Appian provides a leading low-code software development platform as a service
that enables organizations to rapidly develop powerful and unique applications.
The applications created on our platform help companies drive digital transformation
and competitive differentiation.
With our platform, organizations can rapidly and easily design, build and
implement powerful, enterprise-grade custom applications through our intuitive,
visual interface with little or no coding required. Our customers have used
applications built on our low-code platform to launch new business lines, automate
vital employee workflows, manage complex trading platforms, accelerate drug
development and build global procurement systems. With our platform, decision
makers can reimagine their products, services, processes and customer interactions
by removing much of the complexity and many of the challenges associated with
traditional approaches to software development.
Organizations across industries are digitally transforming—leveraging
software to automate and optimize mission critical operations, enhance customer
experiences and drive competitive differentiation. Historically, organizations
have principally relied on packaged software and custom software solutions to
operationalize and automate their businesses. Packaged software often fails
to address unusual use cases or to enable differentiation and requires organizations
to conform their individual processes, needs and systems of record to standardized
frameworks. While traditional custom software solutions can be differentiated
and tailored to meet strategic objectives, development requires a long, iterative
and cumbersome process, as well as costly integration, and relies on scarce
developer talent.
We enable organizations to differentiate themselves from their competition through
software-enabled digital transformation. Our low-code platform employs an intuitive,
visual interface and pre-built development modules that reduce the time required
to build powerful and unique applications. We believe that developing applications
on our platform can be as simple as drawing a picture. Our platform automates
the creation of forms, data flows, records, reports and other software elements
that would otherwise need to be manually coded or configured. This functionality
greatly reduces the iterative development process, allowing for real-time application
optimization and ultimately shortening the time from idea to deployment. Further,
our patented Self-Assembling Interface Layer, or SAIL, technology ensures that
applications developed on our platform can be immediately and natively deployed
across a full range of mobile and desktop devices with no additional customization,
including desktop web browsers, tablets and mobile phones. Updates to applications
developed with SAIL disseminate automatically across device types to ensure
that all users benefit from the most up-to-date functionality. At the same time,
we unify enterprise data in a single searchable environment, providing organizations
with a comprehensive view of customer, product, organizational asset and other
critical information. Rich reporting dashboards capture detailed performance
metrics, providing valuable business intelligence and analytics that enable
business process optimization. Moreover, our platform can be deployed in the
cloud, on-premises or using a hybrid approach, with organizations able to access
the same functionality and data sources in all cases.
Our go-to-market strategy consists of both direct sales and, to a lesser extent,
sales through strategic partners. We sell our software almost exclusively through
subscriptions and intend to grow our revenue both by adding new customers and
increasing the number of users at existing customers that use applications developed
on our platform. As of December 31, 2017, we had 356 customers in a wide variety
of industries, of which 285 customers were commercial and 71 customers were
government or non-commercial entities. Our customers include financial services,
healthcare, government, telecommunications, media, energy, manufacturing and
transportation organizations. As of December 31, 2017, 29% of our commercial
customers were Global 2000 organizations and included 44 Fortune 500 companies.
We determined relevant global financial services and healthcare companies by
referencing certain independent industry data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Customers receive all of the modules and functionality of our platform with
their initial subscription, which facilitates the seamless creation of new applications.
Many of our customers begin by building a single application and grow to build
dozens of applications on our platform, which implicitly reduces the per-user
cost of each application. Generally, the development of new applications results
in the expansion of our user base within an organization and a corresponding
increase in revenue to us because we charge subscription fees on a per-user
basis for the significant majority of our customer contracts. Every additional
application that an organization creates on our platform increases the value
of our platform for that organization because it further integrates people,
process and data across the organization and facilitates knowledge sharing.
At the same time, our industry-leading professional services organization enables
our customers to more easily build and deploy applications on our platform to
achieve their digital transformation goals.
Software-enabled digital transformation. Organizations across industries are
digitally transforming—leveraging software to automate and optimize mission
critical operations, enhance customer experiences and drive competitive differentiation.
Software has revolutionized mass transportation, drug development, business-customer
interactions and operational management. Software has evolved from being a method
for modernization to an opportunity for differentiation. Several key trends
are fueling software-enabled digital transformation, including the rise of cloud
computing and the Internet of Things and the proliferation of mobile devices.
Challenges to effective digital transformation. Historically, organizations
have principally relied on packaged software and custom software solutions to
operationalize and automate their businesses. However, these solutions are challenged
in their ability to facilitate effective software-enabled digital transformation.
More specifically:
Packaged software is inadequate. Packaged software, whether delivered in the
cloud or on-premises, is a one-size-fits-all solution that performs industry-agnostic
functions, such as customer relationship management or enterprise resource management,
or serves specific industry verticals without organization-specific differentiation.
Organizations are often unable to use packaged software to address unusual use
cases and differentiate themselves and must conform their individual processes,
needs and systems of record to standardized frameworks. Moreover, for both cross-industry
and industry-specific software, the limited scope of functionality often forces
organizations to adopt numerous point solutions that can be difficult to integrate.
Traditional custom software solutions are expensive and difficult to create.
