Appian Corporation is a cloud computing and enterprise software company headquartered in McLean, Virginia, nearby to Washington DC’s Dulles Airport. Its focus has been on low-code application development working with a Platform as a Service offering with enterprise level applications as its primary market. One of its key strengths has become business process management, and from this has grown a significant presence in business process management, robotic process automation, workflow management and process mining. These developments have given it the opportunity to move on into the edge computing arena as a provider of the necessary software ‘glue’ that brings all aspects of a business together.
Company Info
Headquarters: 7950 Jones Branch Dr, McLean, VA 22102, USA Telephone: +1 703 442 8844
Appian has focused on the deployment goal of ‘write-once-use-anywhere-on-anything’ for its low-code deployments. So the same application can be used on an on-premise data center, out in the cloud, and on a mobile device. This has become an important factor in the company’s ability service its current core market: providing business process management capabilities that tie together the business operations effectively. In addition, it provides the tools to fine tune those processes (which in practice can include significant re-design and development work) so that process errors are kept to an absolute minimum. Key to this is the ability to use process mining to expose the operations of a process, step-by-step, to ensure the code is achieving what is expected of it. With these tools it is then possible for the company to add robotised automation to the processes that can manage and run complex workflows across the entirety of a corporate network.
This year has seen the capability extended in a couple of important respects with the introduction of a Workplace Portal Service. This is a low code Application Object, and instead of it only working in the Appian runtime in the cloud, it can now be deployed to external microservice such as Amazon Lambda and Knative. But that same technology can also export objects to mobile devices and have it run locally, offline, without any network connection. This way it becomes a dynamic data-driven application.
Though developed with applications that have the mobile business executive ‘road warrior’ as the primary target, it can be applied equally well to applications out at the edge, and to all the sensors, controllers and other sub-systems that already exist across the edge environment and the many millions more that will come in the future. Using it in this application, the tools Appian provides can be the link between the farthest reaches of the edge and the central management and control of the business. At any point in the network, any device can then be an integral part of a service that is running the same applications across all the devices that are participating as part of that service. This is, potentially, a crucial capability for edge computing users, particularly any that are planning to extend the same applications requirements downwards and outwards into the edge.
As an interest point of semantics here, Appian tends towards an explanation that the edge brought up into the corporate system, rather than the system being extended and dispersed down through a far larger network.
Quotes
“By extracting data from thousands of legacy documents and linking it to Records within Appian, users now have access to critical data in seconds rather than hours or days.” LiUNA/CIO
“The value of RPA lies in its ability to enhance human capabilities [and] reduce response times and errors. Appian RPA has given us not only powerful tools for bot development but also a complete automation platform for workflow management.” Partner, Deloitte Robotics
The company’s recent developments are now creating an opportunity for it in edge computing, as the key to workflow and business process management is the ability work across different systems and cloud services, which is the basic requirement for providing integrated, collaborative business management services from the edge to the back office.
A growing number of the ‘dumb’ sensors/control devices already have low-level processors built in that can be used to run low-level, targeted compute services. Providing more powerful small systems for such applications is now becoming a target for vendors in the semiconductor community, and for many users they may well be able to base many of their solutions on ready-made small systems such as Raspberry Pi-based controllers that are now appearing. Indeed, many businesses will have old PCs which have motherboards can be repurposed to become local controllers/service managers/general compute nodes if necessary.
In addition, Appian’s Workplace Portal Service now has the ability to: a) orchestrate business functions from the data centre outwards - and orchestrate the orchestraters lower down to the furthest points of the edge, and: b) automate complex processes out of large numbers of smaller, simple processes, and make writing the necessary code a reasonably straight forward task.
The real-world role of edge computing is, in most cases, going to be as, 1), the observer, notator and controller of processes at the ‘production’ end of business processes, and 2) the source of the raw data about those activities. That data is going to be the essential lifeblood of the business, so the more of it that is available, and the quality/richness of the data itself, will be of immense value to the business. Accessing and working with that data is, therefore, going to be a key component in the success or failure of any business.
In turn, a key part of that success or failure will hinge on how easily the different business processes that make up ‘the business’ can work with that data and the results of those lower level business processes as they work on that data. Any disfunction caused by an inability to work with the data generated by lower order processes will hinder, and quite possibly stall the overall business process. That is why the level of commonality across those process steps, in terms of the data produced, that a system like Appian’s is expected to play a vital role in extracting real operational value from edge computing.
Appian Corporation’s focus has been on low-code application development working with a Platform as a Service offering with enterprise level applications as its primary market.
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