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In December, when I vacationed in Costa Rica, I brought with me a secret. On my iPad and iPhone (I travel with both) I carried an app that integrated me back to my office better than anything I’d ever used. Its interface was a simple scrolling list, filtered to my preferences, of things happening at work. It included items for my approval, process alerts from various applications, messages from my employees, data reports and more. I could comment on any item and be sure those comments were heard by the right people. I could extract data from remote systems to draw my conclusions. I could fill forms and make approvals in every application in the enterprise. It was native – and beautiful – on all my mobile platforms.

It was the new Appian 6.5, code name Tempo.

iPad Tempo1 300x230 Appian 6.5 – the new leader in Mobile and Social BPM

It’s a revolution of new functionality, and because it is so novel it has undergone an unusually long testing and acceptance cycle. We’ve run our company on it for nearly six months now, and it’s been in development for more than a year. We took our time because in an uncertain market, we wanted to get the concept exactly right.

Our intention was to set the new standard for mobile and social BPM.

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Last week, Appian released its Q1 results.  Generally, we keep quarterly results to ourselves and do semiannual ‘momentum’ press releases.  This time we publicized the quarter, for two reasons: it was awfully good, and it’s ‘quadrant season’ for the major analyst firms so all good news helps.

We grew 58% over last quarter (not last year) which is to say the company is 58% bigger than it was 90 days ago.  There are multiple reasons for this. More »

For years, Appian’s nearest competition was Lombardi, followed by Savvion.  In just under a month, both have been acquired.   While Savvion had long ago faded from competitive viability, its acquisition by Progress Software puts neat punctuation to the era of crowded and overlapping BPM pure-plays – ending it, as it were, with a bang.
Nearly everyone ‘wins’ here – even external parties. More »

Appian’s goal has always been to be the top pure-play BPM company. The road from where we stand to that place has never been clearer than it is right now.

You have heard by now that IBM is buying Lombardi. We welcome this transaction, as it will help us to achieve our goal more quickly. Lombardi has now marginalized itself, and will soon be entangled in the IBM stack. No BPM company has ever maintained its innovative vitality after being acquired. More »