Pegasystems Acquires Building Blocks For Next-Generation CRM

For quite some time, Pegasystems (Pega) has pursued customer experience and customer service business through its strong rules-based business process management (BPM) offering and customer process management framework application. Now Pega has thrown down the gauntlet to other CRM vendors by acquiring Chordiant, a CRM vendor that could provide key pieces that Pega lacks. Pega isn't abandoning the mainstream BPM market in favor of CRM — it's just strengthening its hand by more forcefully connecting business process and the delivery of great customer experiences. Apart from new marketing automation and analytics capabilities, Pega also gets solid tier one customers in new sectors, a valuable team of engineers and CRM domain experts, and new sales channels. Rather than a major apps vendor buying a BPM suites vendor, this is the first time we've seen a major BPM suites vendor buy an apps vendor. The most important takeaway? Packaged suites are slowly giving ground to BPM-enabled processes. This acquisition signals the next wave of investments as packaged apps move to legacy status.