New Platform Speeds App Development

Great to be invited to Appian World 2018 global user conference, where Matt Calkins, Founder and CEO, talked about the company's vision and the latest version of Appian, the Digital Transformation Platform® which makes it easier to build powerful software applications, fast.

Appian is creating their own version of Moore's Law for building applications by helping developers cut in half the time it takes to build an application every two years.

Enhancements to the platform help drive intelligent automation across the organization, optimize the designer and user experience across channels, and bolster performance and administration of Appian’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud architecture.

They do this with:

• Drag-and-drop interface design which makes it intuitive to build interfaces that enable the embedding of web pages and greater density.

• More integration using standards like HTTP, API Keys, OAuth 2.0, client certificates, and SOAP. More integration to open systems via the Open API initiative and Swagger. And more integration with popular applications including Twitter, Facebook, SAP, Salesforce, and hundreds of others.

• Intelligent automation with RPA bots and AI algorithms providing an orchestration layer that can be operationalized.

• Low code whereby more complex applications can be made more easily with less code.

• Enhanced architecture with 2X process throughput, up to 300% faster, and containerization with Docker and Kubernetes. 

These enhancements have led to the development of the new Appian Intelligent Contact Center Platform® which I'll cover in a separate article.

Meeting customer expectations for service and efficiency in the digital age requires smart digital processes. The new platform combines business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver intelligent automation -- a confluence of technologies and capabilities that enables the future of work. That means people working together in a flexible, adaptable, collaborative environment, supported by system intelligence that automates out the low-value work and assists users with recommendations and decision support.

The latest version of Appian includes native AI-based sentiment analysis to inform and improve human decision making. Furthermore, customers can easily extend applications with AI services with Appian’s new no-code integration to the three leading public cloud cognitive and machine learning platforms, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. Appian has additionally extended its integration capabilities with support for the OpenAPI standard, allowing customers to easily consume web services designed in Swagger toolsets.

With this release, Appian has simplified the creation of beautiful and engaging user interfaces. The latest version of the platform features low-code, drag-and-drop composition of all aspects of interface design. These interfaces are immediately available across web and mobile platforms without additional development. Appian is releasing a new beta version of its latest mobile application to customers and partners with greater styling and UI controls for mobile app developers.

The latest version of Appian makes it easy to run Appian in Docker containers. It allows for expansion of Appian’s process engines by a factor of 4x, enabling increased throughput to meet the largest and most-demanding customer environments. The latest version also extends Appian’s comprehensive security with a “Bring Your Own Keys” capability that enables the customer - not Appian - to hold the encryption keys to their data hosted in Appian Cloud.