Novak Provides $10 Million in Funding for Appian

Appian, a global provider of BPM, announced that they are receiving $10 million in funding from Novak Biddle Venture Partners as announced in their press release. Jack Biddle, partner at Novak and an Appian board member, had this to say:

"With analysts predicting a significant growth pattern for the industry over the next several years, Appian is well positioned to emerge as the leading pure play BPM provider. Their ability to bootstrap the business to this point is a strong indication that Appian's product offering and market strategy - implemented by an experienced management team - are meeting organizations' complex and diverse needs."

Industry insiders, as pointed out in this blog post are excited by this news. The feeling is that this will help increase the use of the SaaS model since according to company executives, Appian is increasingly becoming more “SaaS-oriented”. As the post mentions:

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.

Also, we're getting ready to launch a new blog that looks at the broader issues of Business Process Management, update your RSS feed now as we get it ready for our official launch: http://evolvebpm.blogspot.com/

BPM Vendors Use of Internal Products

Appian, recently posted a report regarding some of their cost savings techniques. Specifically they mentioned that they estimate a cost savings of $500,000 a year attributed to use of their own products by eliminating licensing and support costs. Also mentioned is how by using their own products they feel they are able to provide better service to clients by discovering new uses for their products. As stated in the report:

Many other of our BPM applications are cross-functional, demonstrating the new possibilities our technology offers. For example

- Our Human Resources department uses Appian to manage many of their day-to-day administrative responsibilities and process integrations with other departments, such as handling departmental transfers, promotions and reassignments. Our Recruiting team uses Appian for managing the complete lifecycle of recruiting from prospect intake through interview through offer. Appropriate handoffs are then automatically made to HR, where Appian makes on-boarding fast and easy by providing all benefits and employee handbook information in the context of their associated processes, with status-tracking.

While some may feel that it is obvious that BPM vendors should use their own products, this blog post on Column 2 poses an interesting question to BPM vendors by asking them to release reports on use of their own company’s internal products. What is your opinion on the subject of BPM vendors maximizing use of the products they offer?

A Starting Point When Searching For BPM Applications

Implementation of BPM systems and products can be a long hard decision, so which one is the right one for your organization to select? Luckily, this article on CIO lists the following leaders in BPM suites and development platforms:

Pegasystems

The SmartBPM Suite is a highly integrated product with many features to support agility, accelerate the modeling of process workflow and deploy applications across a variety of thin-client and rich-client user interfaces.

Savvion

BusinessManager 7.0 is one of the most mature BPM suites, able to handle high-volume workflows requiring tight coordination of people and systems. Boasts process-modeling and repository tools that are accessible to business users.

Lombardi

Provides an environment for incremental, business-driven process improvement. Lombardi Teamworks 6 earns high marks from both business and IT. BEA Systems | Its AquaLogic BPM Suite lets business users collaborate with IT during all phases of the business process life cycle. However, integration with other BEA middleware products is a work in progress.

Tibco

Business Studio 2.0 is an Eclipse-based, unified design environment that supports business process analysts and developers and is compliant with key standards. Provides a highly graphical process simulation tool. Integration with other Tibco middleware needs work.

Metastorm |

As the leading BPM vendor on the Microsoft platform, it has broadened its suite with a string of acquisitions. Built-in rule processing technology is "somewhat simplistic," although the suite supports external rules engines like Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor or Microsoft's BizTalk Server Business Rules Engine.

Appian

Appian Enterprise provides a thin-client architecture for design time and run time, which also allows the company to offer a software-as-a-service version of the system known as Appian Anywhere. Another strength is a complimentary business intelligence product, Analytics Everywhere, for analysis of process data.

IBM

IBM brings a broad array of technologies, consulting resources and partners to bear on accelerating user adoption of BPM as a management discipline. IBM's BPM strategy encompasses many products from divisions including WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, FileNet and Rational, so that customers are presented with a menu of choices rather than a single suite.

Global 360

Best known for its Process360 BPMS for the Microsoft platform, although it also offers process management components (including some for the Java server market) for those enterprises that don't want to purchase a full suite.

Software AG

Its webMethods BPMS appeals to business users that need to continuously modify and improve business processes via a model-driven approach, while also addressing IT requirements such as process life-cycle governance.

Others

Gartner ranked Oracle and Adobe as challengers with a less complete vision of BPM, and identified SunGard as a visionary that needs to improve its ability to execute. Since the report was published, Oracle has completed the acquisition of BEA and broadened its BPM portfolio.

With these tools, execution within your company’s business process management system will surely improve.