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.

In addition, we have added a 4th training day for those attendees wishing to get even more training on aspects of the Appian product.

For a full break-down of the agenda, please visit our Appian World 2012 agenda page.

We look forward to seeing many familiar and new faces this year.  Be sure to register early, registration is free but seating is limited.

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

“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.”

Here’s another echo from former-Phil Gilbert that shouldn’t be forgotten:

“The choice isn’t between pure-play vendors and stack vendors, the choice is between BPM or IBM…What is BPM? I think it’s pretty simple: put the business back in charge of its business assets. And what is IBM? Keep that control in IT.”

They say the only way to achieve real change is from the inside, and I have no doubt that is what Mr. Gilbert would like to do at IBM. I don’t doubt his intentions for a second. I’m also sure Captain Edward Smith intended to miss the iceberg.

The fact is that nearly two years after its acquisition of Lombardi, IBM has still failed to outline a clear path for its BPM customers. Yes, it made a marketing-oriented announcement about a roll-up of its disparate BPM portfolio into IBM BPM 7.5, but that is a unified offering in marketing-speak only.

As Forrester analyst Clay Richardson rightly pointed out, IBM slapped on a new coat of paint, but hasn’t done anything substantial to rev the engine. He wrote: “While this is not surprising — we predicted that it would take three to four years for IBM to completely integrate Lombardi and WPS into a single unified environment — we expected IBM to communicate a strategy or vision for merging the engines as part of this announcement.”

In the absence of even a strategy, let alone any significant action around BPM engine integration, IBM customers are forced to figure out their own path. Their choices are what was WebSphere BPM (itself not a single engine, but the product of several acquisitions and internal development), and the additional Lombardi engine. The former is what pre-acquisition Phil Gilbert said was “worth nothing.” The latter is what IBM described as merely a “departmental BPM” solution in their acquisition analyst call.

If I were an IBM BPM customer I would certainly be confused. And worried. And wishing for a different kind of Wayback Machine of my own.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

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.

One of the most powerful benefits of Mobile BPM is that it extends participation in process beyond a narrow set of predetermined users. The ubiquity of mobile devices means everyone, at all levels of your organization, across your supply chain and out to your customers, can (as we say) “Be Part of the Process.” But that’s only if the user experience on those devices is up to par with what the mobile generation expects: simple, modern, engaging and effective.

A “mobilized” web experience is none of those things. It is slow. It is clunky. It creates inconsistencies. For example, iOS and Blackberry users will have very different experiences. This sub-par experience will not drive the usage that will make process a pervasive and effective component of efficient operations and a stellar customer experience.

Building mobile enterprise applications is a cost center with a high price tag. Estimates range from $50K to $150K per application. And that’s only for one mobile platform. Once you do it for iPad, you have to do it all over again for Android. And again for Blackberry. In addition, mobile UI design is a specialized skill that not all traditional developers possess, and each mobile platform has different limitations and form-factors that must be considered. So you need dedicated developers across the mobile devices you want to support.

Appian’s native Mobile BPM eliminates this additional development cost. Any application built in Appian can become a native mobile app simply through a series of check-boxes. Data inputs, forms and actions are then automatically rendered natively across the iOS, Blackberry and Android operating systems. Taking a mobilized web app approach loses that significant development cost advantage. It requires a developer and specialized tools/training to build a special, separate mobile interface every time a new mobile app is created.

There are many reasons why a BPM vendor would choose the inherently limited mobilized web application route. Desperation to bring a mobile offering to market as cheaply as possible is one. Inability to deliver a unified native mobile app across their set of inconsistent architectures resulting from years of technology acquisitions is another. (It takes a well-integrated and consistent architecture to achieve what Appian has done with native mobility).

Whatever the reason for the choice, one thing is clear: Mobile BPM over the web is a losing proposition for a BPM vendor’s customers.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

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.

Developers, as Mies dutifully points out, are working all the time on the Next Big Thing in mobile computing. The next iPhone or Droid is being sketched out on a napkin somewhere. “Smartphones have gone from portable messaging and email devices to streaming-video machines that surf the Web at blazing speed and have cameras that rival point-and-shoots (and they also happen to make calls),” Mies writes.

