Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ:PEGA) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Alan Trefler: Sure. So, we made a decision to preview Blueprint with our partners a couple of weeks before we made it publicly available to clients and prospects on our website, to make sure the partners felt respected and that they were part of the community is moving forward. And they were assured, one of the things they asked for, which we are in the process of implementing is the ability for our partners to themselves create Blueprints that they could use to capture their intellectual property and the structure of a Pegasystem in the way we talk about cases and stages and steps and interfaces. And given the ability to create their Blueprints, which would then be proprietary to them to make us so that when a customer Blueprint was created, that customer Blueprint, which today is an amalgam of Pega best practice and best practice from the Internet would now be able to be an amalgam of Pega best practice, the best practice from whatever partner was there particular plus the Internet, putting those all together, I think that’s going to be hugely, hugely powerful.

So, that’s our agenda for the next 60 days is to get that working. And that was directly based on what we heard from partners as to how they want to leverage this to be able to help their go-to-market, which obviously helps our go-to-market. So, we are seeing a lot of enthusiasm there. We are getting customers in very significant quantity. I mean like very significant quantity, doing literally thousands of these Blueprints in just a couple of weeks. And we are seeing prospects coming in. I think we will see more of that as this begins to take hold and as they get to be more buzz about that. It’s still, once again, very young. But as you can experience it yourself, it’s very real.

Austin Cole: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Schappel with Loop Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Mark Schappel: Thank you for taking my question. Alan, with respect to Blueprint, I realize it’s still early, but I was wondering if you could just talk about some of the consumption trends or patterns that you have seen on the Pega platform with respect to the early Blueprint adopters?

Alan Trefler: I never would have expected we get thousands. There have been 20,000 Blueprints created. Some of my Pega staff, those can count as well, but many, many thousands by customers and partners. And I would say that actually would have exceeded my expectation a month ago when we were beginning to talk about how we are going to roll this out and make this happen. So, it’s garnering quite a bit of excitement. If you come to PegaWorld, then I hope one of you will be there, then you will have a chance to talk to clients themselves. I think you are going to hear great things.

Ken Stillwell: Mark, I think just to add one thing on that. The new feature that we just rolled out recently, where you can actually implement a Blueprint in a Pegasystem, originally, you could turn it into a PDF, right. You can look at it as a PDF. And recently, we have the ability to actually convert that into a Pegasystem. That to me is possibly the glue that connects what you are doing in a Blueprint to the realization of how fast an app can actually be built. And it is really – I mean I know we are talking about it, you could probably envision it, but to think about sitting down, spending 30 seconds to two minutes, getting a framework of a workflow going in and making it your own through the course of what could be 20 minutes, could be an hour and then clicking a button that set implement it and you are looking at an application that actually…

Alan Trefler: So, what’s interesting, so we have now – and once again, it’s all very new, but very real. We have – for a lot of years for the last 2 years, had a program we call Catalyst, where we would go in with a real design thing sort of approach to help customers envision how they wanted to rebuild an app or rebuild a part of their business functions. And we have a very talented team that’s able to do this sort of work at a high level. I just saw the video of the first Catalysts that we are doing with Blueprint instead of the traditional way where people would candidly end up with a whiteboard, with stickies, posted notes on the white board using neural technology to kind of imagine a year, what they wanted. What they were able to do in two days was enormously high quantity quality.

Those are two half days. It blew the customers away and it was really, really able to do what we always wanted to do with Catalyst, which is to catalyze new thinking and leverage what they were able to do. So, this was a major European bank that we did it with. And in two half-day sessions, they do what – they did what I would have actually can’t believe we have expected to take three weeks or a month. And the customer was thrilled. So, it’s not just a little tech thing. It actually organizes the way people think about how they want to automate their processes in a way that makes sense with Pega architecture, which I think we have refined over all these years of doing it to be just a very effective way to thinking about process automation and being able to get rid of some of the historical barriers about why Pegasystem are hard to use, you need a lot of experience.

I think give us another couple of weeks. That’s just not going to be true, so really exciting.

Mark Schappel: Great. Thanks. And then Ken, real quick, given the strong free cash flow generation this quarter, is there any update to achieving your Rule of 40 targets this year?

Ken Stillwell: Well, I mean certainly, we are dependent on hitting both our growth and our cash flow for the year, which is obvious us having a start with the cash flow in Q1 is moving the ball, so to speak, down the field quite a bit. So, that side of the equation and our previous comments about the fact that we knew Q1 was going to be a difficult compare. So, we knew that we were going to start with ACV growth decelerating in Q1, and we will work our way back to that 11%. That was exactly how we modeled, so I am feeling just as confident as I was last quarter in our achievement of Rule of 40. And it’s right there in front of us, which is great. And I think everybody could see in the numbers how we get there. But we have got three more quarters to execute, Mark. So, we are going to keep focused on that.

Mark Schappel: It’s okay. Thanks.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Blair Abernethy with Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead.