Pega Infinity ’23 Advances Low-Code Application Development
Pega demonstrated its commitment to low-code application development by recently announcing a number of enhancements to Pega Infinity, a software suite for process automation and optimization.
Dubbed Pega Infinity ’23, the updated release was revealed at PegaWorld iNspire, a conference held in Las Vegas earlier this month. Many of the new capabilities pertain to composable application development and deployment, Generative AI, and reusability. The new features are projected to become available to the general public in the next few months.
Low code application development empowers business users to swiftly devise and implement applications. Its enterprise merit has increasingly been measured by the quality of the experiences it creates across any number of use cases.
“The next generation of low code is a lot of different things,” acknowledged Ken Parmelee, Pega Senior Director of Intelligent Automation Strategy. “And that includes a lot of the Generative [AI] things that we’re announcing.”
Generative Automation
Some of the more noteworthy improvements to Pega Infinity revolve around the use of Generative AI models to fulfill many of the requisites for building applications in a low-code manner. According to Parmelee, “You can generate a full application or a workflow. You can generate the underlying data model. You can generate the integration itself as a part of it. You can even generate test data.”
Pega Infinity provides these gains via a series of what are called “boosters”, which rely on advanced machine learning techniques to find, generate, and input information for these use cases. “This means that as you’re going through the creation of an app, the manual steps necessary and the creation of stuff like test data is so vastly reduced that it provides speedy app creation,” Parmelee confirmed.
Composability
Several updates have been made to Pega’s design system, Pega Constellation, to support a composable user experience. In addition to giving users what Parmelee termed “the common objects you need to build any application”, Constellation also has an API so users can access Pega’s services in other environments, tools, and applications.
Thus, organizations can embed salient aspects of Pega’s tooling in other application frameworks they employ. “Constellation, in our view and for our customers, is an evolution that allows you to take advantage of the best-of-breed experience itself, but also leverage any existing design framework you use for Pega applications,” Parmelee divulged.
Templates
Constellation was also endowed with a number of pre-built templates for design principles that are specific to commonly found use cases. Some of the pre-built characteristics of templates include different steps for building applications and constructing underlying data models.
Users can customize this information to their liking or supplement it with Generative AI capabilities. “You can use generative data model generation to create even more particulars around the way you want this to be laid out from the data side,” Parmelee commented. It’s also possible to map the resulting data model to the data source.
Reusability
One of the advantages of Pega Infinity’s composable approach is that low-code components are building blocks for others to use. Similar to how a data catalog functions, the platform contains a new reuse library for organizations to store details about the composable elements they rely on. The library centrally locates this information and makes it searchable. Users can publish low-code components to Pega App Factory to repurpose them.
“The idea is to have one place for organizations to look at all your shared assets,” Parmelee mentioned. Organizations can also reuse specific facets of data governance as part of the platform’s composable methodology. “If had a particular branding that you had to use, or I had a particular approval flow that you had to follow, you can build those things as a common component, and I could then pull them into applications I’m building,” Parmelee added.
Self-Service
Low code application development is critical to furthering the aims of the self-service movement. The enhancements typifying the updates in Pega Infinity ‘23 are calculated to further reduce the time required to build applications, implement them in production, and boost the value reaped from organizations’ content and data.
Not surprisingly, generative language models play a fairly important role in these advancements, particularly when coupled with reusable components for composable applications. Parmelee commented that these developments are part of a possibly even grander vision to “make the platform autonomous, so you can do more self-optimization across the tooling.”