IBM Business Automation Workflow vs. Pega Platform

It is best suited for streamlining business processes in our enterprise. It acts as middleware and allows to use of mobile development

Incentivized

Pega [RPA] is good to address a specific business function requirement with not too many bots or automation processes. It takes time and effort to set it up. Though once done, it is very easy to configure and use. One should also run a POC to verify if this product meets the scalability requirements.

Incentivized

• Case management - provides flexibility for dynamic processing.
• Smarter process - streamlines repeatable activities and does work distributions.
• Advanced integration - makes integration with other systems very easy.

Incentivized

• Reusability
• Pega’s Situational layer cake architecture is capable of organizing application to suit enterprise needs. An enterprise can have a complex organization structure located around the globe. Because of Situational layer cake architecture reusing common policies and procedures is easy while allowing for differences between products, regions, channels and customer segments.Whereas with some application development platforms, separate copies of the application should be created to suite different business context.
• Faster application delivery
• With Pega developers can reuse common policies and procedures, replicate functions and industry specific frameworks and utilize pega UI elements to develop applications. IT is easy to deploy.Therefore developers are capable of delivering application earlier compared to some application development platforms. Pega reduces time taken to deliver an outcome.
• Pega upgrades
• Pega platform is upddated to adapt and work with latest technologies.
• Proprietary users support and maintain Pega platform continuously. Pega customer support is always willing to enhance product support.

Incentivized

• Installation is (typically) a bit painful out of the box and requires expert help.
• Following installation, initial projects require outside consulting expertise to be successful. Projects without importing BPM expertise tend to have much higher failure rates. Though individually the technologies involved are widely available and not complicated, combined and collectively BPM solutions require a flexible, creative, technical talent to help deliver. It takes time to learn the judgment and craft required.
• The out-of-the-box UI controls (widgets) are not terribly inspiring- on desktop or mobile. Use of third party toolkits (e.g. Brazos) is recommended. Silver lining: those third party toolkits are quite good.

• Reporting is not extensive in Pega. Because of this higher management is not able to get the reports which will give them insights into a different area. So Reporting functionality can be improved in Pega.
• Organizations that want to fully use all the features of the Pega 7 platform must follow Pega’s solution development methodology which may not be aligned fully with the organization objectives.
• During upgrades, some of the rules which are deprecated have to be changed to new available rules. This becomes a problem as one has to understand all the functionality and then change a lot of things.

Incentivized

This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.

Pegasystems has continued to demonstrate a strong partnership with our organization and investment in their product that aligns with our overall vision and need. Pegasystems has engaged us at every level, with the assistance of minor defects to the overall roadmap planning and alignment of our goals

Building complex UIs can be cumbersome. Calling complex SOA services that have a lot of objects, types, anyType attributes, recursive object references, etc can be cumbersome. The Process Designer IDE communicates with the server side Process Center a lot and as a result it is pretty slow. The IDE is also Eclipse based which doesn't make it faster.

Pega Platform is enhancing its product and launching new features day by day which help to achieve customers needs. If I talk about the earlier version of Pega Platform (i.e. pega v5 and 6.3) there were many numbers of limitations in Pega Platform and if we need to do some customization then needed to write custom java and jave scripts to achieve the functionally. Now I can say Pega Platform is running with market trends and demand. Pega Platform is giving all the options which support the current technologies like decisioning capabilities, real time processing, mashup, process fabrics etc..

Incentivized

Issues can be raised through tickets and it works based on the priority of the issue. The Support Team response is also good and the solution is provided in a short span of time. In a case where the issue is serious, they try to find out the root cause and provide an alternative for it.

Incentivized

It’s very slow sometimes, but that may be our servers. Also the Knowledge Library needs some work - again, not sure if it’s our setup or what- but I’m unable to search the body of an article for content, so I have to be very intentional with tagging, but it’s not ideal.

Incentivized

• Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.

The online training is an excellent one, but still it is missing hands on development.

• Very satisfied – not too difficult at all.
• We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)

Implementation is totally depend up on the requirement

Incentivized

Pega Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight. Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it. Pega vs IBM Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.

We did evaluate multiple products offerings with Pega Platform capabilities and observed that Pega PRPC rules engine and case management capabilities are better over so many BPM Tools. We also conducted a detailed study with developers to identify the best products out of Suite of BPM products. It's observed that Rules engines integration is very streamlined with forms in Pega whereas other tools multiple have powerful data model capabilities but lacks the ease of creating business rules.

Incentivized

It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load

• Easier to implement and does not take much effort to work on it.
• Versioning made easy. We can even degrade to the previous version in case of any issue, which is not easier to do in other BPM suites, thereby, saving a good amount of time.
• Helped in achieving client requirements faster, which results in a higher return of investment.

Incentivized

• Our company has boomed in the past few years because we of how we use Pega.
• We will get a project from a client and the turnaround will be so quick they will throw 3-4 more projects at us.
• Smaller developer teams means less complexity and less overhead.

Incentivized