Appian World 2019 - Key Takeaways

"Low-code has arrived" was the unofficial theme of this year's conference. Of course, low-code platforms have been in the stratosphere for a while, but this statement from Matt Calkins (CEO and Founder of Appian) was about the fact that at this point in time a vast majority of decision-makers understand what low-code is and how it can help their organizations.

Low-code has arrived

Automation Toolkit

Neil Ward-Dutton a renowned research analyst shared his views on what organizations really need for digital transformation. A key takeaway from his session was that business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), integrations, and artificial intelligence (AI) separately won't be enough for digital transformation. All of these tools need to be used in tandem for successful digital transformation.

This is something I have written a lot about as well in my eBook "Getting Started with Digital Process Automation".

Platform Evolution

For the past few years, Appian has been working on making the platform as open as possible. A platform that anticipates future needs of organizations and plays well with other systems that organizations might want to interact with. To accomplish this Appian is forming partnerships with major players in the RPA, integrations, AI and other spaces so that customers don't have to worry about these connectivities.

Malcolm Ross (VP of Product Marketing at Appian) shared exciting new features and solutions that the team has been working on.

• UI/UX: Quite a few UI/UX improvements were announced, but the one that got the biggest applause was the ability to Auto Refresh!
• DevOps: Appian now provides better connectivity between environments, that is going to significantly improve the peer review and deployment stages of the SDLC. Developers will now be able to compare objects between different environments.
• AI: Connectors for major AI vendors were already available, to further improve and make AI adoption easier, Appian has partnered with Google to bundle multiple services (Google Translate, Google Vision and Google Natural Language Processing) in the platform.
• RPA: Till now Appian had only built connectors for Blue Prism, but now they have partnered with all the major RPA vendors i.e. Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UiPath. All these connectors are available for free in the AppMarket.
• RPA: Appian also announced the release of RPA workforce manager, a new solution that allows you to easily manage, deploy and monitor digital workforce in Blue Prism directly from Appian.
• Twilio: For folks interested in the Intelligent Contact Center (ICC) solution, Appian announced that Twilio will come bundled as well.
• Open SDK: In my opinion this probably is one of the bigger features in the platform, opening up the SDK so that customer and partners can build their plugins and connectors to all types of systems. Few of the partners have already done wonders using the Open SDK.

Development Skills Gap

Michael Beckley (CTO of Appian) shared statistics about the gap between supply and demand of developers and how low-code platform can help organizations bridge the gap. By providing more drag and drop features, Appian wants designers to assemble rather than code apps, this can enable more non-Computer Science graduates to pick up app development.

Michael Beckley also talked about the vision for the platform. He shared how Appian is working on integrating AI to further reduce development times. This is still a work in progress, but a very interesting way of leveraging 20 years of anonymous development data to improve development in the future.

Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.