Appian: Departments and Sub-groups to Lead in SaaS/BPM Efforts in 2008 - SaaS Week

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January 11, 2008
Appian: Departments and Sub-groups to Lead in SaaS/BPM Efforts in 2008

BPM is one of those technologies that everyone’s talking about, given that the latest innovations are able to streamline management of business processes. Appian is a company that hopes to help manage BPM through SaaS, which is obviously another much talked about technology. I recently got some answers about Appian’s SaaS offerings from George Barlow, the VP and general manager for Appian Anywhere.

Q. What are the benefits of handling BPM via the SaaS delivery mode as compared to on-premise installed software?

A. Customers and prospects tell us that BPM/SaaS product offerings provide many SaaS benefits including:

Reduced project risk by minimizing up-front capital investments
Rapid ROI from fast deployment and pay-as-you-go pricing
Linear cost scaling
BPM/SaaS vendor experts perform configuration, tuning and maintenance
Typically better reliability, security and interoperability than on-premise systems
No on-going human capital costs for on-premise data center operations
No on-going traditional on-premise software and hardware maintenance fees
Consistently lower TOC versus on-premise solutions
Freedom to focus on core business with scarce IT resources
Frequent software updates/patches without business disruptions
Lower training and desktop configuration management costs
Single integrated platform for all subscribers
Single set of standards simplifies interoperability
Common architecture optimizes performance inter/intra enterprise
Increases available pool of trained consultants and employees
Supports SOA, Web Services and reusable business logic
Allows inter/intra enterprise collaboration and process execution
Can easily integrate with other SaaS applications (salesforce.com, etc.)
Can easily integrate with enterprise systems (PeopleSoft, SAP, etc.)
Provides a low-cost global delivery channel for pre-built application solutions

Q. Are you seeing a trend of adoption of this tool by departments implementing it directly rather than company wide efforts that are centered through IT? (There have been some reports that this is an increasing trend and it seems like it might be especially true with BPM).

A. Our current customers and prospects can be grouped into three major adoption categories:

Enterprise – 40%
Departmental and sub-enterprise groups – 30%
Solution-provider partners – 30%

Although 40% of customers and prospects are currently in the Enterprise category and the application(s) they are developing are led by IT initiatives, based on our current pipeline we expect that mix to change in 2008 and beyond to a much higher percentage for departmental and sub-enterprise groups. We predict that by the end of 2008 the mix will look like:

Enterprise – 30%
Departmental and sub-enterprise groups – 55%
Solution-provider partners – 15%

Q. Do you anticipate an increase in BPM/SaaS efforts in 2008 or do you think there will be a bit of a slowdown due to forecasts of reduced IT spending? A. We expect a very big 2008 for our BPM/SaaS offering based on our initial successes in 2007. While we are a privately held company and don’t disclose financial information, I can say that we expect to sell many millions of dollars of BMP/SaaS and associated services in 2008 both in North America and abroad. I believe the overall SaaS market will continue to grow at an increasing rapid rate over the next five years.