Pegasystems acquired Everflow, a process mining startup, and also deepened partnerships with Google Cloud and Celebrus, a customer data platform. These deals come against the backdrop of a record financial judgment against the company in a corporate espionage case.

Everflow's process mining technology analyzes corporate event logs with machine learning tools to find bottlenecks in customer service, marketing and employee operations, problems that can be addressed with Pega Process AI workflow automation. Everflow's software is designed for line-of-business users to manage, analyze and optimize processes.

Pega follows other ERP and customer experience vendors in acquiring process mining vendors. SAP acquired Signavio in March 2021, and Microsoft acquired Minit in April of this year .

Process mining has become an essential technology for users to orchestrate bots and robotic process automation to digitize repetitive processes for ERP and CRM, said Predrag Jakovljevic, an analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers. He said it helps in many departments' and vertical industries' scenarios, including original equipment effectiveness optimization, customer journey transparency, working capital reduction, improved outcomes in healthcare, compliance and audit readiness, among others.  

"The importance falls on collecting information, generating new insights on the weak spots and opportunities to improve, and acting upon them," Jakovljevic said.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Pega plans a limited rollout of Everflow functionality in its products in the fourth quarter, with a full launch next year.

Pegasystems also entered into a partnership with CDP vendor Celebrus, which has many joint customers with Pega. The partnership is a "formalization of some of the joint success we've been able to get," said Don Schuerman, Pegasystems CTO and vice president of product strategy and marketing.

The partnership culminated in the release of Always-On Insights, which combines the Celebrus CDP with Pega Customer Decision Hub to capture first-party customer data and intermingle with third-party digital advertising data to drive automated marketing campaigns. It is available now.

U.K.-based Celebrus isn't one of the larger or more well-known CDP players, said David Raab, founder of the CDP Institute. But it serves users both on premises and in the cloud, as does Pegasystems -- making it a good match. Partnering with Celebrus doesn't preclude Pegasystems from acquiring the company or another CDP in the future, he added.

In the last several years, Pegasystems competitors such as Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP have either bought or built CDPs. While CDP market consolidation has slowed down since its peak a couple years ago, Raab doesn't think it's over.

"You always kind of wonder why someone would bother to buy if a perfectly adequate partner relationship is available to them," Raab said. "But the reason you buy is because you want the deeper connection, deeper integrations. If you just partner with somebody, you don't really control the roadmap -- that's why the big guys tend to build their own or buy."

Pegasystems also extended its partnership with Google to run Pega Cloud on Google Cloud Platform. Pegasystems will begin to roll out some Pega Infinity applications in the Americas by the end of this quarter, with full global availability of all applications planned in the next 18-24 months.

Pega Cloud already runs on AWS but expanded to Google to accommodate users' preferences for different cloud environments, Schuerman said.

Earlier this month, a jury found that Pegasystems had misappropriated trade secrets from low-code platform vendor Appian, which was awarded $2.036 billion. Pegasystems said in its official response it "strongly disagrees" with the judgment and plans to appeal.

Given the size of the monetary award compared to the company's market capitalization of about $4 billion, Pegasystems customers might wonder about the company's ability to invest in innovation.  Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler said the company has 6,000 employees and remains on strong financial and engineering footing.

"There's a long set of appeals, which I am personally counting on to address what I think is just wrong," Trefler said of the verdict. "Regardless of that, Pega is an innovative company. We have the capacity to invest. We have a strong and very, very large customer base [and] lots of recurring revenue. Anybody who's watched me for the last 39 years [shouldn't] worry about innovation at all."

It would take an "unlikely" and "extreme" situation for the judgment to put Pegasystems out of business, despite the size of the monetary award, Jakovljevic said.

"If it is true that Pega can continue to sell its software without any injunctions, then it is just a matter of reputation -- and when and how Pega will fork out that money," Jakovljevic said. "Probably they will reduce the amount in the appeals or perhaps in a settlement."

The partnership and acquisition news came in conjunction with Pegasystems' Pegaworld Inspire virtual user conference.

Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.

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