I'm happy to announce the latest release of Appian 6.
Appian Forum members, please join us on December 9th at Noon EST to review the latest features of Appian 6 and updates to the Appian Forum customer support site.
This version of Appian first represents a continuation of Appian'scommitmentto deliver a highly scalable and responsive process development environment based on the latest industry standards. In addition, we have initiated our first release of the Appian Tempo project, bringing an entirely new perspective on process participation.
New in this release, Appian has updated the security architectureallowing easy adoption of modern authentication frameworks. Appian customers can nowquickly integrate with their enterprise LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos and other custom authentication servers. More exciting though, is the ability for our customers touse modern authentication techniques like OAuth. OAuth integration can enable Appian customers to quickly integrate with common cloud providers and consumer social networks like Salesforce.com,Facebook and Twitter, allowing any user of these environments to authenticate with Appian and participate in process events. This greatly expands the potential for direct consumer process participation in a organization's key processes and allows for a more intimate interaction between a company and their customers.
Next, we have overhauled our real-time analytics engine to greatly increase the performance and scalability of report performance. Appian has always differentiated in the BPM industry by being the only vendor to include a native in-memory reporting engine. This has allowed Appian to deliver unmatched reporting performance with real-time results with very low maintenance. Now, the number of possible parallel analytics engines has now been expanded to 16, toaccommodatetruly massive amounts of data for customers needing real-time reports against tens-of-millions of active process instances.
In addition, Appian is continuing to innovate around the merging of MDM and BPM concepts. This has become a hot topic recently with Forrester publishing a great whitepaper called "Avoid Process Data Headaches: Align Business Process And Data Governance Initiatives". As customers build more complex process environments, being able to easily connect and govern the data that drives those processes has become increasingly important. In response, Appian has introduced a new Data Store and Data Designer environment that delivers an easy way for data owners to share and represent data sources in Appian and empower process modelers to work with existing data. This architecture is highly scalable and uses SOA concepts to represent data objects as re-usable components throughout the BPM platform.
Finally, Appian has released Appian Tempo to select customers to begin experiencing BPM in an entirely new way. Appian Tempo will revolutionize the way people participate in process. It's an entirely different view on process participation which will break down departmental and geographic barriers and connect people in ways that couldn't be modeled into a traditional BPM process. For now, we'll save the details for a early next year, when we'll be organizing a larger launch event.
As usual, customers and partners can download the latest version of Appian from the Appian Forum site. Customer's using the Appian Anywhere SaaS environment will be automatically upgraded to the latest release in the coming weeks.
For a live demonstration of the latest release of Appian, join us for our December 9th, Noon EST event.
Thanks,
Malcolm Ross
Director Product Management
