Yesterday I sat in on a terrific Pegasystems’ community webinar on what our customers and partners are doing with Pega’s mobile app development technology and witnessed the excitement this capability is feeding across diverse industries. One indicator of the momentum for Pega mobile is that we had record setting attendance, with over six hundred people registering… clearly a hot topic! As you can see from the survey, everyone (89%) is ‘interested’ and over half of attendees are already currently engaged in mobile projects.

People like the fact that Pega allows you to develop once and publish across multiple platforms, including multiple mobile platforms (iOS, Android, RIM, HTML 5/CSS3).

They also like that customers who are currently working on their BPM or CRM applications on Pega do not need extra tech training to build out a great new mobile app. There are new considerations of course…  For example, how to think about optimizing for touch interface, dynamic orientation (horizontal versus vertical), making the app smart enough to know when the user wants a calendar, a numeric keypad, or access to the device’s camera or GPS capability. The webinar, I think, did a great job showing how Pega takes care of those hassles for you and how.

Isn’t it insane that every new channel wants to build its own siloed development culture and hardwire their business logic into the presentation channel? That’s just crazy! And so last century. People have better things to do to than enslave themselves to yet another soul-destroying software coding paradigm.  The only real solution to this madness? Cross channel, process driven solutions…

One of the great things shown in the webinar demo (that was also a big hit at our partner kick-off summit in January), was demonstrating Build for Change® on mobile. The light bulbs go off whenever we do that, and people get it that there is a big difference from having a general purpose downloadable BPM app (that does what exactly??), and a full model-driven environment that makes mobile a first class citizen. The proof is in the Build for Change pudding – go to the design environment and change the screens, the business logic, the authentication rules, the predictive model that is generating a location-based next best offer, the process, the rules – and bingo your mobile app is there with you 100%. None of this “please wait while we update your app” (am I the only one tired of seeing those multiple spinning wheels on my iPad App Store?), no re-coding and distribution of files. Just raw, undiluted dynamic business applications. Conveniently on mobile – ready for field service workers, for hospital clinicians, retail locations, claims adjusters, commuters, and everyone else on the move.

Is this a good thing for BPM? You bet. I’ve always talked about ‘driving work to done’. Now with what we see our customers and partners doing with Pega BPM on mobile platforms they can literally (using the clever GPS and mapping technology on the platform) get in a car and be advised on where to drive the work. :)

Another poll from the webinar, like some other tight contests going on here in America, the Google vs. Apple debate is virtually neck and neck, with more people on Apple but, interestingly, slightly more people trending toward Google.  Too early to call the election, but interesting nonetheless! Where are you at in your mobile BPM journey?