Appian Funding Will Boost SaaS Efforts
July 21st, 2008
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.
Entry Filed under: BPM
6 Comments Add your own
1. barlowg | July 22nd, 2008 at 7:53 am
Bruce, thank you for the mention. I just wanted to clarify one detail. Appian Anywhere is already in General Availability status supporting dozens of production accounts. The Q1 2009, release date represents the next level of SaaS product availability which will include some additional multi-tenancy features, uniform per-user per-month pricing, and the Appian Anywhere Marketplace.
George Barlow
VP & General Manager, Appian Anywhere
2. Sandy Kemsley | July 22nd, 2008 at 1:21 pm
George, by “GA” do you mean that anyone can go to your website and sign up, as in, it’s generally available? Or is it still in a restricted release to a number of enterprise clients?
3. barlowg | July 24th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Sandy, we currently take Appian Anywhere (A2) subscriptions through our field sales force rather than sign up on the site. While A2 subscriptions can be acquired by anyone or any group through our sales force, the application economics often preclude very small groups from participating. Making applications inexpensive and easy-to-get is the role of the Appian Anywhere Marketplace. When we open that (Q1 2009) we will also provide go-to-website credit card sign up and numerous free and low-cost applications. That being said, it may also be of interest to know that today, in addition to enterprise-type subscribers, we have partner developers, our own field personnel and hundreds of users in small groups running development and production applications on our A2 platform. So A2 isn’t restricted - it just isn’t currently available for web site subscription sign up.
4. jimrudden | July 25th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
“the application economics often preclude very small groups from participating”?? What? One of the chief benefits - for customers AND providers - of a well architected, multi-tenant SaaS offering is that the incremental cost of adding accounts or users is small. That is what allows us to service thousands of companies of every size in a hundred countries. Just about every viable SaaS offering you can name - starting with our Blueprint product and extending to Salesforce.com, 37Signals applications, Socialtext, DabbleDB and others are accessible to any company - from one person to thousands - located anywhere in the world. The only economics to consider for the customer are whether the monthly fee is worth it. And they can try it by signing up - usually for free - on the website. On-demand.
Now, if you are a provider trying to sell a single-tenant hosted offering that requires a new blade server turned up each time someone is interested .. I can see how the economics don’t work for small orgs. But then that is hardly the on-demand SaaS model people are excited about. That is the application hosting business - and it has been around for decades.
5. barlowg | July 29th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Jim, using these blogs as a way to try to suggest that Blueprint is anything like Appian Anywhere is misleading. Blueprint is not a BPM Suite it is a design and documentation tool. To somehow suggest that because Appian curently offers our product through our sales force and that because we have not yet released our full multi-tenancy product, Appian Anywhere is not of great value to our subscribers is absurd. In fact, your field sales people have repeatedly tried to offer similar server hosting (but with your modeler on PCs at the customer’s location because it won’t run in the cloud) to compete with Appian Anywhere. To the best of my knowledge in the last few months we have gone head-to-head with your “SaaS” BPMS solution at least six times and been named the vendor of choice in every case. Sell your Blueprint documentation tool as SaaS but don’t compare it to Appian Anywhere. As for your BPMS TeamWorks, I have yet to see it offered as a real SaaS product.
6. Lombardi Update - BPMS Wa&hellip | July 30th, 2008 at 9:52 am
[...] and Marketing VP Jim Rudden has been sparring with Appian Anywhere GM George Barlow in a BPMS Watch comment thread about which is the SaaS-ier of the two offerings. I’ll stay out of that one, but I was [...]
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed