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Focus. Connect. Lead with Appian: Gartner Symposium ITxpo Recap

Cindy Cheng, ​Sr. Director of Marketing Communications, EMEA, Appian
October 30, 2012

Last week'sGartner Symposium and ITxpoattracted over 10,000 attendees and far exceeded original estimate of 8,000 attendees. "The world's most important gathering of CIOs and Senior IT Executives", according to Gartner, featured aFocus. Connect. Leadtheme. Appian sponsored the event and talked to hundreds of attendees on howworksocialcan help achieve these goals and drive business results.

Focus:The conference focused on today's disruptive technologies: cloud, social, mobile, and information (a.k.a. big data and analytics). According to Peter Sondergaard, Gartner analyst, Software as a Service (SaaS) is adopted by 80% of businesses, while IT's use remains 80% private cloud. It's impressive to see how many business and technology leaders came to embrace cloud in the past five years.

Many traditional enterprise software companiesdismissed and marginalized SaaSas a fad, or relegated it to an SMB offering with little revenue potential and significance. Only in the past two years, companies have scrambled to acquire other companies, formulate internal strategies, position an offering in the cloud, and cloud-enable legacy software to take advantage ofthe agility, scalability, and elasticity of cloud computing.

Appian's 100% web-based thin-client architecture made it a perfect fit to deliver our software in the cloud, allowing us to be the first BPM vendor to deliver a cloud SaaS offering in 2007. Other vendors followed suit to offer cloud BPM, but they're either not a true SaaS offering or only a portion of the entire BPM Suite (e.g., modeling) is available in the cloud. Today, roughly 50% of new Appian customers choose cloud deployment.

Connect: There is a direct correlation between the ability to connect different ideas, people andtechnologies, and the capacity to innovate. Social software is being touted as the way to facilitate consumerization of IT, increase adoption of business applications and devices, collect customer intelligence, and improve service and product quality. That seems like a tall order but the ROI of social software in the enterprise has been shown by a number of studies.

Appian's worksocial approach is elegant, simple, yet powerful. Gartner ITxpo attendees who saw the Appian social user interface and the process modeler got it: they marveled at the intuitive interface, the ease of use, and they want it in their enterprise. There is no better way to connect systems, expose enterprise data, deliver relevant analytics and insights to business users than through modern, social web and mobile interfaces.

Which brings up another key theme: mobility. According to Gartner, mobile technologies is #2 on CIO Technology priorities in 2012 and a hot topic in this year's Symposium. Appian rolled out native mobile applications for the Apple iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Google Android and RIM BlackBerry devices back in 2010 - another first amongst BPM vendors.

Lead: Gartner is one of the leading technology analyst firms. Its analysts' opinions are trusted by thousands, if not millions, of CIOs and senior IT executives to make mission critical technology choices that could literally make or break the business.

It is no coincident that Appian is positioned in the Leaders Quadrant in Gartner's new intelligent Business Process Management Suite (iBPMS) Magic Quadrant report. Appian's worksocial vision delivers BPM with cloud, social, mobile and analytics capabilities to bring the best of work automation tools together with enterprise social software features.

Join us for a webinar this Thursday, November 1st, to hear more about worksocial and how it can transform your business. Malcolm Ross, VP of Product Marketing at Appian, will demonstrate and discuss how the Appian BPM Suite helps organizations turn the Social revolution into real business value by:

    • Bringing measurable meaning to social in the enterprise, and its impact on work

    • Allowing access to any corporate data, and action on that data, from any device (mobile phone, tablet, and desktop/laptop)

    • Driving efficiency through a single integrated "work automation + social collaboration" user experience

Cindy Cheng

Director of Product Marketing