Some of the highlights:

• The Nokia Morph, a concept device that showcases the collaboration between the Nokia Research Center and the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre. The Morph uses nanotechnology to create a flexible, malleable electronic device. The Morph is constructed from fibril proteins that are woven into three-dimensional mesh, allowing the whole phone — screen included — to move and bend.
• Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich update could be a game-changer. The company has big plans to make near field communication ( NFC) even more useful in its next major Android update. One of Google’s goals with the update is to enable so-called “0-click interaction.” Imagine setting up peer-to-peer connections via NFC simply by putting two phones back to back.
• Qualcomm’s 2.5GHz quad-core smartphone processors could ship to manufacturers as early as next year. According to Qualcomm, these quad-core systems on a chip will feature Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and FM radio; support NFC and stereoscopic 3D video/photo (capture and playback); and support LTE networks. If we’ll be seeing the first devices with these chipsets in just a year, how powerful will such phones be in five years?

And this is to say nothing about the move to augmented reality via mobile devices. Very cool, indeed (and potentially a bit scary at the same time).

Of course, the underlying issue remains how you make today’s (and tomorrow’s) cutting-edge mobile capabilities work for business. Appian is blazing the trail in mobile BPM, with native apps on all popular mobile device platforms. We’re always on the lookout to integrate the latest mobile capabilities, so you can make enterprise mobility work for your organization.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

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

Our latest release of Appian includes many new features that will make it easier for developers and users to visualize, find, and update enterprise data sources from their Appian process applications.   In addition, Appian has added new expression functionality to our start forms, and expanded our platform support to accommodate more server options for our on-premise customers.

In this webinar we will be providing a detailed walk-through of the new features and functions with live Q&A.

Like previous product webinars, this event is held exclusively for Appian Forum members.  If you do not have an account for Appian Forum, you can register from the login screen.  Also, if you cannot attend the live conference, a full recording of the event will be available for replay from the Appian Forum community site.

Hope to see you there,

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

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.

It’s an important trend that businesses need to consider when building enterpise mobile applications.  Businesses will find a number of benefits in native mobile apps that equate to real efficiency gains, improve data gathering, and greater customer/employee satisfaction, such as:

Native mobile client apps deliver :

1)   Faster and more responsive navigation than mobile optimized web apps.

2)   Better access to unique abilities of mobile devices, such as Cameras, Voice Capture, Accelerometers, GPS Location, SMS, Telecommunications, and local file libraries.

3)   Availability on Application Stores that provide better marketing exposure and increased brand awareness

4)   Better security options with the ability to create custom encrypted data stores for storing content rather rely on mobile OS security, as well as control over which devices can install the app.

5)   Overall better usability which can lower training costs and speed adoption.

HTML 5 shows much promise, but the smart businesses are choosing enterprise applications that use native mobile apps rather web apps to ensure successful adoption of new enterprise mobile applications.

As always, if you’d like to take Appian’s native apps for a spin, Appian Mobile apps are on the Apple, Google, and RIM BlackBerry application stores.  Free trials of Appian are available on the Appian.com website.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross

Director Product Management

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.

Also according to Indeed.com, nine of the top ten fastest-growing job posting keywords relate to Mobile, Social or Cloud technologies (if you consider that HTML5 and jQuery also relate to mobile web apps). Note that the scale changes depending on the keyword.

Mobile, Social and Cloud are clearly the hottest areas where organizations are finding value and making investments. It corroborates what we are experiencing in the BPM market, which is a convergence of BPM with these three megatrends. We’ve found that Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM, and Social BPM are starting to become key drivers of multi-channel and cross-functional BPM software projects.

On a related note, if you’re looking to work at the forefront of Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM and Social BPM, consider joining Appian. Our top-notch development teams continue to build world-class capabilities in all these areas into our BPM software. Our BPM practitioners are also gaining unparalleled experience and success leveraging these capabilities in their BPM projects. Job opportunity details are here.

Finally, for a sobering comparison, I searched for ‘cobol’. It’s not surprising that this has been trending sharply downward, though I can’t account for the precipitous drop in early 2009.

- Sid Nazareth, Director, Solutions Strategy

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.

