A big thank you needs to go out to all those who attended the Appian Forum.  This was certainly a milestone event in the history of Appian and a fantastic education and networking event in building your BPM practice. 

The Appian Forum was kicked off by Forrester Vice President and Research Director Connie Moore .  Followed by Connie, we had six great customer presentations by Nokia Siemens Network, AGF, Archstone, Defense Acquisition University, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Mercer HR Consulting on how they managed their BPM implementation.  In addition, presentations were provided by Appian partners on BPM best practices, methodologies and tools by Satyam, SMART, Oakbrook Solutions, and Mega. 

On the second day, Appian held a number of technical sessions providing tips and tricks in managing your BPM systems, code examples for performing some more complex actions, best practices in setting up your BPM initiative, and some sneak peeks on future versions of Appian Enterprise.

I’d certainly like to provide a special thank you to Sandy Kemsley for providing detailed blogs and summaries of each presentation.  Sandy takes time from her busy schedule to attend these sessions and provide useful feedback in improving our conferences.  Next time Sandy we’ll try to have a power plug nearby to keep you going throughout the day.

Overall, we could not have asked for a better event.  We had close to 200 total attendees, a great location at the Ritz Carlton, informative presentations, and even beautiful weather. 

Thanks again to everyone who attended.  If you happened to miss it, all the presentations are available on Appian Access.  We look forward to seeing everyone at the next Appian Forum.

Malcolm Ross

Tags: Uncategorized by Malcolm Ross
No Comments »

I’ve been waiting to blog about our partnership with Mega for a few weeks now.  We at Appian have been very busy with our recent Appian Forum event and Gartner BPM Show, and with those events behind us, there are many topics to catch up on.

The Appian / Mega partnership is an exciting relationship that provides an unmatched value proposition to the BPM market.  Mega has lead the way in Business Process Analysis and Enterprise Architecture tools while Appian is the innovation leader in Business Process Management in the execution and management of enterprise processes.  Binding these products together will provide unmatched capability in modeling, analysis, simulation, execution, and management of processes.

We’ll disclose more details as the integration evolves, but suffice to say, it goes far beyond what has ever been attempted before in integrating a BPA and BPM tool together.   The partnership will close the gap on round-trip modeling, execution and analysis.  Furthmore, it will raise the bar in change management and architecture for all application platforms.

Look for an upcoming webinar in Q4/2008 that will highlight the partnership and integration between the two products.

Malcolm Ross

Tags: Uncategorized by Malcolm Ross
No Comments »

Another member of Appian’s professional services organization, Medhat Galal, was chosen to provide insight for DM Review on an article entitled Centers of Excellence: The Path to Process Innovation Success.  In this article Medhat provides great insight in why organizations need a CoE to compliment any BPM initiative.  He also covers defining a CoE and setting up it’s basic framework.

If you are pursuing your first project, I highly recommend this quick read on BPM Centers of Excellence.

Tags: Uncategorized by Malcolm Ross
No Comments »