Here at Appian, we are gearing up for our biggest global user conference yet.  This is the 4th Appian World conference, and the first to feature a multiple tracks that cater to the diverse and growing audience expected to attend this April.

For Appian World 2012, we will be featuring a BPM Beginner, Appian Developer, and Business track featuring.  Each track will feature a variety of customer case studies, 3rd party analyst / BPM expert perspectives, and learning sessions to ensure success in your BPM endeavors. More »

Tags: , Appian World, Appian World 2012

The thing parents keep telling their kids about the internet – about how once you put something up, it never goes away – is equally good advice for all of us. That Wayback Machine never forgets. A trip through the BPM software world of the internet archives is an interesting thing, because it shows what a difference a corporate acquisition can make in someone’s opinions. Let’s hop in the machine and take a little trip:

“Today one of our customers said they were told by IBM: “why spend your money with Lombardi, we’ll give you our BPMS for free.” I finally agree 100% with IBM on something: their BPMS is worth nothing. Getting a cheap BPMS is like buying a dancing elephant for a dollar: cool, but who can afford to feed it?”

That’s Phil Gilbert talking. Or rather, Phil Gilbert back when he was president and CTO of Lombardi. Today’s Phil Gilbert is head of BPM at IBM. Say it again, Phil: “Their BPMS is worth nothing.”

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Tags: , BPM, Business Process Management, IBM, Lombardi, WebSphere

We knew that Appian’s BPM software competitors would eventually wake up and try to grab some of our Mobile BPM thunder. We also expected that when they did, the offering would be well short in catching up with our innovation lead. Just recently, we’ve been proven right on both counts. But even we are surprised at how low the bar has been set among the other vendors.

Don’t be fooled by look-alikes. All Mobile BPM is NOT created equal. Delivering Mobile BPM over the web rather than through a native mobile experience is a terrible mistake – for your internal users, for your customers and for your IT shop. The reasons boil down to user experience and cost.

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Tags: , Appian, Business Process Management, mobile BPM

Mobile phones have certainly come a long way. Remember the halcyon days of the 1980s, when you could feel like Michael Douglas in Wall Street, provided you had the upper body strength to lift the thing to your ear? Or how about back in ’65 when Don Adams introduced the world to the first combination footwear and “Smart” phone? (sorry, terrible pun).

Gordon Gekko and Maxwell Smart could certainly both take care of business (in their own inimitable ways). Today, though, you can take care of a lot more business on mobile devices that fit in the palm of your hand. For business, the focus today is cloud computing, mobile IT and social networking. Today’s smartphones enable all of that. So it’s a good idea for corporate IT to keep an eye on the latest and greatest mobile devices coming our way. Ginny Mies at CIO.com recently took a look at the possible future smartphones. It is definitely worth a read.

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Tags: , Cloud Computing, enterprise mobility, mobile BPM, Social

Appian has released our latest version of Appian 6 to our customers and invites all Appian Forum members to join us for a webinar reviewing the latest features.

Appian is making available two webinars to accomodate our customers in the Americas and Europe on Sept 14th at 12 pm EST as well as in Asia, Australia and New Zealand on Sept 15th at 12 pm AEST.  Registration is available here:

• Appian Q3 2011 Product Announcement Webinar – Americas / EMEA - Sept 14th 12 PM EST
• Appian Q3 2011 Product Announcement Webinar – Asia / Australia / New Zealand – Sept 15th at 12 PM AEST

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When Appian started our mobile BPM development efforts, we like everyone else had an important choice to make.

Do we optimize our web interface for mobile or build native mobile client applications?

Luckily we saw the same benefits that mobile users are seeing.  Despite the wonderful developments of HTML 5, native client apps for mobile devices provide an overall superior end-user experience.

A recent Nielesen Media report on Smartphone Analytics shows that on average Android users are in agreement, spending 2/3 of their time inside native mobile apps rather web apps.

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A good indication of where organizations are making technology investments comes from looking at their job postings.

Indeed.com, a search engine that aggregates job postings across a large number of employer and recruiting sites, has a nifty ‘job trends’ feature that tracks the growth of specific keywords being used.

A search for the keyword ‘bpm’ shows a 450% increase, since January 2005, in its use in job postings. This aligns with the widely experienced growth of the BPM software market and Gartner’s recent prediction about increasing BPM spending in 2011.

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Tags: , Appian Cloud, BPM in the Cloud, BPM software, mobile BPM, Social BPM

When Appian released our last iOS update, we added the capability to capture images directly from a mobile device and submit as part of an Appian task or form.  The feedback was overwhelmingly positive as customer began to imagine the many use cases inside their business, but the most immediate response was “What about voice capture?”

Well just a few weeks later, we’ve been able to add another update to our Mobile BPM offering that includes voice capture and playback directly inside an Appian task or form.

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Tags: , Apple, mobile BPM, Voice

We had our quarterly company meeting yesterday. Everyone was in a pretty good mood based on our success in the first half of the year. As usual, our executive team did a great job talking about numbers, goals and strategies. Our CEO Matt Calkins, however, spent most of his time on something much bigger. He talked to us about redefining Business Process Management by redefining BPM software – how it looks, what it does, and where it does it. By doing that, he said, we will change the very nature of how organizations operate and how work gets done.

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Tags: , Appian, Business Process Management, mobile BPM, Social BPM

Tags: , Cloud, IT Management