Appian World 2022: keynote noteworthies
Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian, kicked off proceedings at Appian World 2022 by sharing his vision for empowering organisations and elevating people through his company’s mission to democratise development..
Addressing the 1400 attendees, the Appian team were understandably delighted to be able to host this event In Real Life (IRL) and in-person after the events of the last two years.
“Low-code is not just workflow anymore, low-code is now Robotic Process Automation (RPA), low-code is now Artificial Intelligence (AI), low-code is now Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and low-code is all about agility, speed and empowerment – by making our product more accessible, we have been able to make developers more productive and also welcome citizen developers into the productivity mix,” said Calkins.
In the two years since Appian has been working virtually through the pandemic, Calkins says that logins to Appian have quadrupled, but – more significantly – the number of processes run on Appian has increased by a factor of x25.
In any given year, 98-99% of Appian customers decide to renew their subscription rate. On the back of this positive figure, Calkins says that the Appian user community has been growing in line with that upward trend.
Because every organisation has processes that take too long and hold it back, the Appian team has been highly focused on process mining over the last year in particular. Appian has merged in a key process mining product over the last year – this is technology that can take activity logs and then push them through data analytics to build a process mining model.
Process mining – workflow – automation
Talking about the concepts playing out here, Calkins explained that process mining describes the past (it’s like a photograph or an x-ray)… and then workflow defines the future and helps an organisation decide whether to delegate a task to a bot, some other part of the total IT system or indeed a human individual… all of which ultimately leads to a point of automation and what Appian now calls the ‘unified low-code suite’ that it is now taking to its user base.
Appian has also recently extended its solution suite. Appian Connected KYC (Know Your Customer) provides continuous monitoring and works with connected data across a customer lifecycle management.
Some 37% of the company’s customers now use Appian’s low-code data services. Appian can be accessed through APIs, so Appian can collect data from around the enterprise and Appian can also serve data into the various places it is needed.
Talking about his firm’s new #lowcode4all initiative which we have covered in full here, Calkins closed the opening section of the keynote with some real heartfelt thanks – Appian World was one of the very first events cancelled at the very start of the first wave of the pandemic, seeing people for real again has been emotional for everyone.
Appian’s day #1 keynote continued with a customer panel entitled: Business Agility as a Competitive Differentiator. Moderated by Pavel Zamudio-Ramirez, chief customer office at Appian, this session also included John Kotsonouris, global head of business intelligence and process engineering for markets operations at Citi – and, also, Luigi Migliaccio, group chief customer operations officer, Poste Italiane.
An excellence in low-code awards session followed along with a product update session which we will dig into inside other analysis pieces.
