Hi - Yes, CPBA is a great place to start. I would definitely start there and then consider looking to CSA, UI Specialist, or a Product/App specific track depending upon what interests you or what type of projects and roles you are looking for.

Hi there, I can see that you are also from Australia. I have found that for some reason, Australian IT professionals tend to stick to purist definitions of their job roles. A lot of business analysts here tend to only do business analysis, without any crossover to other domains. (ie. you won't see a lot of BA's doing developer, project management or tester tasks).

The CPBA is geared more towards business analysts, but the "Pega way" of doing business analysis recommends business architects also write specifications (as opposed to systems analysts). This means you'll also need to learn a bit about the system. The CPBA material goes over the system and you'll be able to create very basic Pega apps, enough for you to understand the technology and write specifications.

Having said all that, a Pega business architect from a DCO perspective is the business process designer/modeller for the project. I would say that a Pega business architect is your BA, business process analyst and (to a certain extent) your data modeller/analyst all rolled into one.

For the record, before joining Pega as an SSA here in Australia, I was a Senior Business Analyst for about 7 years, then a software developer for several years prior to that.