Appian Funding Will Boost SaaS Efforts
The $10 Million series A funding announced by Appian today will be used to expand in a number of areas - marketing, sales, and professional services - but of most interest to BPMS Watch readers, I think, is accelerating the company’s BPM-in-the-cloud offering, Appian Anywhere. Appian is one of very few BPMS leaders actively pursuing the SaaS model, and they believe they are ahead of competitors in both the “vision” and the technology.
According to company executives, Appian as a whole is becoming more “SaaS-oriented.” They believe SaaS represents an ”inflection point in BPM,” a must-have feature for any leading BPMS vendor, one that will bring new vendors into the market and chase out others unwilling to accept it. An important part of SaaS BPM is the new partner ecosystem it enables, including ISV application providers and professional services providers.
Today, two kinds of customers are attracted to Appian Anywhere: 1) large companies, where business cannot get IT to respond quickly enough for smaller-scale solutions; and 2) smaller companies for core business processes.
For example, Appian points to a large life insurance company that had trouble responding to requests from advisors and partners for marketing information in a timely way and provide accurate tracking and reporting. The project was too small to get IT priority, but the marketing department had their own budget. Appian built a demo in couple days that replicated the requested functionality, and proposed to build out the real solution and host it. That took one person about two weeks, which was billed up front, with the hosting billed on a monthly subscription basis.
The platform is hosted by OpSource on three data centers in the US and Europe. Customers pay per-user per-month, with pricing tiers based on the number of applications and the size of the system. For a single app with 70 users, a customer would pay $35 per user per month. A minimum 1-year commitment is required, but when the platform moves to a multi-tenant architecture, that will no longer be the case, just pay as you go. Finishing up the multi-tenancy piece will be accelerated by the new funding. When that is done, in Q1 2009, Appian Anywhere will become generally available, and supported by an online marketplace of application and service providers, similar to an iTunes store for BPM.
6 comments July 21st, 2008
