Pega acquires Everflow to advance its process mining and hyper automation ambitions

Pegasystems has today announced the acquisition of Everflow, a Brazilian based process mining company. The move comes as Pega looks to position itself as a platform of choice for hyper automation across the enterprise, building on its other recent platform advancements. 

This time last year Pega laid out how it is thinking about workflow orchestration across multiple systems and platforms, where it has built what it calls a ‘center-out approach’. Pega’s ‘brain process engine’ essentially ties multiple systems together and feeds live data into the front-end, no matter where it needs to be. 

This is coupled with Pega’s context-aware APIs that dynamically update as processes change. Unlike static APIs, Pega’s Digital Experience (DX) APIs claim to automatically adjust all connected front-end interfaces when changes are made to its core back-end process - without rewriting any code. 

The aim of all this is to allow buyers to respond rapidly to change and to identify where work is being slowed down, so that those processes can be fixed and work can be automated across an organization. 

With the acquisition of Everflow, Pega hopes to take this further by enabling automated suggestions or fixes for where those process bottlenecks occur. 

Speaking with media at a pre-brief ahead of the announcement, Pega CTO Don Schuerman said: 

Process mining has become a pretty powerful tool for organizations, as they think about really getting deep into their digital transformation. Truly optimizing their processes, finding opportunities to make customer journeys and customer experiences better, as well as processes more efficient. 

But we actually think the value of process mining goes beyond just being able to collect events and information through systems and paint a process picture. Many process mining tools tend to be pretty tactical. They require a large amount of technology support to get set up.

Everflow will provide Pega with process mining that allows organizations to analyze and optimize their customer and employee-related processes. The technology claims to allow users to automatically model their processes based on organizational activity logs. 

Then the software analyzes where those processes break down in the field and suggests ways to improve the approach. For example, a retail banking head may use Everflow to determine if customers are abandoning the bank’s mobile app when it takes too many clicks to complete a transaction, or an insurance company may find out that back-office bottlenecks in the application approval workflow are slowing their underwriters down. 

Improving employee productivity is particularly critical at the moment, as companies across the world face soaring inflation and increased costs. 

Pega claims that when Everflow is integrated with its own AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation, it will allow buyers to continuously monitor processes across the enterprise, identify process issues or deviations, and even fix them on the fly. 

Pega adds that this “will evolve the process mining field beyond static modeling and deliver real-time process optimization, deploying true hyper automation on an enterprise scale to improve operations and customer experiences”. 

Schuerman said:

What’s perhaps most key is that process mining by itself can't fix the problem. It can only find the problem - find bottlenecks, find places where processes go off the happy path and suggest workarounds. And we think that we are in a really exciting position with the acquisition of Everflow’s technology, plus some of our existing capability. 

So for example, last year at Pegaworld we announced Process AI, which uses our proven decisioning models, the same things that our clients use to support billions of customer interactions a day, to optimize our processes and find opportunities to improve the processes. 

Well, now we've taken that process optimization, the workflow automation, the AI powered decisioning, and combined it now with that process mining so that not only can we see the process data of what's happening outside of Pega, but we can use the AI power decisioning to fix these problems on the fly. 

[This means customers can] self optimize the process, to get recommendations in real time for things that will make the process execute better. 

We think that pulling this technology in, when you add it to the already incredibly rich AI powered decisioning that we have, the workflow automation, the centre out architecture, and our ability to work with existing systems both on the front and the back end, gives us the most complete hyper automation platform that's on the market. 

Google Cloud partnership

In addition to the Everflow acquisition, Pega is also announcing a new strategic partnership with Google Cloud today, which will see the two companies engage in a number of go-to-market activities. 

As part of the agreement, Pega will make its Pega Cloud applications available on Google Cloud as a fully hosted and managed-as-a-service offering. In addition, Pega and Google Cloud will partner to identify opportunities where capabilities from both companies can possibly address specific use cases in key industries, initially focusing on telecommunications, healthcare and financial services. 

Carola Cazenave, head of global partner ecosystem, Pega, said: 

This deep collaboration with Google not only gives our clients a cloud choice with one of the leading cloud vendors, it also provides us with a powerful new growth channel to be innovative and drive our business forward. 

We look forward to giving our Pega Cloud clients the exceptional speed, security, and scalability that Google Cloud reliably provides to clients around the world.

Both companies will collaborate on co-selling, field sales enablement, migration accelerators and marketing activities. 

Pega Infinity applications for Pega Cloud clients on Google Cloud will be available by the end of Q2 2022, starting with Pega Platform in the Americas. Other Pega Infinity solutions and regions are planned to go online over the next 18-24 months. Pega Infinity solutions are expected to be available on Google Cloud Marketplace by the end of Q3 this year.

My take

Process mining is the buzzword of 2022 so far. And I’ve seen some pretty sophisticated examples so far. From an end user perspective, it makes sense. The past decade or so has been about migrating to the cloud, carrying out a delicate balancing act of integration across cloud tools and legacy on-premise systems. Processes are intertwined and the work people do weaves a tangled web across the enterprise. If organizations want speed and the ability to adapt quickly, then this means better understanding of those processes. And the ambition is to use automation to act quickly to necessary changes needed. It’s still early days in many respects, but there are certainly gains to be had in this area.