05/21/2007

Appian, a provider of Business Process Management Suites (BPMS), today announced the launch of Appian Enterprise 5.6, delivering capabilities for increasing user productivity and improving business operations.

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With this release, Appian becomes the first vendor to deliver key capabilities that integrate casual business users into the process, allowing for organizations to derive the greatest value out of their BPM implementations. These new user-friendly features include an improved AJAX-powered interface designer and rules creator, real-time analytics, and desktop and RSS Feed integration – all designed to simplify and make BPM more accessible to everyone within the organization.

“Appian recognizes that the only way for organizations to fully tap into the knowledge and ingenuity of their workforce is to empower all users to be part of the process, and this is the philosophy that drove all of the innovations into Appian Enterprise 5.6,” said Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian. “BPM should be flexible enough to enable all users to participate in unique, personalized ways, and our latest advancement leverages some of today’s leading productivity tools, including AJAX, desktop integration and RSS Feeds to ensure that our users gain the greatest advantage possible from Appian Enterprise.”

Appian Enterprise 5.6 is the first BPM Suite to incorporate a browser-based, AJAX environment for creating and managing rules separate from processes, which enables users to quickly adapt policies to address changes within their business environments. Through its AJAX-enabled, browser-based WYSIWG Interface Designer, Appian Enterprise enables customers to create forms, dashboards and other process driven interfaces. Business users can now modify the parameters of rules or policies without being encumbered by the details of the entire process. For example a user can modify inventory thresholds to automatically redistribute stock without requiring the user to alter the entire supply chain. In addition, Appian provides a centralized rules repository so that users can easily manage, implement and reuse processes throughout the entire environment.

Appian Enterprise now incorporates new desktop integration and mobile technology tools, enabling users to leverage the applications they know best to speed implementation, simplify management and increase overall productivity. In addition to Appian’s existing Microsoft Outlook plug-in, Appian has added Appian Smart Nodes that enable the manipulation and creation of Word, Excel and E-mail templates. These plug-ins allow users to interact with processes directly from those environments, so that they can easily create processes that increase productivity and simplify collaboration. For example, users can now develop a process that automatically creates and emails documents, such as monthly reports or status updates, to a predetermined group. Appian has also added more than 75 new pre-built activities for facilitating collaboration and participation in process management.

As RSS Feeds have matured to include process lists, task lists, process models, documents and discussion forums, Appian Enterprise 5.6 is integrating these capabilities to help simplify process management. By fully implementing RSS feeds throughout the product, Appian is enabling customers to utilize process management anywhere the user chooses to aggregate their RSS subscriptions -- on the desktop, mobile device, or Web sites.

Appian Enterprise’s new patent-pending optimization technology delivers real-time analytic information to drive process improvements, so that users can report on anything, at anytime, in real-time without delays or data loss. This significantly increases the flexibility of process analytics and allows certain processes to “self optimize.” For example, traditionally a process might state that a task should be escalated if it is delayed two days, but now Appian enables an escalation to be triggered if the task is taking longer than average or deviates from the norm. The process engine can make real-time queries to the performance engine and access all of the data at any time. These reports can be used in the context of process rules to adjust process flow, trigger exceptions and escalations, modify security privileges or task assignments and display contextual information to a user on a form.

As end-to-end processes now span organizational and geographical boundaries, Appian Enterprise 5.6 is the first BPM solution to provide full support for global, cross-organizational processes that span cultural and language barriers. With a fully internationalized interface to supporting localized forms as well as right-to-left reading, Appian Enterprise has been optimized to support geographically dispersed processes. This provides international organizations with a consistent foundation for structuring and managing all of their critical business processes.