Pega targets bot developers, but bottom-up must not be its only plan

Pega has reimagined its robotic automation developer experience in a bid to make life easier for both professional and citizen developers. But it remains to be seen if this investment in building bottom-up demand is the right defense against challenges from the likes of UiPath and its Marketplace initiative and new deep-pocketed entrants such as Salesforce and MuleSoft RPA.

Robot Studio v22.1 is a relatively big deal as updates go—a return to Pega using its integrated development environment (IDE) after 12 years of using Microsoft’s Visual Studio. It claims its new IDE maintains all its power for robust and scalable outcomes while making life easier for users.

Updates include a quick-start, through which Pega’s Recording Assistant records process steps as a user walks through them. These recorded steps become visible blocks the developer can edit immediately; the quick-start helps developers discover steps and code how each one works, creates the automation, and tests it to reduce the time developers must invest.

Pro and citizen developers can rapidly reuse functions because each automation component is mapped within the applications they build, and Pega’s Robot Manager 8.8 repository surfaces commonly used functions. Pega built testing into each subsection, making each element more robust and errors easier to trace and amend.

Cleaner and streamlined UX palette—and it’s about time

Developers will save time thanks to a simplified UX palette focused on swifter navigation. Built-in shortcuts ensure only relevant items are visible during design tasks. Wizards steer developers to relevant data and include key properties along the way.

Relatively poor UX interface design has been something of a hallmark of bot-building studios. Most Pega rivals recognize this weakness in their own products, so it’s hard to imagine Pega will enjoy a competitive advantage from resolving this—at least not for long.

Built-in automation testing supports debugging applications while they are running, removing a recognized frustration developers usually face when they must restart or log in to applications to test them. Instead, the values of variables and controls are shown directly on the blocks of the design, surfacing relevant data to support fault identification. And, as an early warning, Pega has added a “black eye” warning icon to the build palette to alert developers to issues. All this test support should make for happier developers.

Enterprise leaders demand greater security, and Pega has responded

With security, privacy and regulatory compliance rising to the top of many enterprise leaders’ agendas (37% rank it a 1-2 or 3 challenge – the highest score for any challenge surveyed in our HFS Pulse Q3 2022 report – see exhibit 1), Pega has responded with controls to help automated applications overcome IT governance challenges.

Exhibit 1: Enterprise leaders rank security, privacy and regulatory compliance the greatest challenge to their leadership agenda

Source: HFS Research Pulse Q3 2022

The controls automatically detect sensitive fields such as passwords, and the UI, studio, and runtime logs never surface the related values. Developers can also manually opt to mark other fields as sensitive to ensure associated data they identify as sensitive is similarly protected. A data-protection API (a simple cryptographic application programming interface built into Microsoft software) stores application login credentials and applies them automatically only when needed, securing credentials and speeding up the login process.

“Lazy loading” of automation projects—loading only as and when needed—reduces lag for users of attended RPA applications built with the studio. Updates to the Chrome/Edge Pega browser extension offer simpler updates for enterprises.

The Bottom Line: Pega must prove its UX investments drive business value.

It’s a tough and noisy automation market out there, and it’s getting increasingly price sensitive. While “best-in-class” UX may win friends in the developer community, that benefit will only convert to enterprise sales, where those UX investments do more than give developers an easier life. No one ever says Pega is cheap, so it must demonstrate, compete on, and emphasize the business benefits of the reduced time to build and test, stronger security, and smarter recording that it claims for its new bot studio.