07/24/2006

Appian, the 'first Business Process Management (BPM) company to deliver advanced process, knowledge and analytics capabilities in a fully integrated suite,' announced that it has been recognized by Forrester Research, an independent research firm, as a Leader in the Q1 2006 Forrester Wave™ report, Human-Centric Business Process Management suites (BPMS).

ebizQ received the following details:

In this evaluation, Appian Enterprise BPM Suite, Appian's flagship BPM solution, ranked number one in the workflow category and earned accolades for its analytics, collaboration, and user management features.

"Appian presents another kind of leadership that is truly differentiated from the other leaders," stated Connie Moore, author of the Forrester Wave report. "This innovative product has the widest breadth of functionality among the suites we evaluated, by design - Appian endeavors to provide all the tools necessary to support all types of people-intensive processes. It delivers diverse features, including DM, team collaboration, and a rich, Web-based user environment."

Appian is recognized throughout the report as a true innovator and as one of only two companies that is "pioneering a totally new vision for BPMS by integrating collaboration and process technologies to support the full dimensions of human work." The report comments that Appian "has carved out unique differentiators in a crowded market, significant market share in the government sector, and envisions a new direction for BPMS that many of its competitors could learn from."

In awarding Appian the highest score in the workflow category, Forrester comments that "Appian features skills-based and ad hoc work routing, making its overall workflow support a strong point. It also has the most easy-to-use and feature-packed workflow portal we tested, and the portal integrates extensively with various desktop work environments." The report further states that Appian "promises to continue bringing groundbreaking features to market, focusing on empowering people to do both highly structured and highly collaborative types of work."

"We are pleased that Forrester has recognized Appian's leadership and innovation in the BPM suites market," said Kevin Spurway, Vice President of Marketing and Solutions at Appian. "This validation, coupled with our success and significant growth in 2005 clearly demonstrates that our highly differentiated approach to BPM - delivering process, knowledge, and analytics functionality in a fully unified, web-based platform - is ideal for enabling round-trip, context-driven processes and facilitating the creation of process-centric composite applications and solutions."

Identifying other core strengths of Appian Enterprise, the Forrester Wave report states that "Appian has some of the strongest user management, content, and collaboration features tested. The suite provides functionality that reaches beyond the boundaries of traditional, structured processes by offering team collaboration features like threaded discussions and document sharing that are monitored throughout the process - supporting what Forrester describes as the 'whole process.'"

"Appian's analytics features make it easy for process designers to base decisions within the process on information about the process itself, like average cycle time and individual workers' performance." said Moore. "Appian is an especially good fit for buyers that need heavy collaboration and ad hoc workflow support, or that want to build self-optimizing processes."

This recognition by Forrester continues to add to recent accolades and growth that Appian is experiencing. Earlier this month, Appian announced that the company achieved record growth in in 2005, posting a 171% increase in its BPM software licenses over 2004, also added 45 new customer projects, including a multi-million deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Appian also was recently named to KM World's 2005 "Top 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management" list, and as one of the "Best Places to Work" in the Washington DC metro area by Washington Business Journal.