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Gartner BPM Summit Comes Roaring Back

Ben Farrell
May 2, 2011

It's no secret that the last two Gartner BPM Summit events had lackluster attendance. This was no fault of Gartner's; the recession drove expense reductions and corporate travel bans that hit the event industry pretty hard across the board.

I'm not going to say corporate conferences are necessarily a bellwether of the economy, but judging by last week's BPM Summit in Maryland, something has changed. The place was packed, and the general vibe was way up on the optimism scale.

The analyst and end-user content was top-notch, as usual. The discussions covered all the themes near and dear to our hearts at Appian: Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM and Social BPM. We were very proud to have two customers on the agenda presenting their success stories.

John Verburgt and Brian Toba at CME Group gave a fantastic tag-team presentation on business and IT perspectives on launching a BPM program. Key take-aways: get strong exec sponsorship, understand that BPM requires a new level of cross-function communication and collaboration, and get started fast with a pilot in the cloud.

Derrick Hill of UPS was on-hand not only to detail his company's BPM journey, but also to accept UPS Gartner 2011 BPM Excellence award. Congrats again to Derrick and his team!

It's a reach to declare the return of economic growth based on one conference, but I was very glad to see such strong attendance at such a worthwhile event.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications