours. So you're able to orient yourself and be more comfortable before you start to play around. >> But how functional is that? I mean, is it a lot of the trials are neutered, or you know, can I get the full picture? How does that work? >> Absolutely. I think that's a really good point is that we don't handicap anyone. Like there's no limited functionality. If you want the trial, you want to figure out app studio and have that guided experience, you can do that. If you want to unlock all of it, just go wild and play with all of it. You can do it as limited 30 days. You want to renew it, go ahead. But we don't restrict any of that because we want you to get access to the capability so that you can do your job better and that you learn the true power of the technology. >> Well, we're excited for PegaWorld 2020 it's on June 2 starts at 9 am East Coast time. So just google it and go sign up. This automation economy, it's going to kick in, in a big way already has actually but it's going to accelerate in this post COVID era. Stephanie thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and give us a preview of PegaWorld Inspire 2020. >> Thank you, and I hope to see you there. >> All right, you will, and thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you at PegaWorld Inspire 2020. This is Dave Volante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)