Appian社はBPMソリューションを提供するベンダーの一つ。 去年はSaaS事業への展開で成長を遂げているベンダーの一つで、StarbucksやManulifeなどの顧客を自社のSaaSアプリケーションAppian Anywhereでサポートしている。
2008/4Qは売り上げが好調で、US Army等はログイン回数が10億回を超えるなど、ユーザの規模も大きくなってきている。
同社はアプリケーションを軸として事業戦略を明確にしている。 従来のOn−Premise型のAppian Enterpriseに加え、2008開始のAppian AnywhereというSaaS版、さらに低価格バージョンとしてEC2-Hosted型のAppian Anywhereの3つのバージョンを全く同じソースコードで提供しながら、異なる価格帯、顧客層を対象として事業を展開している。
Amazon EC2バージョンのAppian Anywhereは、30日無償トライアルが出来る事に加え、Single Tenantアーキテクチャを採用し、一ユーザあたり ＄３５の価格で提供される。 EC2版で製品を試した後、自社SaaS型のAppian Anywhereへの移行が簡単に出来る。 3つの製品はコードベースが同じなので、顧客データも簡単に移行できる。
同様に、自社プラットホーム上でアプリケーション開発を可能にする開発フレームワークを提供開始しており、3rdパーティがAppian Anywhere上でビジネスが展開できるインフラも提供している。
Appian Analyst Update
Matt Calkins and Samir Gulati from Appian were on a short analyst call today to give us a summary of 2008 and a preview of 2009. They had some big changes this year: expanding their marketing efforts, launching their SaaS offering with customers like Starbucks and Manulife, and expanding geographically into Europe and Asia. Much of this is fuelled by the $10M in VC funding that they took on in 2008, the first external funding in their 10-year history; based on the timing of the funding, I'm guessing that they got a much better valuation than if it had happened a few months later.
Their sales numbers are counter-cyclical, with their Q4 in 2008 being their biggest closing quarter ever. Although they built their business on their US federal government business, they've broadened out to a number of commercial clients in financial services, manufacturing and other verticals. They've also seen some milestones with systems already in place, such as a total of 1B logins to the system that they have at the US Army. I think that they're just getting starting with BPM there, so this is likely mostly on their portal platform; still, that's a lot of logins.
Appian's big push in 2008 was their SaaS platform, Appian Anywhere, which is forming an estimated 30% of their new business. Currently, it's still only available to selected large customers in a dedicated and fault-tolerant hosting environment: in other words, not a multi-tenanted SaaS solution that you can just sign up for online at any time, but more like just having your BPM servers sitting in someone else's location. They'll be releasing a lower-end offering hosted on Amazon EC2 in early February, with 30-day free trials for small businesses, where each customer is hosted on their own instance. This is the same sort of configuration approach adopted by Intalio, as discussed in the comments on a post that I wrote for the BPM Think Tank; there are many who would say that this is not multi-tenancy, it's virtualization, and it doesn't provide the level of scalability (both up and down) that's needed for true SaaS. The subscription cost for Appian Anywhere on EC2 will be $35/user/month.
Regardless of the platform – on-premise Appian Enterprise, the high-end hosted Appian Anywhere, or the EC2-hosted Appian Anywhere – it's the same code base, so there shouldn't be a problem moving from one to another as the need arises. This also means that they're not trying to split their engineering team in three directions to serve three markets: it's all the same code.
At the same time as the EC2 launch, Appian will be launching an application framework to allow for faster development and deployment of vertical applications, and an application marketplace to provide applications developed by Appian or partners on a subscription basis. Some initial applications will be free, with others coming in at around $10/user/month on top of the base subscription price.
Appian's focus is on making BPM frictionless: allowing it to be purchased and deployed within an organization without all the usual hoopla that it takes for on-premise systems. I think that there could be some challenges ahead, however, with the lack of multi-tenancy causing additional administrative overhead and setting limits on how big (or small) you can get with your Appian Anywhere system and still have it be cost-effective all around.