This great new feature enhances the productivity of Appian BPM users by not requiring them to enter information on sometimes impossibly small keyboards on their mobile device.  With a single click, users can now record voice notes and embed them directly inside the electronic form.  Voice notes can be routed and shared inside an Appian BPM process model, or even routed to a Speech to Text web service to convert the audio voice note to a searchable text string.

To see a demonstration of this, and other great new features, check out our recent Mobile BPM webinar.  The last 30 minutes of the webinar provide a demonstration of the capabilities that Appian Mobile BPM can bring to your enterprise processes.

Thanks,

Malcolm Ross, Director, Product Management

These are exciting times for the BPM industry, and for Appian in particular. Gartner has announced a very encouraging prediction about BPM spending this year. Vendor market shake-out continues to crystalize customer options between BPM innovation and mish-mashed, bolt-on approaches. Awareness of BPM software is at an all-time high. With the advent of Mobile BPM and Social BPM, active use of BPM software is poised to explode. And that, as Matt said, will herald a transformation in business.

He wasn’t talking about optimizing some percentage of the thousands of individual processes and process fragments that create an enterprise. He was talking about the unified management and orchestration of all of those processes through a new business system. He was talking about using that business system to extend process beyond the corporate walls, to involve everyone, whoever and where ever they are. He was talking about the next evolution of the Mobile Process Enterprise – a new system for business control that is sensitive, dynamic and intuitive.

In this new business system, process presents a single and holistic view of the enterprise in real-time. Executives can see it, make decisions and take action on a mobile device. All siloed applications and data sources will be simply “surfaced” where and when needed by the meta layer. Process will act as the glue that links employees, customers and partners to the organization.

Appian has been driving towards that vision for more than 10 years. With each product release, and with each customer “ah-ha” moment when the real potential of BPM software is glimpsed, we get closer. That’s what our new Tempo interface is all about. As Matt says, “Tempo is not a new means to an old end. It is a new end unto itself.”

Exciting times, indeed.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

A common practice among software developers is “eating their own dog food”; which means using their own software in an effort to understand areas where the biggest improvements are needed. Multiple organizations have taken this notion one step further and make the entire company “drink their own champagne”. These organizations try to become a laboratory where employees are asked to use their software internally, not only to test it before it reaches the hands of the customer, but also to get them involved in the definition of the product road-map.

At Appian, we have made our Business Process Management (BPM) Platform the operational backbone of our key processes. This is particularly true for our Appian Cloud operations, where we use Appian to orchestrate all our processes. Whether these customer facing, such as trial management, as well as internal, such as compliance audits. It has been always clear to the team that Appian is the perfect tool for our mission critical processes.

From the moment a new prospect Requests a Trial, an Appian process is started for our business development organization to review each request. If the request is approved, the process automatically initiates a customer profile, configures the user account and sends out a welcome e-mail to the user who requested the trial. All of this is done without the intervention of our engineers. The process keeps track of the duration of the trial and notifies prospects accordingly about their trial expiration. Moreover, the process also posts the information about a new trial to our Tempo feed, where we are able to collaborate and discuss about  the new opportunity.

Our BPM platform has also proven to be a very powerful tool in the arena of regulatory compliance. We have built a set of processes specifically created to ensure our compliance with different security and privacy regulations for our cloud operations. These processes enable us to systematically, and efficiently, perform the necessary audits, reviews, and record keeping required to guarantee a high quality service for our cloud customers.

Many of the BPM applications used in our Appian Cloud operations integrate with multiple external systems, relying mostly in Appian’s built-in integration capabilities. They constantly evolve to incorporate the new features and enhancements in our product. Moreover, the systems where these applications reside are typically the first systems where our new releases are deployed, to make sure that, if any issues are introduced, they are addressed before it ever reaches our customers.

Throughout the process of building this framework of BPM applications, the Cloud team has had and important role shaping our product. Some of the new features and enhancement part of Appian today are the direct result of making Appian the backbone of our Cloud operations.

We invite you to be part of our process and try out Appian today by requesting a Trial of the Appian BPM Suite.

Thanks,

Marco Lara, Cloud and Community Services