With the acquisition of InfruidLabs in 2019, we were expecting some substantial changes to how we display dashboards and summary reports but it does not seem to be the case. Did the plan change or is it planned in a later release to integrate those new capabilities?

Deployment Manager has its own release cycle which allows benefiting from the latest features without the need to constantly upgrade the entire platform. With Pega promoting more and more composition and less inheritance, is it a release model that will be expanded even further with other parts of the platform like Pega testing, Robotics capabilities, DX API, …?

What are some of the high level steps Pega folks can take to start to align themselves and their current and future projects with DX API, Cosmos and Project Fnx?  

When it comes to newer projects there are some sort of guidelines (single actor/channel etc.) to keep case types small, manageable and discrete/purposeful with Microjourney approach.   

However in existing projects some of the case types have become big and monolithic and there does not appear to be any concrete guidance on how to align them with microjourneys evolution.  Is there any guidance we can offer to re-align existing landscape with Microjourney evolution?

Do we know if the UI/UX investments in existing projects be cross-compatible with Cosmos? If not, what is the strategy for aligning and conversion to Cosmos? 

It would be nice to see Pega start initiatives to establish relationships with independent LSA's and small LSA's owned companies and expose potential projects to this group. Is there any plan to start initiatives of this kind?

We're seeing a big investment in App Studio, many great features come with each new version, improving more and more the authoring experience for citizen developers. It looks like our strategy is moving the development team from Dev Studio to App Studio, but my experience (and also the one of many other LSAs) is that the real life on the field is so complex, and there are a lot of scenarios not supported by App Studio. On the other hand, our target client is an enterprise account, most of the time with high complex architecture and a lot of legacy systems to integrate with. So I would like to have a better understanding of App Studio roadmap and strategy. The final goal is being able to execute these complex projects almost with App Studio, or on the other hand the roadmap is positioning App Studio (with App Factory) just for the non-complex ones.

I would like to know more about process fabric. It looks like a great feature, but I'm missing some low level content about that feature, and how it works behind the scene.

I am curious where you see the Pega platform growing in the industry as its use expands to a larger customer base.  Obviously the platform started in the enterprise with bespoke applications and is able to handle extremely complex workflows and business processes at a fraction of the cost of custom development.

With an expansion into corporate markets, we have noticed some expectations from prospective clients that are sometimes met and sometimes at odds with what the Pega community (Pega corporate, partners, etc.) are offering:

• Needs for relatively simple workflow cases that I would say definitely fit nicely into a micro journey/app studio approach.  For these types of deals we see a lot of pressure from partners to get cheaper and faster and in many cases it may not even be prudent for them to be at the table.  What does the future look like for partners in this type of market as the platform continues to evolve?
• Needs for extremely complex workflows to solve more industry standard solutions.  In this case the client does not have deep pockets for the kinds of enterprise applications built in the past, nor the desire to build them.  Downmarket, clients are used to finding something off the shelf and there is often competition from standard offerings, without the need/desire for customization that larger enterprise customers have typically had.  How does the platform support this kind of solution today and in the future?

Thanks!

PEGA as a product quickly evolves but customers are not able to align to that speed. Whats prescribed as a UI best practice in the previous versions are now replaced with a new way of doing things. Customers recently upgraded to 8.3 or 8.4, Its practically very hard to convince the business teams to again upgrade to Cosmos. For huge applications built, I dont see a these UI upgrades to cosmos will be easy. Probably some are easy to rebuild in cosmos than upgrade. Also adopting cosmos appears business needs to retrain users as we cannot mimic the current UI layouts. How do you convince business/customers to adopt these changes? 

Why PEGA academy not providing courses to learn frameworks like KYC/CLM or Smart Dispute frameworks? There are content available but thats surely not sufficient for a developer to start working for the customer. Content available are at very high-level. 

Like others in here, I would love to know more about project fnx features that are up and coming. Where multi-tenancy is going, more on using Read Replicas with Aurora Postgres and anything related to containization or if there is a future where Pega is running serverless on an App Engine/Beanstalk.   Are there other technologies on the horizon that we should pay attention to?  Things like Kafka, Cassandra, Hazelcast, or front end stuff like React ect that were not in the tool say 5 years ago but are now relevant for us to know. 

As LSA's we tend to have to stay current on platform capabilities and technology trends in the IT industry.  Often times juggling this and project work are there any plans to put more training content around some of these things as they pertain to Pega?

Also, in Pega World 18 (i think) Stephanie Louis demonstrated some neat capabilities in a lab around being able to blow out a Case in Pega based on an image of a sketch  or using ML to pull information from a use case.  Are we eventually going to see anything like this in the real world? 

In the last 3-4 years, the market is abuzz with many low-code, no-code platforms which seem to offer rapid development capabilities. This may very well be the next technology hype cycle.

Examples  - Outsystems, Mendix, Unqork, ServiceNow,

Mid-size customers (comparable to Pega corporate market segment), find these low cost providers extremely attractive. I feel, they are slowly maturing to become a competition for Pega in the mid-size market segment.

What's Pega's Product strategy & roadmap to compete with these type of products?

It might be good for to have a "Pega Lite" - lightweight flavor of the product. Scaled down, easy to deploy, light weight etc.

Is there a plan to create "Pega Lite" version ?

I guess App Express may be positioned like this, but it still feels like an accelerator on the overall product and not decouple as a light weight version

Relational Databases are a core part of the Pega core engine. However, from an industry perspective there is a slow shift from relational databases to more object based, in-memory databases.

I personally feel that, for Pega's engine architecture, an in-memory, object based database would fit in well. Especially the blob processing etc can become more native.

Is there a plan to move away from relational database based product architecture ?

With  Low code being the buzzword, how would you envision the role of an LSA or SSA in the future ?  How can we ensure demand for the growing community of LSAs and SSAs ? 

Do you envision that non-citizen developers (level CSSA) will use App studio instead of Dev studio? If so then App studio must be able to work with branches.

In our current version of Pega (8.4.2) a branch toggle have been added to App studio but this leads to a number of unexpected issues so we have been forced to switch it off and we use App studio currently only to discuss the application with BA.

So what are the short and long term plans with App studio, and how will branch based development fit in these plans?