In contrast, traditional custom solutions are built to address particular organization-specific
use cases. Although this allows organizations to better manage their operations
and differentiate their businesses, traditional custom software solutions have
historically been hampered by several limitations:
Traditional application development is a long and cumbersome process, requiring
complex coding and an iterative feedback cycle. According to one example cited
by Forrester, the coding of custom software took an estimated 2.7 years to complete,
and therefore the output from a development project may not meet user needs
and intentions even on the first day of deployment. In the same report, Forrester
found that the use of low-code software development was six to 20 times faster
than traditional software development. Further, traditional custom software
projects require on-going maintenance and enhancement, without which the resulting
software will not keep pace with future needs.
The proliferation in mobile devices and the competition among mobile device
manufacturers means that device operating systems are continuously being updated,
modified and customized for specific hardware configurations. This continual
change means that traditional custom software needs to be updated continuously
in order to remain relevant across an organization’s entire technology
environment. Updating such custom software so that it can be used across devices
adds another layer of complexity to the entire process.
The need for organizations to manage their operations utilizing all of these
devices and environments necessitates costly integrations in an attempt to avoid
creating information silos. Otherwise, organizations could not effectively share
information across applications and processes, which would inhibit collaboration,
effective analytics and real-time decision making.
Developer talent is scarce and hiring developers to create custom software is
costly. According to an LTM Research survey of Global 2000 executives, which
was commissioned by us, 79% of respondents said they were concerned that their
digital transformation initiatives would be impacted by challenges in hiring
and retaining skilled developers. Software developer costs can be greater than
$100,000 per year, depending on location. Given its labor intensive nature,
traditional custom software can be very expensive to design, implement and maintain.
Low-code software development platforms have emerged to address the limitations
associated with packaged software and traditional custom software solutions.
These low-code solutions seek to enable both professional software developers
and business users to rapidly build organization-specific applications. However,
many existing low-code platforms are either limited in functionality such that
they do not support the development of enterprise-grade applications or continue
to require significant manual coding, and therefore are not truly “low-code.”
SAIL is our patented technology that allows developers to create dynamic and
responsive web and native-mobile user interfaces through a “create once,
deploy everywhere” architecture. SAIL interfaces only need to be created
once and SAIL automatically assembles customer applications for optimal viewing
on each device type, including desktop web browsers, tablets and mobile phones,
and each device operating system, including iOS and different permutations of
Android. SAIL leverages native functionality inherent across a myriad of devices
and operating systems to ensure the consistency of experience and optimal performance
levels that users expect. Updates to applications developed with SAIL are automatically
disseminated across device types to ensure that all users benefit from the most
up-to-date functionality. This approach enables enterprise mobility without
the extensive time and resources that other development approaches require.
The following graphic shows how our end-user interface appears across different
devices.
Unified Data
Appian Records is an advanced data management technology that allows end users
to discover and unite enterprise data into a single searchable environment,
providing a comprehensive view of an organization’s data. In contrast
to typical enterprise software, our platform does not require that data reside
within it in order to enable robust data analysis and cross-department and cross-application
insight. Using standard database software and service connection frameworks,
including APIs, our platform seamlessly integrates with many of the most popular
enterprise software applications and data repositories and can be used within
many legacy environments. Users simply need to assign a name to a given topic
and then decide which existing data sources within the enterprise they want
to capture. Users can categorize important information by business topic, not
just by where that information resides, thereby allowing organizations to unify
their data and their processes and effectively access information buried in
existing systems. For example, a Record for “Customer A” might bring
together data from customer relationship management, accounting and customer
support systems to give users a complete view of the customer in their organization.
In addition to the benefits of having an immediate snapshot of all centralized
data relating to the customer, product, employee or service request. Records
also allows organizations to analyze the end-to-end journeys of any given person,
entity or asset. Once the connections are established, users may navigate, analyze,
collaborate and take action on data from our intuitive dashboards and interactive
reports.
Unified End User Interfaces
Our end user interfaces enable end users to discover data, collaborate with
other end users and participate in process actions. The end user experience
begins with a news feed that allows end users to monitor key events from processes,
systems and other end users, providing a unified view of all applications and
activity in one place. End users can collaborate with others, obtain status
updates, send direct and secure messages and create social tasks for other end
users. Our activity stream is designed to be intuitive for end users familiar
with popular consumer social interfaces, allowing them to instantly track important
events and occurrences and collaborate with little to no training. We also enforce
company security policies, so end users can confidently collaborate without
fear of compromising regulatory compliance. Our end user interfaces solve the
problem of information silos, allowing organizations to respond to constituent
feedback in real time by uniting the right team with the right information.
Since inception, we have invested in our professional services organization
to help ensure that customers are able to deploy and adopt our platform. More
recently, we have expanded our professional services partner network to further
support our customers. We believe our investment in professional services, as
well as efforts by partners to build their practices around Appian, will drive
increased adoption of our platform.
When we first acquire a new customer, our professional services experts or our
deployment partners’ professional services experts start the implementation
process, which typically takes several weeks. Delivery specialists facilitate
deployment of our platform and training personnel provide comprehensive support
throughout the implementation process. Customers have access to our Appian Academy,
which caters to a diverse range of skill sets and roles within organizations
and trains developers on our platform. We also provide instructor-led courses
at our Reston, Virginia headquarters and certain of our other offices, as well
as virtual classrooms for self-paced learning and on-site training at our customers’
offices.
Once our customers have deployed and implemented our platform, our Appian Architects
review our customers’ programs and applications to find potential issues
and provide recommendations on best practice. Our professional services team
also assists customers by building applications on our platform for them.
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