Nexo is buying Vauld, marking more DeFi consolidation

3

Pegasystems

Power Score: 48.55

Momentum Score: 21.00 (10)

HQ: Cambridge, MA

CEO: Alan Trefler

On Power

One of the few public companies on the list, Pegasystems’ journey to becoming a serious low-code player seems to have been guided by Apple Maps instead of Google, given the number of interesting turns it’s had to take along the way. The nearly-40-year-old company plays in a number of spaces, from robotic process automation to customer relationship management, and its foray into low-code tools has given the company the chance to expand its existing relationships into the still-growing market. It’s a strategy that’s been paying dividends. Pega uses its annual contract value as its North Star, and noted in its most-recent earnings call that annual ACV had grown 22% year-over-year. That mirrors the growth it had the prior year as well, when it turned in 21% ACV growth through the first nine months of 2020. While some of the growth can be attributed to Pega’s success in other businesses, CEO Alan Trefler has been quick to highlight low-code successes in recent earnings calls, calling out a couple of Fortune 50 clients that had built 500 applications using Pega’s low-code tools in June 2021.

On Disruption

In mid-2021, Pega launched an updated version of its Infinity Platform, introducing more AI into the company’s low-code engine. It's a further build out of the company’s “ center out ” philosophy, an approach that Pega says ensures that front-end interfaces will update automatically even as users adjust back-end APIs and processes — a step that centralizes development onto Pega’s “brain,” making the company’s low-code environment responsive in the way front-end and back-end developers might be to each other’s new code. Moreover, the company announced that it was expanding the number of UI templates for its low-code development environment in a visuals-centric move that borrows from the no-code playbook.

Tea Leaves

The company has long been popular with government services, both in the U.S. and abroad, through its FedRAMP authorization status and existing federal relationships around process automation and its CRM platform. As the company’s low-code offering has become a more-prominent part of its business model though, Pega has found ways to make low-code a part of those partnerships. Recently, the company signed a contract with the U.K.’s air force and navy to build a recruiting platform for the armed services that would be powered by the low-code engine. Looking forward, the company sees the integration of a number of its services as a key to growth, with CEO Alan Trefler noting in the company’s most recent earnings call that giving low-code capabilities to existing customers is part of the company’s strategy. Moreover, Trefler highlighted that the agility that low-code products give Pega customers will be crucial to how businesses respond to the continuing Great Resignation during the next 24-36 months.

They Said It

“Last year, the software industry came up with a couple dozen new computer languages. Who the hell needs more computer languages? We should be working to simplify, but instead are almost celebrating complexity” – CEO Alan Trefler in an April 2021 interview

Return to the Low-Code/No-Code Power Index here .