Appian puts polish into BPM

I look at four key elements when gauging the potential ROI and success of a BPM package: adaptability to existing platforms and applications, process insight and activity monitoring, usability, and the strength of the rules engine. On all counts, Appian Enterprise 5.1 fills the bill with its full-featured, people-centric, process-management suite.

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld Appian Enterprise 5.1 Appian, appian.com Very Good  8.6 criteria score weight Features 9 30% Administration 8 15% Ease-of-use 9 15% Integration 8 15% Performance 8 15% Value 9 10% Cost: CPU pricing starts at $125,000 for a production server. User-based pricing starts at $550 per user (less than $50 per user for large numbers of users). One year maintenance agreement required (20%). Platforms: Application Server: JBoss, Tomcat, WebLogic, Oracle. Web Server: Apache, Sun, IIS. Database: Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server; Web browser: Internet Explorer 6 (required for modeler), Firefox 1.5. Bottom Line: Appian provides a comprehensive solution for managing human-centric processes. Development and process modeling tools are top notch, and built-in collaboration and knowledge worker features integrate seamlessly into workflow. Analytics, monitoring, and the Web services API for integration are key strengths. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

For developing, deploying, and managing complex human workflows, Appian’s AJAX-backed modeling environment and wizard-like configuration tool is one of the easiest I’ve ever used. Onboard activity monitoring and data analytics are also first rate, and in-flight process management features -- specifically, on-the-fly exception handling -- are extensive as well as easy to configure. New features, including customizable reporting filters, made-to-order dashboard views, and live drill-down objects within reports, enhance the already insightful visuals.

Appian lacks some of the tools required for complex, system-to-system integration found in competing products such as Tibco and BEA’s FuegoBPM. Orchestration capabilities are strong, but automating advanced system-to-system processes demands additional features to fully manage ACID-grade transactions, notably compensation and rollback, fault handling over long-running processes, the capability to execute on multiple partner variables, and Web services execution platform support (say, via BPEL4WS) that fully addresses run-time transaction semantics. More significantly, the simulation tools essential to iteratively test and improve process performance fall short, lacking the means for historical comparisons and forecasting and paling to the likes of Lombardi TeamWorks, for example.

Nevertheless, Appian’s strong general monitoring and feedback loops take up some of the slack. And first-rate support for human workflows, including good document management and collaborative workspaces integrated directly into processes, set Appian apart from the pack.

Providing a rich blend of process routing and decision-making support features, Appian Enterprise 5.1 is one of the strongest BPM suites in the market today, especially at its price point. Appian has all the key ingredients for efficiently and flexibly weaving together people and the information and processes they’re entrusted with managing.

All aboard
Appian’s event-driven processing engine rides the J2EE rails, requiring a Java app server and database for its processing logic and application data. The setup was straightforward. Appian supports both high availability and fail-over configurations (active-active and active fail-over). Admins will find the included diagnostic scripts beneficial in tweaking system performance going forward.

Client deployment offers you the option of either an AJAX-driven, browser-based portal -- no plug-ins required -- or an Outlook 2003 plug-in delivering comparable views and interactions to the desktop. Either way, you get swift and easy access to processes, rules, forms, people, and reports that will be a clear boon to usability and adoption. Good user and group management facilitates personalized content delivery as well as skills-based workflow routing.

Comprehensive dashboards provide clear views of task status and process pipeline activity. I was able to traverse and sift data to readily view overdue tasks and stuck processes in need of manual intervention.

A highlight was the built-in support for exception handling. Rather than simply throwing an exception for manual processing, Appian enables properly authorized users to manage exceptions directly. They can make necessary changes to data that spawned the error (such as incorrect or missing delivery address) and completely reroute tasks within the process flow on an ad hoc basis.

Appian has laid a strong foundation for analyzing business activity. A full range of ready-made reports is available via the portal. Activity summaries and historic reports can be sifted and filtered quickly, and the capability of incorporating external line-of-business data ensures employees are getting the complete picture.

I liked the capability of modifying report tables dynamically. Using Appian’s expression-based reporting language (think Microsoft Excel-like functions and formulas), built custom definitions and formats into my reports, replete with active drill-down links to underlying data objects.

Making tracks
The process designer in Appian Enterprise is one of the easiest I’ve ever used. The AJAX-powered tool offers a graphical, browser-based approach to composing BPMN-compliant processes. Using the drag-and-drop framework of objects (events, conditions, and actions) as well as predefined Smart Nodes (a sizable collection of preprogrammed, encapsulated functionality), the toolkit hides the complexity of defining the process grid.