Matt Calkins gave us a brief address at the customer dinner last night, but there are many more people here today, and he provided a more in-depth review of the corporate picture. Amongst other indicators are a revenue increase of 150% and active customer increase of 58% in 2009: I’m seeing numbers like this from many of the midsized BPMS vendors, supporting my impression that the BPM market continues strong even in the face of an economic downturn.
Their new corporate slogan is “BPM Accelerated”, referring to both speed of creation and operational speed. Speed to create results in quick ROI and reduced risk while satisfying constituencies; speed to operate results in customer satisfaction, better cost structure and enables the optempo opportunity to adapt to changing conditions. Given their new professional services offerings “Live in 10” and “Live in 20” – meaning a fully operational production system in 10 or 20 days – supports their goal of implementation speed.
Appian is creating a new BPM implementation methodology based on the idea that great processes evolve, they’re not invented: the ability to gradually change a process in order to optimize it is a key factor. I completely agree with this very Agile tenet: if you can’t change your processes gradually over the first few months of operation, they will be unable to properly support your business.
He highlighted some of the new features in Appian 6, such as an application focus both in user interface and deployment. He also emphasized the benefits of their real-time architecture, that allows for subsecond response time for process data, rules and reports from the instance data stored in Appian’s proprietary database combined with the full business data in a relational database. They’ve taken a page from Google’s book and made their UI as minimalist as possible, displaying only the features that the user really needs, in order to make BPM as easy to use as email.
The old Appian Access online community has been rebranded as Appian Forum, and expanded to include a library of free applications (created by Appian, partners and customers) with a starting point of 25 applications contributed by Appian based on customer requests: again, speeding time to implementation for these types of processes.