Pegasystems Inc. is an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1983, Pegasystems develops software for customer relationship management (CRM) and business process management (BPM). Pegasystems specializes in the following industries: financial services, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, insurance, government, high tech, communications and media, energy, and utilities. The company announced in 1996 that it would be publicly traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange (PEGA). Since 2010, the company has acquired a number of companies including Antenna Software, Firefly, OpenSpan, MeshLabs, and Chordiant. The company's core product is the Pega 7 software platform.

Alan Trefler founded Pegasystems in 1983 at the age of 28, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prior to founding the company, in the early 1980s Trefler had developed computer systems that could play chess. During the company's early years it focused on providing case management, namely for companies such as American Express. Trefler recollects that when he started Pegasystems, he wanted to create software that eased the heavy lifting that business people deal with, as well as software that understood how business-people wanted things to work, commenting "it turns out to be a fairly hard problem to solve." An article in Computerworld traces business rules engine to the early 1990s and to products from the likes of Pegasystems, Fair Isaac Corp and ILOG. As a private company, Pegasystems was "bootstrapped" initially, but did not take on outside investors. The company went public in 1996 with initial and secondary public offerings, and began trading on NASDAQ under the symbol PEGA. Raising several millions in funding in the process, going public freed the company from needing to pursue venture capital investments. Pegasystems entered a period of financial trouble in the late 1990s, following a dispute with its accountants, Ernst & Young. After restating their earnings, Pegasystems faced an investigation by the SEC, which was dropped in 2002.

In March 2010, Pegasystems acquired the enterprise software company Chordiant for around $161.5 million. Although it had clients such as Citibank, Capital One, MetLife, Cigna, Wellpoint, T-Mobile, and Vodafone and was described as an "innovator" in "applying predictive analytics to customer interactions," Chordiant had struggled in the 2008 recession. The acquisition gave Pegasystems access to new markets such as telecommunications and healthcare, with Pegasystems integrating Chordiant and its customer relationship management (CRM) technology into its existing operations. Pega Cloud was introduced using Amazon Web Services in 2012, and in October 2013, Pegasystems acquired the mobile application developer Antenna Software for $27.7 million. Located in New Jersey, Antenna also had bases in Kraków and Bangalore.

In October 2013, Pegasystems was described as a "provider of business process management (BPM) and [CRM] solutions," and had its global development center in Hyderabad. Revenues for the company grew strongly when compared to the rest of the business process management market from 2005 until 2013, with license revenues rising 34% in 2013. The company reported that profit increases in 2013 were "fueled by demand for an upgrade to its main software product," Pega Platform, which was designed so companies could integrate data and software systems. After it released its recent financial results in November 2013, Pegasystems' stock rose 20%, resulting in an 122 percent value increase over the prior year and a record high for the company.

Pegasystems hired a cloud technology proponent to develop its cloud technology strategy in 2014. Over the following year, Pegasystems invested in network operations in North America and India to support its cloud services. In May 2014, Pegasystems acquired the Bangalore-based MeshLabs, a text mining and analytics software startup. The Times of India reported that Pegasystems would integrate MeshLabs's text analytics software "to gather unstructured social media data and decode it into actionable business insights for its clients." The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Pegasystems acquired Firefly in June 2014, a co-browsing tool funded by First Round Capital. The startup from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was the company's first move into the cobrowsing market. By the summer of 2014, Pegasystems remained headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts with 2,700 employees. By July 2014 the company was worth around US$1 billion.

By early 2015, Pegasystems remained a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq, with 3,000 employees, 30 offices, and "more than half a billion dollars in revenue." As of February 2015, the company had active partnerships with IT outsourcing companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, InfosysBSE, WiproBSE, HCL Technologies, Accenture and Cognizant. By September of that year, companies who had built teams of Pegasystems specialists included Accenture, Ernst & Young and Cognizant. Between 2005 and 2015, Pegasystems had average sales growth of 21% per year. There was a steady rise in the company's share price in 2015, with higher than expected revenues from the year prior. In January 2016, it was reported that Pegasystems planned on raising its number of employees significantly, and the company announced the acquisition of OpenSpan Inc. in April 2016. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, OpenSpan specialized in robotic process automation and workforce analytics software.

Pega Academy was founded to "provide online resources, classroom training and certification for systems integrators to help them train up new Pega specialists." In 2016, Pegasystems announced the launch of the Pega University Academic Program (UAP), offering training and certification on the Pega 7 platform for educators and students. In November 2016, Pegasystems Inc signed an agreement with TalentSprint to train 10,000 Pega-certified professionals at Indian engineering colleges. At the time, there were 27,000 professionals trained in Pegasystems technology, with 60 percent in India. The first PegaWorld conference was held in 2006. PegaWorld 2016, the company's annual users' conference, brought in 3,500 attendees.

Pegasystems develops and supports software for customer engagement and operations. In particular, as of 2013 Pega specialized in software for business process management (BPM) and customer relationship management (CRM), and was seen as offering more bespoke technology than competitors such as Oracle Corporation or SAP ERP. As of late 2013, Pega’s core software, PegaRULES Process Commander (PRPC), was related to BPM. The company's current core software offering is its Pega 7 platform, which is accessible via cloud technologies. Pega 7 platform is the company's "core offering in the market that mixes business process management, CRM, data analytics, big data (social and mobile)." The company continuously modifies and updates the platform, investing as well in co-browsing and cloud and social media to integrate. In August 2015, the company "made a strategic decision to make its software easier to use," hiring teams with backgrounds in user experience. By September 2015, the company had introduced Pega Express. Pega Express was designed to allow business specialists to quickly build simple applications.

Fortune wrote in August 2015 that Pegasystems' CRM suite "correlates data from existing marketing, sales, and support systems. Whenever a call arrives, an agent is presented with an omnichannel view of the history so he or she receives a heads-up into what the call might be about. That in itself isn't so new, but the software also uses predictive analytics to suggest solutions proactively. In Sprint’s case, agents are presented with several different scenarios of how to handle a call." In 2015, Pegasystems' CRM suite was listed as one of the top five largest in the CRM market by David Roe of CMSWire, alongside Salesforce.com, SAP CRM, Oracle CRM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Gartner mentioned Pega in April 2015, and Forrester Research named Pegasystems a "leader in customer service for enterprise clients" in December 2015.

Pegasystems Inc. in March 2016 announced Pega Client Lifecycle Management (CLM), an application "that streamlines and automates corporate client onboarding" for banks by "[orchestrating] complex CLM processes on a global scale in a single application, reducing onboarding time by 70 percent and reducing costs by 60 percent." In September 2016, Pegasystems released enhancements to its Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Know Your Customer (KYC) applications. By that time Pegasystems had applied predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to its CRM applications for years, and among other products, it is used in Pegasystems' decision management software.

Pegasystems specializes in the following industries: financial services, insurance, life sciences, healthcare, government, manufacturing, high tech, communications and media, energy, and utilities. While core areas have traditionally included banking and financial sectors, more recent areas include manufacturing, life sciences and healthcare. As of 2013, other clients included "largely Fortune 500 companies" such as ING, Lloyds Banking Group, BAA, and the state of Maine, which commissioned Pegasystems to create a BPM system to cut administrative costs. By July 2014, PayPal, Cisco Systems, and Phillips were using Pegasystems’ CRM software, and BNY Mellon announced they would be integrating Pega into its operations as part of their efficiency strategy.

In 2015 Pegasystems disclosed that its clients included "six of the top 10 global communications companies, eight of the top 10 credit-card companies, and eight of the top 10 global banks." Among them were American Express, HSBC, United Health Group, JPMorgan Chase, General Motors, Barclays, Pfizer, General Electric, and Cisco Systems. In 2015, American International Group debuted a customer complaints application from Pegasystems, and also that year Sprint used Pegasystems to focus and rework its customer relations strategy. Between 2010 and 2015, ME Bank worked with Pegasystems on a rebuild of its technology systems utilizing process automation. According to the bank, the time to open a new deposit account decreased from five days to five minutes. On June 9, 2015, it was reported that The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) had "chosen to implement customer decisioning software" developed by Pegasystems.

In 2016 Philips and Pegasystems worked together "to create a new wireless patient remote monitoring system," and by July, Philips had supplied devices to 700,000 patients. Pegasystems began work on a CRM platform for the state of Maine in 2016, building on earlier projects. Other clients include Heineken, the New Jersey Courts,AIG Japan, Hanover Insurance Group, Cigna, MKB Brandstof, Wüstenrot & Württembergische Gruppe, Trancelerate, British Gas, Allianz, and OnStar.