Appian Attempts to Move Up the BPM Food Chain

Sandy Kemsley at Column2 recently reported that Appian, one of the "pure-play" BPM tool providers is attempting to move up the food chain by taking on $10million in Venture capital. One of the objectives for this funding is to enhance their Appian Anywhere SaaS BPM platform. They also want to take on the big players in this space like IBM and Oracle so they need more marketing clout.

I was interested to read several things. Their CEO Matt Calkins said that they’re creating a separate Appian SaaS sales force. It includes a sales model that compensates them based on projected 3-year revenues. This makes it easier to compare the on-demand and enterprise sales teams.

More importantly, Sandy reported that “they plan to shift to a SaaS “metabolism” for Appian Anywhere, allowing for frequent code releases in the on-demand platform, while only occasionally freezing that code base for the Enterprise edition. This keeps the two versions in sync, but provides a functionality advantage to the Appian Anywhere customers, who will see the new features earlier.”

I was also pleased to see that Sandy included in her links, one of our posts on BPM testing & validation: How & Why? She said that “often, companies test BPM in a pretty ad hoc manner; this post discusses how to get some discipline into that activity.”  In this post Chris Kraus and I went into a method that companies can better handle the types of changes that BPM providers like Appian bring and keep testing and validation of business processes under control, especially with more frequent code releases that SaaS models like Appian Anywhere offer.