“This is a way of working change”: Pega chief of client and partner success on the impact of AI and SaaSpocalypse on the company

John Higgins explains how Pega has adapted to this new working landscape.

Organisations aren’t going through just a technology change, but a way of working change.

John Higgins, chief of client and partner success at Pegasystems told CRN Australia that with the SaaSpocalypse, agentic AI, and everything in between, that partners and vendors are going through a significant change.

“This is not just a technology change. This is a way of working change. This is a design and an implementation change,” he said.

Higgins noted that Pega isn’t immune to this change and the company has made certain alterations to adhere to this new way of working.

Including the release of Pega Blueprint, an AI powered workflow design tool that uses agentic and generative AI. The partner-focused part product was released last year.

“We have infused all of our implementation best practices within the Blueprint product, so that every one of our partners gets our best practices out of box,” he said.

“As we look to the future, there's also things like, how do we do role consolidation and delivery of projects?”

Higgins explained that nowadays every project needs 12-14 roles, a recent trend.

“There's been a proliferation of role specialisation over the last decade, and again, we've got a new capability that allows us to consolidate the number of people involved and drive greater self sufficiency,” he said.

"We've done a lot of work on trying to rewire the how you deliver in the AI powered world, and that's been received incredibly well. We've seen 80 percent of our clients now go live in less than 90 days, which is unheard of in enterprise software in the years past.”

Read more of our interview with Higgins below.

CRN: What has been the partner reaction to SaaSpocalypse?

Higgins: Most enterprises are probably in the wait and see model. A lot of them are struggling with the approaches that some of our competitors are taking.

Historically, packaged software companies have used what we in the industry call wrap and renew. The challenge with doing that is you end up with tech debt. Every time you replace it, you're putting a veneer on it, but you're not getting rid of the systems that are underneath.

If you study the architectures that are being sold at the moment, a lot of that is, I need to centralise the data from the existing applications, and then I'm going to put another layer on top of technology, which is another version of wrap and renew.

I could argue it's wrap and renew, on wrap and renew.

CIOs and COOs are looking at operational risk and complexity, and they're looking at that going that's difficult to integrate with and to work with. What I'm hearing from business leaders is the number one obstacle for AI exploitation is tech debt.

It's not the AI itself, it's the proliferation of systems that needs to be coordinated in order to truly get to that.

CRN: What is something that you love about the Australian market?

Higgins: I always find Australia is a great market to incubate, new ways of working, new ways of doing things. It's also quite a small market and when I say small in regard to you've got a lot of people that are willing to be challengers. When you start getting into large global organisations, the appetite for risk is significantly lower. But if you're a regional division, you're going to be a little bit more, “let me show you, there's a better way of doing it”.

I love this market.

The second thing that's very good about this market is how viral you go when you're successful with organisations. Our customer decision hub product is a product that many of the big banks in Australia have taken on, and it's become the default option for pretty much every large bank.

I think of our workflow automation, the same. If you've built a reputation in the market for being high quality, good and honourable people, top notch software, top notch people, to quote one of my clients, it's a market that is you can execute freely.

CRN: What are some of your plans over the next year?

Higgins: I've talked a lot about app modernisation in regard to helping clients deal with large portfolios of legacy applications. A lot of our existing clients have heritage Pega applications that also need to be refactored and modernised.

We launched a tool called the App Signature tool, which we're now training all of our partners on. So we're drinking our own Kool Aid, and we're using AI to solve something that historically has been quite difficult to solve.

That's going to be something that our clients can expect to see from our ecosystem partners now, that enablement plan is rolling out across this region.

The second thing is just continuing the viral adoption of Blueprint as a product to help clients use it to understand what their legacy apps are doing to do more scenario planning around large scale operationalisation.

If they know exactly what they need to build, we're making it simple for them to envision, design and deploy a new Pega system that we're the default answer for everything. A structured go to market motion, all of which have 100 percent partner muscle behind it.

CRN: What is your message to partners?

Higgins: We built Blueprint for you and for our clients. We're building it in such a sophisticated way that allows you to put your industry IP in place. If we are not helping you sell more, if we're not helping you build better quality solutions, if we're not helping you deliver more efficiently and winning more business; we're not being a good partner to you.

Hold us accountable in helping you drive down your cost of sale, improving the quality of your proposals and winning more business.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.