A high level overview of Appian BPM Suite - Part 1

Appian  is one of the leading BPM Suite currently in the market.

Appian appeared in the LEADERS quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant  (iBPMS category)

Appian is the BPM expert. Appian leads the market in BPM innovation, delivering comprehensive,

flexible, and easy-to-use solutions tailored to the needs of businesses and governments worldwide.

The Appian Enterprise BPM Suite is a 100 percent Web-based solution, including integrated knowledge

management and real-time analytics. Appian simplifies process collaboration between business and IT,

allowing all users to be part of the process of achieving corporate goals.

Appian Anywhere, the first and only complete BPM Suite available on-demand, delivers all the power

and functionality of Appian Enterprise via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Work Social , Cloud and Mobile makes Appian in a different space when compared to competitors.

Appian provides free native mobile apps for customers and no separate licenses for mobile usage.

Developer has to least worry about implementing and support mobile and web separately. As onetime development works on both.

CEO Matt Calkins says: Social Business + BPM + Mobile + Existing Apps = Worksocial

Amazon is the official partner of Appian for Cloud Services.

Current version of Appian is Version 7.2 supported in cloud and on-premise. Appian BPM Suite Product started in 2006 with a public version of 3.5

 iBPMS - Adding Intelligence to the BPM Suite

BPM Suites “enable leading organizations to make their business operations more intelligent by integrating analytics, social, and mobile technologies into orchestrated processes” - Gartner

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1C86TEL&ct=120928&st=sb&goback=%2Egde_154575_member_171021411

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1943514

High Level Architecture of Appian System:

     In a typical On-Premise environment Clients install Tomcat, JBOSS or compatible Java Container , configure Shared Drives for resources

   The Apache Tomcat webserver will be the client facing with a FQDN & Load Balancer ex: bpm.mycompany.com

    Appian components can be distributed on multiple servers, but I personally recommend the k engines are one high end server to resolve sync issues that might arise once in a while.

Appian Enterprise supports a variety of J2EE and OS platforms. For operating systems, Appian

supports Windows 2003 Server, IBM-AIX, Linux, and Sun Solaris. For J2EE platforms, Appian

supports JBOSS, IBM WebSphere, and Oracle/BEA Application Server.

For advanced development, Appian offers a Java Eclipse based SDK. All other interfaces for process

design, forms design, reporting, and end-user interaction are provided through a web browse

From my experience I have seem Appian using 80% of Apache open source frameworks.

Struts, JSF, Spring, Hibernate etc.

Appian Engine in particular h uses K & Q languages and KDB which makes the system really fast and responsive. Company: kx.com

Appian engines consist of advanced process, knowledge management, and integrated analytics.

The architecture consists of a set of Appian engines that manage tasks from storing and versioning process models;

executing predefined business rules; user, group, and role management; document storage; discussion areas; and task execution.

Must appreciate Appian has these core engineers. Appian provides command line scripts for both UNIX  and Windows environments.

Screenshot of Appian engines

Collaboration and Developer Community:

Appian has its own document repository but can integrate with SharePoint 2007 and above  very well with its out of box smart services using “Appian for SharePoint module”

Forum: https://forum.appian.com is a website similar to many companies. Ex: sdn.sap.com community network or pdn.pega.com (Pegasystems community)

Very good familiar social interface like yammer/facebook/linkedin.

The only company which use the product internally for almost everything and sell the same to the clients.

Appian 7.2 interface announced in May 2013. You will see the same interface when developing at your company.

Do you want to enhance using plugins

There is no limit you can enhance your development and Appian provides Java API

And also forum has lot of shared plugins from the community.

I have integrated 3^rd party C#/ASP.Net/Silverlight applications with Appian to communicate between them, Send and receive , collaborate documents and start Appian process from .Net technologies etc.

Appian allows your process models to be exposed as web services. The SOA way.

Consider these following factors when evaluating or finalizing a BPM Suite 

1. Time to Value
2. Lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
3. Risk Mitigation
4. Value Potential
5. Cloud/On-Premise/Hybrid

 Other factors

• SOX Compliance
• How much automation capabilities are provided by vendor for continuous integration and faster deployments
• Is it Server based license or CAL/per user based – which comes in TCO
• Developer reach and resources availability in market

In the Next Parts about Appian BPM  , we will see more details of Appian Features, Developers perspective , Form and Process Designer , Rules Deployment etc.

I hope mean while this helps to get an understanding of what Appian BPM is and what it offers.

We can go over something like this. May be a Purchase or PTO or Travel Request or some sort  business process which needs approval and sox compliance etc.

Rayudu Addagarla

BPM Specialist

I am not Appian employee or official partner, I am just an independent consultant with Appian BPM Suite expertise.