Earlier this week we announced Appian's results for 2011. In the immortal words of Frank Sinatra, "it was a very good year." The numbers speak for themselves: 90 new-name customers, a 219 percent jump in license orders over 2010, and nearly 40 percent of total orders coming for Appian Cloud.
The story behind the numbers is testament to how enterprise mobility, social collaboration and cloud computing are reshaping the IT landscape. Appian's Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM and Social BPM address the broken state of enterprise software today.
The mobile and social revolutions are driving the "consumerization" of IT. In their wake, traditional enterprise software is no longer solving business problems. Increasingly, it is the problem.
It requires too much time, and is much too costly, to modernize these systems to deliver the type of mobile experience customers are demanding. Even if you push through that arduous ordeal, these systems remain stove-piped across business functions. Plus, you now have new levels of platform/OS discrepancies and security issues to deal with. All of this contributes to the increasingly fractured nature of an organization. On the social side, customer expectations about how they interact with a company are changing. Employee needs for how they interact with each other are changing. The nature of work is increasingly collaborative, and that is what social technology supports uniquely well.
Given that something north of 80% of an IT department's budget is allocated just for the care and feeding needed to keep the lights on, there is precious little room in the current system for the focus on innovation required by these evolving needs.
That's why 2011 was such a great year for Appian. Business leaders and IT executives are increasingly turning to us as their engine for innovation. Our BPM platform meets the requirements of the mobile revolution. Through "design once ñ deploy everywhere" we instantly enable comprehensive mobility that overcomes platform fracturing. We feature highly secure mobile processing. We deliver rapid mobile enablement of applications. The Appian BPM Suite also addresses the social revolution by masking extreme power behind an intuitive activity stream interface. We seamlessly merge structured actions with unstructured events, and deliver collaboration that is firmly rooted in business events and outcomes.
But there's no rest for the weary. Come to Appian World 2012 in April to get a sneak peak at Appian 7, and see how we will continue to push the envelope on modern BPM software capabilities.
- Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications
