Good morning. Welcome to Appian's 1st Investor Day. It's been a while since we've all met in person for an event like this, so it's nice to see many of you in person. We also welcome the virtual audience. We have an exciting agenda.
The theme of the event is Discover, Design and Automate. Over the course of the next few hours, you will hear some of our key executives, but more importantly from some customers and partners. First, you will hear an update from our Founder and CEO, Matt Calkins, on our strategy, market opportunity and the trends we see that will drive future growth. Next, you will hear an update on the innovation front and how we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the market from Suvajit Gupta, EVP of Engineering. This will be followed by a product demo led by Michael Beckley, CTO and Founder.
You will then hear an update from Dennis Brody, Chief Marketing Officer and Eric Cross, Chief Revenue Officer, on how we are broadening our marketing and go to market strategy to capitalize on all of our innovations. This will be followed by a short break. Coming back from the break, you will hear from one of our long time customer, Aon, and our partners KPMG, Accenture and General Dynamics Information Technology. These sessions will be led by Pawel Ramirez, Chief Customer Officer and Mark Wilson, Chief Partner Officer and Founder. Finally, you will hear from our CFO, Mark Lynch, who will give an update on our compelling business model.
We will then bring back Matt and Mark Lynch for Q and A. Before we kick off, please be mindful that some of the matters we will be discussing today include forward looking statements regarding our strategies, operations or financial items that are based on the information we have as of today and our current beliefs and respect to the future of the business. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions And our actual results and financial condition may differ materially from those indicated in the forward looking statements. Further information on the risks That could affect our results is included in our most recent filings with the SEC, which are available on our Investor Relations webpage. Would also remind the in person audience to join us for lunch on 12th floor with the executive team.
With that out of the way, it's my pleasure to introduce our CEO and Founder, Matt Calkins. Over to you, Matt.
First of all, I want to welcome you. Appian has been public since 2017. This is the first time We've done Investor Day. So thank you for participating. I also want to appreciate the crowd that gathered in person.
It's a rare thing these days to be addressing people live. Thank you for that. I understand that between the in person audience and the at home, the virtual audience that we are nearly 200 today. And so thank you for your For everybody who's new to this story, I will be sure to explain our technology in a simple way and intuitive way, which frankly is what we should always be doing anyway. In my opinion, a technology can be measured for its importance in inverse proportion to how many syllables it takes to explain it.
So we should always be striving to express ourselves as Cleanly as possible. I want to start with a few basics, please. These are our numbers. You can see that Appian has been a strong grower since we went public. There's no perfect metric to use here.
If we use subs revenue, it would be artificially diminished by the transition to 606. And if I use cloud subs revenue, then there's a little bit of a beneficial mix shift in the early years. However, the transition is finished And the growth continues. So I think that cloud subs revenue is probably the best number I could show you to depict the overall success of the business right now. We also have a really good margin.
At 88%, it's best in class or nearly best in class. I think that says something to the discipline with which we've run the firm. As many of you know, but perhaps some don't, Appian was a bootstrap, which is to say, we got to our IPO almost entirely on earned revenue. And we still run the company with that kind of a discipline. So perhaps that's one of the primary reasons behind that strong profit margin.
We also have a reasonably good net revenue retention and that's based on a terrific customer retention, which is frequently high 90s and reflects the satisfaction that our customers take in the Appian experience. I want to move on now to a look at our market. Appian has always had a big vision and there's a big TAM that goes along with that. These are all current Analyst estimates about the size of these component markets, leading with low code at $22,000,000,000 but a lot of very impressive market sizes there. I don't exactly agree with all these numbers, but it gives you the general sense that we're on to something large and I agree with that.
Low code is what Appian is known for, but we're in every one of these markets. And furthermore, I think these markets are actually converging. That convergence and Appian's leadership in that convergence is something I want to talk about in a few minutes. We're going to get in a couple of slides. But first of all, I want to dilate on low code for just a second because that's the thing that we're known for above all else.
You may have noticed, right, maybe you hadn't heard of low code a couple of years ago, but now you have. There's been a bit of an uptick in interest around this technology. A lot of headlines, a lot of recent kind of attention to this. Low Code has gained profile in the last couple of years for a simple reason. It is seen as a vehicle to change.
Businesses over the last couple of years have discovered how important change is and they have been looking for technologies that can help them change. Low code has emerged as one of the best technologies that a business could use in order to create change. And by change, I don't mean changing the logo. I mean changing the behaviors by which the business operates. If you don't change the behavior in your business, you're going to have to change your applications Or your processes.
That's exactly what Loco does for you. And so all these headlines, these are real headlines. These are Quotes from primary influencers and news organizations. You see Forrester in there predicting that by the end of this year, 2021, 75% of development shops will use low code platforms, that's sharply up over a year ago or Gartner saying that 65% of application development will be low code By 2024, echoing a prediction that I made before the decade began that in this decade most application development worldwide would be done in low code. Low Code has emerged in a large way over the past couple of years.
Now for those of you who are new to this story, I want to stop right here and explain what Low Code is, Because I can't assume that everybody is up to date on this. Low code is a technology that businesses use to create new processes Or applications. In the past, if a business wanted to create a new process or an application, it would have had to break out Actual code with a keyboard, it would type code and that is slow. Writing code is very slow. And so if we could do the same thing With less code then we would be faster.
Low code is a means to create those same applications and those same processes, but with a lot less Coding. Instead of coding, you draw a picture and I've provided the picture here on the slide. On the left, you can see a flowchart. That flowchart depicts actions, choices and endpoint. There would also be a start point.
This is a flow of work and it is known as a workflow. That flowchart depicts much of the logic that you would otherwise have had to have written in code. Low code by allowing you to express yourself in this intuitive An exceptionally human manner allows you to more quickly communicate your desires to the machine that you want to take action on your behalf. Low code means high speed. That's the most essential thing you can know.
If you're new to the low code story, that's the number one thing to know. Low code means high speed. And low code is a gathering of technologies like we're putting together right now. That is a gathering of technologies, the purpose of which is to speed you up, to speed up your ability to change. If you're spending less time writing code, then you're moving faster because code is slow.
And you're faster at every part of the application development and creation process. You're faster to create the application. You're faster to modify the application. Once you have created it, it's easy to change, and it's even faster to execute The application. We like to say that we give you a benefit of speed of about 10 times.
That 10 times is probably an understatement. We've had repeated analyst studies tell us that actually the real range is more like mid teens to 20. We're sticking with 10 because it's hyperbolic enough, But the increase in speed is really notable. It's revolutionary. And that's the core of our value proposition.
But this is the key thing to know about low code, right? Its essence is it is a vehicle for speed. And this plays right into the most important thing that I want to tell you about. This is the most important slide in my deck. This is our low code platform.
Over the past 2 years, businesses have reprioritized agility and transformation. They have escalated their commitment To change. Businesses now understand like they never did how important change is. It is a newly high priority for businesses all around the world. We have seen the same change in priority that you have seen.
We've watched it and we were in a position to do something about it. We're in the position to put together a suite of technology that would facilitate change. There is another microphone on right now over to my right. Could we just shut that one off? I'll wait a second.
Is that off? Thank you very much. All right. So over the past 2 years, businesses have escalated the prioritization of change. Every business around the world needs to Change like they never did before.
That means changing their behavior. That means making new processes and new applications. Appian has responded by assembling a suite of technology that facilitates change. Appian has built a change engine and this architecture diagram that I'm showing you right now, this is the change engine. We started of course with workflow because Appian is a long time workflow leader.
For a decade, there hasn't been an analyst report printed that didn't Cite Appian as a leader in workflow, but we have extended from workflow downstream and upstream. And briefly, I want Tell you about what it is that we did in each one of those two directions. Downstream, we extended it to automation. In case you're not familiar with automation, automation is All the digital workers to whom you can delegate work. So robotic process automation, RPA, that counts.
Artificial intelligence or AI, that counts. Business rules and having a big business rules library, that counts. Intelligent document processing, interpreting documents as they come into your organization, that also counts. All of these are examples of digital workers that you could give work to. We ship with all of that now in our product.
We ship with all of those automation workers And we weave them tightly into coordination with our workflow. We also go upstream from workflow into a technology called process mining. The purpose of process mining is to figure out what processes you should automate. It detects which processes would be improvable, right, in your organization. It is a diagnostic tool by which you know What workflows to write.
Now that's our most recent acquisition and the last piece of the puzzle to come together. And since some of you may not have heard about it in detail, I'd like to take a few slides to walk you through process mining. It was about a quarter ago that Appian acquired a great company out of Germany called Lana Labs, a leader in process mining. In the most recent analyst report On process mining, they were cited as one of the, what do you call it, the primary players, something like that. Here's what they do.
Here's what process mining will do. You begin by analyzing activity logs From users in your organization, you see what actions they take and what natural patterns emerge from those actions. Yes, A happens and then B happens and then you wait a week and then C happens. That's the kind of thing that you learn by examining the logs and tracing the course of a piece of work through a series of behaviors that touch that work. By analyzing that data, you come up with something called a process mining model.
And that's in the slide right now in the lower right. But I want to give you a close-up of that process mining model so that you can see the results of process mining as a technology. It looks like this. On the left is some sort of an event, an event that initiates a new action like maybe a customer calls on the phone or A new loan application comes in by the mail or whatever it is, right? Something initiates a new work, a new job.
And then after that, one of these 7 different things happens. And you could see they happen with different frequencies. And then after that, some of these other things happen. And eventually, you come to a conclusion And the job stops, okay. And all along the way, you're measuring how much time it takes, how much money it takes.
You get a sense of what's efficient and what's not, but overall, you know what's Truly happening. Now for those of you who are familiar with workflow, this diagram probably reminds you of a workflow. And just to make the point really clear, let me show you what a workflow of the very same behavior might look like. It might look like this, Right. So that's the workflow.
Now I'll go back for a second. This was the process mining model and now This is the workflow. And of course, I'm thinking what you're thinking, which is why don't we put these technologies together and convert Process mining models into workflows. Why don't we just integrate this so deeply that the one can become the other? Wouldn't that be more effective?
And absolutely, yes, it is. And that is what we are doing. We're going to we're moving process mining models Forward into workflow and then we're also using process mining to validate whether the workflow is now operating the way you wanted it to operate because process mining is a great diagnostic. So creating this continuous improvement cycle, translating process mining models into workflow, Not only is this intuitive and synergistic, but it actually creates a lot more value for the process mining market itself. Consider, when process mining was a standalone industry, it was a purely diagnostic tool.
It could help you find out how your business was operating, but Couldn't do anything about it. It just gave you this knowledge and then it was up to you what you wanted to do with that. We are now translating that into Behavior. And by translating the diagnostic into behavior, we're going to add value to process mining as an industry. And it's not just process mining to which we added value.
We're also adding value to automation. Remember automation is all the digital workers you could delegate work to. Well, each one of those workers was unable to do the totality of a job by themselves. There's a continuum of capabilities amongst all of those automation workers. Some of them are very cost efficient, but they're not good at exceptions.
Others are good at exceptions, but they're very expensive. Nowhere along that continuum can you do a totality of any job. You're going to need to coordinate amongst them. If you coordinate amongst them, you need workflow. If you want to delegate, coordinate, Right, if you want to shift work, if you want to filter it through 1 and have it done by another, you need workflow to do that.
So by introducing workflow To coordinate automation, we are also adding value to the automation industry. So what we've got here in this low code platform is an arch in which the centerpiece, the keystone, which is workflow, adds value through synergy to both of the ends, process mining and automation. We believe that this combination is so intuitively synergistic that it will soon be impossible to offer just one of these products. I believe that we will soon demonstrate to customers that the case for combining these into one product is so compelling that it will become one industry. I don't think it's going to be possible to be a RPA company a couple of years from now.
I don't think it's going to be possible to be a process mining company a couple of years from now. I think we're going to make such a strong case for combining these. Change is so important. Change is so important to businesses. We are creating a change engine.
And we need to do that with as much delivered speed as possible. As a business, you don't have time to put together 3 or 4 different products and integrate them and hope that their upgrade cycles match and try to hand off data from one to another For something as important as change, you don't have time. We're putting this together because our customers want it together, because the last 2 years have shown That change is a top order priority and it's about time somebody created a change engine that serves that with a minimum of friction, a minimum of delay, A minimum of complication. That's what Appian is now offering, this change engine. You can go from discovering your new process To designing your new process, to automating your new process, all in the same environment.
Discover, design, automate. I've been running Appian for 20 years and for 20 years I've been talking about our value proposition And I've probably never had a better value proposition to talk about than right now. It's been received exceptionally well by customers, partners, Employees, analysts, everybody gets this. It makes sense. Everyone understands why this is important.
I believe that our industry is going to move in this direction. Think it's inevitable. It's great to be able to be pitching, discover, design, automate all in the same platform. I think this is a transformative moment in our industry. Our competition breaks down into 3 primary buckets.
The first is Pegasystems, which is as close to any company gets as being a direct competitor To Appian, Pegasystems also facilitates the creation of powerful, scalable processes and applications. I believe that Appian is a bit more intuitive and agile and maybe has a better interface, but Pega is a direct competitor to us and we see them twice as often as The second category are big tech vendors who have a lot of things on their mind, but they have noticed That there is value in low code and they are making a play for this market, hoping to pick up their share of the revenue. I believe that our edge against them is going to be that we realize the value proposition more fully. Finally, on the right, I've listed a set of firms Who may all aspire to the same low code platform that I just described on the previous slide. They may have started with a different component and not all of them may aspire to create the total arc, but some of them probably will.
And our edge against that group is going to be that we started in the best place. We started in workflow, which is the ideal foundation and connector for the whole arch, And we're integrating more deeply. The primary reasons why Appian wins in competition today, By the way, we feel comfortable we can beat any of those competitors. We can thrive against the competitors that we're arrayed against, even though they are a strong group, and we can thrive against them because of these advantages. First of all, we have that unified platform and it's a very strong value proposition.
Secondly, our customers love our offering. We know our place In this market, we're not going to be the biggest company in this market. We just have to focus on being the best. Being the best can win, can thrive, provided we deliver the realization of that quality to our customers and we're doing it right now. Earlier this year, there was a Gartner survey.
They do this periodically about our industry. Appian came out the clear number 1 in customer experience. In fact, in many cases, the only leader, the only leader for clients more than $1,000,000,000 in revenue per year, The only leader in North America, the only leader in financial services. We're substantially ahead of our competitors in these regards. We have always had a high customer satisfaction.
We will continue to. We're focused on both our experience and our product. That's going to be one of our edges long term. If you look in the lower right, we've got speed. Again, I cite the 10x, we're delivering at least 10x the speed to create and change new applications As you would have done through traditional means, that counts for a lot.
And finally, an open architecture. Appian is committed to helping our customers Keep their architecture the way it is, use the products they choose to use. We are open. We are flexible. We will partner with even companies that I listed as our We have tech partnerships with those companies and we facilitate our customers using those technologies in concert with ours.
Unlike the typical big tech stack that will try to take your data, move your data, put it in their cloud, switch it to their format and get leverage over you the buyer, We are respectful of our buyers and some buyers appreciate that and want a best of breed play and want to maintain technological autonomy And Appian is in that regard for them an antidote to Big Tech. Appian has gathered a great set of customers. We have top customers in all industries and more importantly, our customers are truly happy with their Appian experience. I want to wrap up by mentioning a few things. As strong as our business is, I want to mention a few things that could make it better.
I've got a short list of accelerators here, corners that we may be in the process of turning that could transform our Solid business for the better. The first one is the consolidation in this market and the fact that Appian is ahead in that consolidation, Putting together process mining workflow and automation, allowing our customers to discover design and automate in the same platform, that's a powerful new message. I believe that 1 plus 1 plus 1 is going to be more than 3 in this case. So I think that when we make this industry intuitive and therefore we grant access To it to the mainstream of buyers, we have the potential to unlock more value than the sum of the parts could have unlocked on its own. 2nd, our partners can take us places that we couldn't have gotten on our own and our partners have made a great deal more investment in the past year Than they've made in any previous year.
We're seeing a surge of interest amongst our partners. Perhaps it's because they sense the same need for change among their clients That we're seeing among our clients. Partners facilitate that by providing the staff, the reach, the credibility, the geographical touch points That Appian doesn't achieve on its own through organic growth. So partners could be a factor for nonlinear growth at Appian. And finally, the solutions that are built on our platform could provide another layer of a sellable application that complements Our core platform.
We have a number of solutions, they're growing, but they are still a small part of Appian's revenue picture. They may turn a corner and become a big part of Appian's revenue picture and that is helped by the fact that our partners are also busy building their own solutions And their solution stack now exceeds our solution stack. So we're seeing really good momentum. Now Here's my summary side.
I think it speaks for itself.
I want to thank you for your interest today. Coming up, you're going to hear from customers, From our executives, the intention here is not to give you a pitch, give you a peek behind the curtain. If you like what you see, we would be delighted to have you along as we grow. It's a pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you for your time.
And let me clear the stage and bring up our next speaker, Subjeet Gupta. Thanks,
Matt.
Good morning. For the next 15 to 20 minutes, I'll be talking about the engineering culture and the innovation that Matt talked about earlier. I'll go a little bit deeper and then we'll see a live demo. So first, let me start with something that you all have been hearing probably for some years. You've heard the phrase that every company is a software company.
And we heard that before the pandemic, people were trying to do digital transformation. I've gone to presentations where a bank, a pharma company, a manufacturing company, they're standing on stages like this, talking about all the software they're trying to build. Now there is a challenge with building software. There aren't enough programmers in the world like me, right? There's increasing need for applications, just not enough developers.
So low code has been the big revolution in the last decade, and I'll talk more about your other options besides low code. So first, as companies are trying to build more and more software, they can always write code from scratch, right? You can hire developers and write Java and JavaScript and dotnet. It will take you years. That will be the estimate.
It will be a 3 year estimate that they can start the project for another year, and it might even take longer. So while that Offers to be completely flexible, it's a very time consuming process to build software. Sometimes
when you
have a standard problem like you might want a CRM, you can buy a solution like Salesforce, packaged applications promise to make that transformation real. The unfortunate problem is that they never quite meet your needs. And then years of consulting and 1,000,000 of dollars later, you still don't have what you need, right? So that's not been a very good option. Unfortunately, low code in our mind is the best balance of this flexibility and the time to market.
And we We'll show you what that means, Matt, give you a little bit of introduction. I'll go a little bit deeper. But out of these three options, they're color coded. Red is very bad, yellow is not that great, and green is the best. So we went public back in 2017.
Before I get into low code, I'd just like to show you what low code looks like As you might have heard lots of things, I want to show you how gorgeous low code can be. So these were our UIs back then, quite powerful. One of the things that we always make sure that when people build user interfaces in any technology, we have to first make them functional, right? It has to have the things that the users need to do their jobs. And then of course, you want them to be efficient, right?
Not a lot of pointing and clicking, scrolling. And then you want it to be intuitive. There's constantly a stream of new people joining, learning to use your apps. And last but not least, if you're going to spend 6 to 8 hours of your day in an application, it might as well be beautiful. So let me show you what low code looks like in 2021.
So this is an example of a branded Appian UI. This is actually not a photograph. This is an application. If you can't see it back there, You can build these kinds of gorgeous engaging experiences with low code today. Show you another People really like visual experiences.
B2C apps have taught us how great software can be, right? You're no longer stuck Some enterprise app that someone bought 10 years ago when you detest, right? I've seen videos of people smashing computers after using some of these applications. So that's not what software should be. They should look like this.
It should be inviting. It should be drawing you in to spend more time and make the right choices. Our customers are now building portals with Appian. These are customer facing applications. They need to be In dark mode, they need to provide the highlights to help them navigate these experiences very intuitively.
And last but not least, I'll talk about how Appian is one of the most Powerful platforms to bring in data from multiple sources in your enterprise. And then we can pack it into the single pane of glass And you can actually navigate this, make the right decisions. Everything is at your fingertips. It's not just a report. You can do things with these reports.
If you notice that KPI is off track, You can take an action. And all of this is happening right from your Appian experience. So back in 2017, when we went public, We had a lot of functionality. I'm not going to go through all the bullets, but we were the leading VPN vendor. We had decisions and high availability and mobility, Lots of power packed in there.
For every year since then, as I've grown the engineering team, our customer base has exploded. My engineering team has actually grown 12x as well, while low So each year, we've added things like drag and drop interfaces. We keep up with technology, Right, as containers and cloud native technologies emerge, we put our software to take advantage of those technologies. We've been shipping a solution every year, I'll talk more about those. So we started off with a contact center solution.
Next year, we
I
think someone's talking. Next year, we added visual integration. So as Appian drops into your enterprise and you pull data from multiple places, You can do that through point and click, drag and drop, no computer science degree required. You can build reports visually. We added a suite of solutions in our number in Financial Services.
The following year, last year, in the middle of the pandemic, we actually shipped a solution to help our customers Deal with the pandemic and have their workers be safe. We call that workforce safety, and that was a hot seller. We've moved to cloud Leveraging AI, we bring to our customers the full power of AI, whether it's from Microsoft, Google, Amazon or built into Appian. They're all available at your fingertips to be integrated into your apps. We also, as Matt said, first, we partnered with RPA vendors, and we actually acquired 1, and now it's a part of the Appian suite to be used very easily directly from within Appian.
This year, we've been basically leveraging AI, making AI build features like Intelligent document processing that Matt alluded to. We've taken our ability to work offline and now you can do this with the full power of Appian. They're not just static offline interface, so they're fully dynamic Like those UIs I showed you before, we've been innovating deeply in an area called low code data, which means that now even for the hardest part of your application, which is the data, You can actually bring all that into Appian point and click, drag and drop, no coding required. And we've added a suite of solutions in our number 2 vertical in the federal space. And looking ahead into next year, Matt already teed up the thing that my team is working on.
We're working to integrate the process mining directly to support that Discover Design Automate story. We're also going to be shipping our general available release for portals, so not just business to employee apps, but now business to consumer apps. And we're constantly making the app design process. While we are the fastest, I like to tell people like Usain Bolt, we're competing with ourselves, we like to make it faster and faster. And so we're going to provide a lot more guidance to make you build your apps even more quickly.
So you heard this morning from Matt. I just want to reaffirm that we are the only company that offers all 3 under one umbrella. And when something is inside of the Appian suite, it just works together naturally. Now underneath this art, there is a big platform, and I wanted to talk about some of The differentiators. A differentiator in my mind is a difference that matters.
It's not just a difference. It's a difference that makes it easier for our customers and partners to do what they're trying to do. And the way we've done this is that Matt actually coined a phrase that we like inverse Moore's Law, you've heard of Moore's Law. Gordon Moore said that every couple of years Transistor density doubles and that actually over a decade put a supercomputer in your pocket. It's called a smartphone.
We're doing that with software. So for the last 8.5 years that I've been at Appian, we've been on this journey to make us the fastest platform. We actually test how long it takes to build an app with Appian. We notice the parts and then we attack those. And over time, we've been able to deliver this thing called the Appian Guarantee.
In 8 weeks, we will work with the customer to gather requirements, Do a design, code, test, deploy, fix maybe one incident and hand over the keys to them for a production app. This was unthinkable. Actually, when it was proposed 4 years ago, I was honestly quivering my boots. I didn't know if it was possible. We did pull it off actually.
Over the last 4 years, we've never blown the An Appian Guarantee, And none of our competitors can come close to this. This has been a tremendous advantage. And this is our putting our money where our mouth is. We're not just saying we're fast. Believe it, we are.
Next differentiator I want to talk about is that in my previous job, I was at a company called Eloqua and we built a really nice HTML5 app. Now I was a big fan of HTML5 when I came here, but we have patented technology that allows us to build apps that are Working natively on both web, Android and iOS, naturally, you build the app once and imagine that app on the left, that's on the web interface. We run it on a mobile device, on your phone or tablet, it automatically intelligently just realigns so that it fits on that form factor. In fact, it will fit on a form factor for a device that hasn't been created yet. So this is a model driven approach.
We have a couple of patents on this approach. It took us, I think 5 to 8 years to build this. So it's truly incredible technology. No one else has this. This is another differentiator that makes a difference every day.
You build the app once and it runs everywhere. 3rd differentiator. When Appian is implemented on day 1, we don't start a 2 year data migration project to pull all of your enterprise data Inside of this new app, we don't ask you to put all of your web APIs behind the enterprise service bus. Each of those things takes years. We drop in and remember, the clock is ticking for us.
We have 8 weeks. So on day 1, we can drop into your enterprise. We can connect to whatever data you have, Relational databases, packaged applications, custom applications, we can bring that all into Appian. We can leave the data where it is. In some cases, you might want to copy the debt into Appian to keep it synced with our system so that it can even be faster.
But those are all choices you can make. And then once inside of Appian, you can actually expose anything we have as a web API. We are a good corporate citizen, right? Anything that's inside of Appian, A process, a decision, a rule you can invoke from another application, right? We want to just drop in and disappear into enterprise and orchestrate your work.
So that's differentiator number 3. 2nd to last one is we've also while we focus on Speed, we always keep the other eye on being enterprise grade. What that means is that the biggest companies in the world are running their business on Appian. We have to be reliable, and those are some impressive numbers. We have to be secure.
You can't probably read those. Those are all the certifications you can get pretty much on this planet. We have all of them. And we continue to keep up with that. And last but not least, imagine these large companies running their business on us.
We have to scale, right? There are Probably there's probably some startup I haven't heard about that might claim to be faster than Appian. They're not going to be these things, right? This is our differentiator. This is why it took us 20 years to perfect this platform that we now call Appian.
So that's enterprise grade for you. And the last one is probably the one I think is the most Important for our customers, they probably don't often realize it. We need to market this more. But every application in Appian is future proof. There are applications written on Appian before I joined 8.5 years ago that still run on Appian without change.
And that is an incredible guarantee, and that's actually on my team. We have to make sure That every app ever built continues to run on the platform that we're shipping every quarter, right? That's really hard. And what that does is that when you build an application in Appian, there's no Right? It's not going to get stale and old.
Imagine an Angular app that you wrote in Google 2 years later than Angular 2. It actually didn't even have backwards compatibility, so people moved to React, Right. So we allow you to bring your apps into the future, no change. Now of course, as new devices are built, we run on them. When Apple ship this Apple Watch, Our notifications just automatically work on the Apple Watch.
As new security certifications arise, like IL5, we'll be there with your apps Certified on that platform. And last but not least, all of your apps, not only do they work, you can go back in there and connect them with all the new things that Appian provides. You want to add some Automation, you want to add some mining, you can do that from your old apps. This is an incredible benefit and it takes us a lot of work to continue to provide that promise. For the 1st 6 or so years that I've been at Appian, we used to say that everything in Appian was Under the Appian roof, we actually had one roof at that point and we all our engineering team fit under there and we built all of the technology.
But in the last 2 years as we've grown bigger, We have realized that sometimes we do have to acquire the best technology where it may be and bring that into Appian. Now we're not building a Frankenstack. We've done 2 acquisitions in the last 2 years. And for each of them, we're doing a painstaking way of bringing them into the fold. The first thing we do is when we acquired The RPA technology, before we hung the Appian badge on it, we had to make sure that it has that enterprise grade reliability, right, before we could stand behind that.
So that's step 1, make it enterprise grade. Step 2, when we acquired RPA, at that point, it was a Java based bot programming model. So Unfortunately, a programmer was required. Now for a low code vendor like us, we wanted to go to market, we shipped it, and over the last year, we made that low code. So now drag and drop, point and click, Without being a programmer, you can program bots now.
That's low code. Number 3 is what we call synergy. Matt used that phrase earlier. It's not just a buzzword. What we mean by synergies that every single thing in Appian works with every other thing in Appian.
And there are direct connections. If you have an object in Appian, see who else is calling it. If you want to find out versions of it and upgrade to something else, you can. Every one of these things are connected to each other. They create this orchestra, which we call the Appian platform.
So this is a complicated architecture diagram. The main thing I wanted to highlight is that there is a lot of complexity in a low code platform, But that's not something you have to worry about. That's my team's problem. We build this whole thing. You just have to use it.
And whether you have anonymous external users, internal users that are employees or customers, they can come in, they can use a solution from Appian or our partners. You can go to our Burgening app market, download apps and solutions. You can engage with a large community of Appian practitioners. There's this whole circle in the middle of all the power of Appian. And last but not least, all of this is available on cloud, self hosted or hybrid.
And that's another thing that is a true differential for Appian. There are companies that are cloud only. There are companies that are on prem. We are both. In fact, customers use us in all three modalities, which Britt, leave the choice in your hands.
I'll conclude with just a little bit about the team that I work on. So prior to Appian, I spent my whole career over 30 years in fast growing enterprise companies. I like to say brag about the fact that I've been through 3 IPOs, Appian being the 3rd. So I spent my whole career in fast growing companies. So I have a formula for how to scale engineering teams.
So what you're seeing is Vertical stripes are sets of teams in engineering. Think of them as data blades, right? You can just stick in more data blades. So as our customer base and our revenue has grown, as Mats has shown, as our engineering team, so every year we're growing at a quick clip 30% to 40% and so as my team. So we have to have a model that we can Drop in these engineering teams, they snap in.
We provide the maximum amount of autonomy to these teams because that's how the best software is built. Every one of the teams in my group has about 10 people. They're called a squad. They sit together pre pandemic. Now they're still working together And they build a set of features, sets of teams, form what's called a group in engineering.
And then across the board, These horizontal stripes, what I found out after 3 decades of software, it is the same thing in every company I've worked. It's about strategy, people, process and technology. And these are what we call councils. They cut across these teams and they provide that alignment so that you just don't have 50 or 100 teams rowing in various directions. We orchestrate them directly in the vision that Matt talked about for Appian.
And I'll close with just One note about our culture. I do think that there's a reason that we have this great engineering team. First thing is that when I joined Appian, I remember Matt told me this phrase, something like this that we hire people for their character, not just their skills. And honestly, that's a pretty high bar for all of us, right? We talk about the fact that people, whenever they join Appian, they really love the culture and actually it survived even through the pandemic.
We were worried about how is this going to work, right, when everyone's not in the office. But whenever I talk to any new hire in Appian, they always say, you guys are So nice. You're so helpful. And that's actually something you might find it strange that a tech executive is standing here talking about this. I'm not bragging about our Great.
Developers, I'm talking about the fact that if you come back to a room like this where we have all hands or you come to a quarterly meeting, you'll find awards handed out for generosity, Not competitiveness, right? There are a lot of software companies that will tell you on day 1 that an average performance gets you a nice severance paycheck. We don't do that. We actually have great retention. There are people in my team that have been here for 20 years in a 20 year old company, which is astounding.
And yes, they get 3 calls a week from recruiters and they choose to stay at Appian. So we have great retention. We've had an average of a single digit attrition, which is pretty remarkable in our industry. And last but not least, it's not about our We're very market driven. We're constantly listening to our customers, our partners, our investors.
We're trying to stay aligned with the market. We're trying to shape it. But we make sure that we are attuned to our customers' needs and we work to deliver the things that they're asking for. That's it. At this point, I'd love to welcome our Co Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Michael.
Thank you, Subajit. And thank you all for coming to join us here physically and virtually at the Appian Campus here in Tysons, Virginia. I'm so excited to be back here. I'm Michael Beckley, Appian's CTO. And you've heard this morning about our vision.
You've heard about How we give you everything you need to discover, design and automate your applications and your processes because we believe that essentially every application should be part of an end to end business process. And with Appian, when you build an app, We're going to show you how that actually is what happens, that automatically we're able to help you understand where your applications and data fit within that business process. And therefore, you can then begin to optimize and improve and change and transform the way you work. And when you put all these things together, Some remarkable things happen. We're able to build enterprise business applications and transform entire enterprises with very small teams very quickly.
The typical Appian program is run by a 3 person pod of developers. And yet what you're going to see today in a moment is I'm going to invite 1 developer up here, and they're going to be able to take you through process mining, designing And application based on the insights we learned from those process mining insights. And they're going to be able to then take us through and automate the workflows So we're going to diagnose a problem in how your business is executing today. And then we're going to design some entirely new solutions for it. And we're going to do it with 1 person.
We're going to do in just a few minutes. So let me introduce the demo scenario for you. We're going to be talking about a common example at Appian, a very large global reinsurer. And to control their costs and to make sure that they have outstanding customer service, they actually provide the claims processing services to their dealer network, their broker network around the world. So all these claims come in from different dealers and they come in, in very different formats.
So they can't dictate Exactly how all these different businesses are going to work and how their forms will appear and how their customers will input data. But what they can do is provide centralized processing to make sure that the customer experience is outstanding and that They can keep a control on those costs because there's a truism in insurance. The longer you take to handle a claim, the more expensive it gets. And so it's very urgent that they actually have automated workflow and that it can proceed very quickly. And we're going to show you how, again, Pulling all together everything in Appian from process mining to designing an application to automating the work on a common data fabric It's what is going to allow us to solve this problem so quickly.
So we're going to start out, we're
going to show you an application that brings together claims processing you're going to say, that looks like any kind of web application I've seen before. And in that sense, it is. You could probably build it with other low code. It'd just be about 10x slower, and it may not include all the data you need. But then what we can do with that application, that's what we want you to see now.
So Josh, why don't you come on up and I'll hand you the the clicker, and take us through exactly how we fulfill our
All right, great. Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. My name is Josh Alferthig, and today I'm going to be demonstrating to you the Appian Loco platform. Let's get right into it. We begin logged in as a claim manager at York Re, a sample reinsurance organization.
Now as a claim manager, I need to have oversight into all aspects of the claim life cycle. And so when I log in, I'm presented with a tailor made landing page Unique to my role that unifies everything that I need to know and everything I need to do in one single place. I'm able to find the health of the different processes that are running across the claimless lifecycle. I can see individual requests And yet we're still able to source it and bring it on the screen so that the person has access to it right from here. I'm able to take various actions.
I can start new business processes like creating a new claim on behalf of a customer. I can even change the settings and change perhaps Who needs to approve what in order for us to complete a payment? Finally, in the bottom right corner, I have my tasks. This is everything that's been assigned to me and the teams that I either lead or I'm a part of all unified in one place. Now when I open the screen, there's something that really points out and that's the red area on the left side under intake.
It's been flagged. It's telling us that we are taking on average more than 15 we're taking 15 days above our SLA in order to complete this. That's a clear problem. Now traditionally, what I would do next is either start asking around, interviewing people and getting anecdotal evidence To guess why that is happening or maybe I'd go and request budget to start a new problem to do data analysis that take a really long time and again money in order for me to solve this problem. With our recent acquisition of Lana Labs, we have a better way to do this that This is Appian's Process Mining.
And specifically, what we're looking at here is a diagram explaining to us the sequence of events that happen when a new claim comes in. The way this was created is our process mining technology is able to connect To the disparate systems that we have in our organization, it's able to look into those and see what is the what activities are occurring, In this case, relating to claim intake and then using machine learning, it's able to create this visual easy to understand diagram Telling me what's actually happening. I want to emphasize this is a game changer for our customers As again, now they're able to take a data driven analytical approach in order to diagnose any of their problems that might require automation. In this specific diagram, we have a couple of interesting takeaways. In the middle here, we see that the copy claim details into our legacy system It has an arrow pointing out of it that's red.
That's a clear bottleneck in the process as it's taking 17 days for that event to occur. And if we noticed before that, there are even scenarios where the person who needs to do that copying doesn't have access to the system adding additional time. You'll also notice we have a large red arrow going backwards in the process. When we look a little bit closer, we see that there's a step where a person has to manually type in the details of a claim document into the system. And what we noticed later on is that they're incorrectly typing things in, making typos or not including all of the details that are needed later on, adding rework and costing us a lot in going back and adding additional time to the claim process.
The last thing that's really noticeable is the first step where we're losing 4 days every single time a new claim document comes in Just to have a person merely look at it and classify it as either a claim or not a claim. Now this tells us a lot of really useful information and helps us Fully understand the problem, but in order to solve it, what we need is workflow. And so fortunately, what we can do is go over to our target model That is auto generated in our process mining. And if you're if this looks familiar, it's that's because it is in business process modeling notation or BPMN, which works perfectly with the Appian Process Modeler as we'll be able to import it right into here and start as quickly as possible designing our better solution. Now here in our process modeler, you'll notice in the bottom left corner that again we're taking 45 days end to end for us to complete the claim intake.
What I'm going to do next is look at each of the individual jobs that happen in this process. We're going to consider the nature of the work that needs to be done, Then we're going to allocate the best digital worker based upon the digital worker's capabilities. We begin with the determine document type step Where again, a person is looking at the claims document and they're really just classifying it as a claim or something else. This is something that can be easily automated Through Appian's artificial intelligence that with virtually 100% accuracy, it's able to classify documents like this without a person being involved. And so we're going to free up this person, remove them from the process and instead we're going to drag out an activity For us to systematically classify the document using AI.
Now once we've determined that it is actually the claim kind of document that we expect it to be, the next step is for a person to extract the details. This is another activity that absolutely can be automated. As some organizations use optical character recognition or OCR in order to do this, What our customers have told us is that in real production environments, the types of documents that come in are especially complex and a lot of times they're formatted in different ways. In this reinsurance use case, our clients are different insurers and they all have different formats. Because that's the case, we responded to our customers and we built our own document extraction that uses machine learning and is able to handle different formatting of documents and still be able to process it.
And as it processes more, it'll learn more and be more successful with what it is able to extract. And so again, I'm going to free up another person from doing the work, and we're going to drag out our Document Extraction Smart Service And reduced our process by even more time. So, so far, we've automated the classification and extraction steps. You'll notice in the bottom left that that's reducing 4 2 days, 6 total days already from our end to end. And now the next step, After we've done our extraction, even though our machine learning model is going to be very successful with extracting the data points, There's still going to be scenarios where you're going to want to have a human be in control of the process.
You might have a new document come in that looks completely different, Maybe the field names won't be there and we're going to want to have a person involved to make sure that all the information is still correct. In those scenarios, we simply will assign them a task. We've been assigning tasks to people for a long, long time. And with each of those tasks that are assigned out, We'll give them an e mail notification with a link right to that task and we'll also give them a screen like this one here where they'll have a unified look at All of the tasks that they've been assigned across the entire lifecycle of the claims process. Again, we're unifying right here Every process that you've built to one screen so that people can find what tasks they need to complete in a prioritized manner right from one place.
When we open up our task to reconcile the claim extraction, we're brought to a screen with our main artifact that we're focusing on, The claim document right front and center. On the left side, we find that the machine learning has successfully extracted most of the details. We have our claimant name, we have the type. It even went through a table of items and was able to parse through all of that And get all of the data points successfully. It found our totals at the bottom of the screen that we need to capture and even was able to get my signature down at the bottom.
However, at the very top, we noticed there's 2 fields that are missing. One of them is the Reinsured Company. And in this case, Well, also insurance thought it would look nice for them to put their name on the right side in this vertical format. And so the machine learning model hadn't seen it before and wasn't able to pick it up. No problem at all.
As the user who's reconciling the document here, I can simply hover over their name. As you can see, it gets auto populated into the field, Not running the risk of me making a typo. Next time around, the machine learning model will be smarter and it will know that the reinsurer company field might be there And this step of me doing the reconciliation might not even be required anymore. Now there's another field missing, policy number, and that's a bit different. The policy number, if you look closely, doesn't appear anywhere on this document.
This is a really common scenario where there's a data point that a person needs in order to get it, They would traditionally need to go into some 3rd party system in order to go find it, doing a lookup on Boylston or something else in order to find the right value. With Appian, it's a bit different. Since we have a flexible low code platform that's very much open, we're able to quickly and easily integrate with those 3rd party systems And bring that data right on the same screen so the user can stay in one place to do their work. What I'm going to do next is leave the area where I'm doing the work and go back into my application designer where we're building apps. And as you can see here, the same screen, now we're editing that task that I was working on And we're going to add in 2 elements.
We're first going to add a section in that's going to show us All of the policies that relate to this Boylston Insurance customer that we have. I'm going to make it collapse I'm going to add a little bit of styling and make it collapsible. I'm also going to add in a grid here so that we can show the user all of the results that come back. It's not just going to be one item, but it might be multiple. And so the grid allows us to show us an entire list.
Now in this example, I'm going to reuse an integration that we built using one of our no code connectors to Salesforce As one example of the many types of integrations that we can use, as I start typing in the name of the integration, it finds my integration that I've already built And it's going to ask me for the one input of the search term and that's going to be Boylston, the customer that we already found that we're working with. When I create this, what's going to happen in the back end now is Appian is going to go out and look into Salesforce to find the relevant data points. And when I open now in my preview mode, I can review the document once again. I see my policy number is empty and I need to enter that in. And so I simply open up my policy table, I find the Boylston insurance policy that matches the same location and type, New York in excess of loss, And I can simply put in the policy number into the field.
One other thing that's especially notable at this screen and all others in Appian Is that there are going to be validations on anything that the user interacts with. And so in this example, the policy number, if I was to put in this new value, but then I accidentally add an extra Z, You can see it's going to stop me. It won't let me move forward until I have the data point correctly. We know policy numbers are always 18 digits, So that we are not faced with data quality issues later on and again faced with rework to go back in steps in the process. The last element of this that's especially notable as it's been talked about already today is that everything that we interact with on Appian is immediately going to be accessible on Tablet and mobile devices for iOS and Android.
We found especially during the pandemic that work has changed not only from the office space to work from home, But also people are doing their work a lot more often from their mobile devices. Fortunately, Appian works perfectly with this as we already are enabled on all of these devices. And you can see in this example, if I want to complete this task from a mobile device, I'm able to easily do that. I'm able to see All of the same things, including a sales force integration, machine learning extracted details, the documents, and we've even added in this example An extra signature component for when people are interacting with a mobile device. This signature could be really useful, for example, in a scenario where maybe an insurance company Has a claim adjuster going on-site reviewing an incident, they might need to take some pictures and enter in details, which they can do all from their phone, don't need to bring a computer.
Then maybe they sign off on their activity with this digital signature so that it's uploaded and tied to the case. Coming back to the business process, after we've successfully classified the document and extracted the details, the next step is the biggest bottleneck in our process, And that's copying the claim data into our legacy claim system. In this kind of scenario where we have a legacy technology, It can be especially costly in order to build integrations to it. And so Appian's digital worker for completing that Instead of making our customers build the expensive integrations is to use a robotic process automation or RPA bot. And so that's what I'm going to include next.
What a robotic process what an RPA bot is, is what it's really doing is it's going to mimic human behavior, Taking the actions that I would when going into that other system and by using it, we're able to remove non value add activity, repetitive tasks That often includes interaction with these legacy systems from a person's workload. What I'm going to show next is how what this actually looks like. We're going to go into our robotic process automation and I'm going to show you how would I train a bot to go and do this and then we'll see the bot actually in action. We open up our legacy claims system. And when I do that, I'm opening it up with our recorder that will track all of the activities that I do interacting with the system.
You'll notice that as I start clicking things, typing things and doing any interaction, On the right side, things are going to change. I put in my username and password, which we can encrypt and keep in a secured way like all other aspects of our platform. And then as I start doing my interactions again in my legacy claims system totally outside of Appian, the recorder has continued to track all of the activities that I do. As I put in my details like Wilson Insurance and maybe I need to add a certain number of line items, it's tracking all of that on the right side So that next time around, I don't need to be the one going into the claim system. The bot can do all these actions for me.
Now, I'm going to jump out of the training kind of area, we're going to see how this runs. Again, this would occur as one step within a larger business process where we already have a lot of the data points we need. And as you can see here with my hands up, I'm not clicking on anything, it's taking over for me and doing all those actions that's been trained to do. It puts in my credentials, it chooses to create a new claim and now all of those details we extracted from our claims document and that we reconciled and add additional details are being populated in. It even can handle scenarios where you have those multiple items and you don't know how many are going to occur beforehand.
In this case, we had 3, but It could have been 300 and it would have worked all the same. After it's done, it's going to communicate back to the workflow that it's been successful and we'll be able to now We move on with the process without a person ever having to come in touch with the legacy claims system anymore. The last step of our process is to update our CRM, And that's actually the easiest part. We've already built an integration with Salesforce, our CRM in this case. And so all we need to do now is reuse that integration Using our no code connectors in order to do that update, so again, I'm going to free up this task from a person's plate And we're going to drag out our call integration node.
And in order to configure this to do the update, we merely click into our activity, we go to the setup tab, we Now in summary, by doing these changes moving human activity to our digital workers, we've effectively reduced all of the human work In every step, except for the one where we want to have a human in control for reviewing claim details and the end to end time has gone from the 45 days To really just this 5 that we have remaining. And so when I come back to my landing page, you can see that the changes I made have updated the screen. We're no longer being flagged for our intake area and everything we're doing is within our SLAs. So to summarize, what we've done today is we found a problem and we used process mining in order to discover and diagnose the issue. We designed a better process rapidly using low code.
And then finally, we took automation using workflow, the best orchestrator of worker types, in order to find additional efficiencies. I'm going to pass the now to Sri.
Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Josh. That was a great product demo. If anybody has questions, we might have time for 2 or 3 minutes. Mike Beckley, if you want to come here.
Thank you.
Get that mic for now.
Thank you very much. This is Andrew Steng with Morgan Stanley. Really impressive, All the technology put together in a unified platform. When I think about the broader competitive environment, visavis ServiceNow, VUI It seems like everyone sort of realizes where the puck is going and they're all sort of trying to build this full automation platform. From the perspective of the customer, Why would they want to have these capabilities converge when a lot of these players in this market were all partners before, right?
So what's going to be the Forcing function to say, okay, I want these sets of capabilities with Appian versus ServiceNow, Pega, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, etcetera, etcetera. When they could just sort of use these or they had been using some of these capabilities piecemeal when you think of The low code piece
and the Yes, great question from the what is the customer perspective on all this. I think the first answer to that is everything we've done here is quite Practical. And from the customer standpoint, in terms of making it possible for them to get what they need 10 times faster. And so when you look at having a common foundation, a common data fabric for how you're going to discover your process problems and then how you're going to design solutions and automate them, That means that you can go 10 times faster. Now having a common data fabric across them, having a common platform for low code Doesn't mean you have to do everything in Appian.
That's the beauty of the process mining is work can still be happening in ServiceNow and Salesforce and Workday and SAP. And Appian can be your dashboard to see and how you're going to have control over that end to end process. The second thing is Appian is taking a unique approach here in that we're adaptive. We're not prescriptive in terms of saying to you, You must put all your data in our cloud. We have to own your data.
You have to use our schema for how a claim will be handled. Instead, it's your data. It's your designs. We're putting a virtual data model on top of it. And so that is what's so compelling to customers.
Now they can have their differentiated business process And they can continually improve it without having to write the custom code. So when other vendors say they're low code, They're usually coming at the standpoint of, well, it's only low code if you accept our data model. And that's a big if, Right. And so now you're not locked into 1 vendor's data model. And so we're avoiding vendor lock in.
We're also providing dramatic improvements in speed. And where you have these capabilities already in place, we're leveraging them. If you have an investment in RPA, Appian can coordinate with those bots. You have an investment in AI and the data science team, of course, Appian can take those predictions and use them all the more efficiently. So that's the real power here is this We're able to work as sort of Switzerland, connecting all the dots and be a neutral party here, but give you that unified control visibility.
And that's our focus is to be the best low code. Thanks for the question.
That makes sense. If I just one follow-up, if I may. We've talked about the technology. What about the pricing piece and that being sort of a differentiator? How are you sort of thinking about these integrated capabilities and how you're going to bring that package To customers in a pricing model, any sort of thoughts there?
Before you answer this question, Sanjit, can we Save those questions towards the end when we'll have Matt and Mark on the stage. So I know we're running a little bit behind time. If anybody has more questions,
Yes. We'll handle pricing a little later in business strategy. But if there's any other questions About the technology or technology strategy, I'm happy to take them. Got time for one more. Yes, right here.
I'm going to get you the microphone.
Yes. Thank you, Arjun Bhatia, William Blair. You just mentioned that Appian can create this Virtual data layer on top of legacy systems. If we fast forward, maybe it's 2 years, maybe it's 5 years, maybe 10 years, at some point customers are going to want to maybe sunset their legacy systems and that data is going to need a new place to reside. What does that mean for Appian?
Can you handle all that data coming into your system for applications that sit on that data? And are there any broader kind of implications from a tech stack or from your capabilities that you have to think about when you think about that long term Kind of data migration?
Yes, absolutely. The reality is that migration has already happened for many of our clients. That's always been A reason why you'd adopt low code as an overlay. We've been working with legacy systems in government and financial sectors where you have a need to give people a common interface so that now IT can work behind the scenes To slowly over time sunset those systems with no impact on the users. And that's the power of having this low code interface on top of them.
And there's A common problem where people are going through upgrades to their legacy systems and they may not even be getting rid of, say SAP, but doing an R4 migration may take 5 to 10 years. And so what they need to do is provide a common interface And also a place where they can be innovative and disruptive with new processes as opposed to just those standard processes behind the scenes in SAP. So now a user can actually interact with the new and the old legacy and do that through Appian. Now the Tenet of your question is can Appian handle large data volumes? And Subhad showed you some of that already today.
Appian Sits on a foundation with a totally scalable data platform. You can put in as much data as you want. There's no limitations there. Also, the core of Appian is built on now a containerized orchestration containerized elastically scalable foundation with Kubernetes that we're Migrating all of our customers too so that we can stay ahead of their demands.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you, Sanjit. Thank you, Arjun. Good questions. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Josh.
That's a good product demo.
Thank you, Sri.
Next up, we have the energetic team of Dennis Brody and Eric
Probably now you have heard the updated messaging positioning as well as seen a demo of the product. And then What we're really going to cover off between Eric and myself is how we're going to take this all to market? How do we make the benefits get realized for our customers as Part of the overall piece. And when I look at coming to Appian for the last 10 months, it's been a lot of fun. I really look at only having Three focus areas on the marketing front.
Very simple, to elevate the messaging, you already heard about you heard from Matt This morning already talking about discover, design and automate as part of the updated messaging. And then what we look at is to All of that is centered and building quality pipeline. At the end from a marketing standpoint, it's not just about the volume, it's about the quality pipeline. What we've seen in the last 10 months since I've been here is being able to drive this through programs and various demand generation. We've already been able to increase the pipeline by from 2.5x to 3x as part of this and we'll continue to Grow that as we continue.
And then the last part is definitely to raise the overall market awareness. I know and being in B2B Software for the last 25 years coming to Appian, I actually had to look at what the The company was doing as part of the overall piece, right? So we really want to spend the time to elevate the market presence. You may have even heard us Out in NPR in the last month, quite a few features. We've been featured already twice on Forbes this year alone and then Fortune and a few other venues.
So again, 3 simple priorities from a marketing standpoint. And what have we been doing since I've been here for the last 10 months Join me with Eric. The one thing that we're super proud of, if you noticed, we updated our branding. And this always seems so simple. It's like this Tiny little logo change.
Now it takes an entire village to do this. We joked about it, 39 meetings with Matt, Over 1400 folks to be involved in the overall process. But let me just share something really interesting with you is when we look at the simplicity of the I always say that Leonardo da Vinci summed it up so well, which is simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. And simplicity is really hard to do, right? When you look at the branding and the identity from an Appian perspective, as Matt mentioned, We want really people to think about low code with high speed, with the simplicity, with the ability to help Build, execute and get out in a very fast way.
When we did something so simple, we were test running During the branding process, we took one of the old ads, same exact message and identity of the old brand. And then we Put on the new brand and identity. By the way, the new brand and identity was open 36 times more Then the old brand. So we knew that this for us was our new identity to really convey simplicity and make sure that our customers Not only benefit, but get value from the Appian brand as part of this. We have also in the last 10 months really had a big push around thought leadership.
You may have seen this as Part of some of the new content that we're launching. At the end, content is king, right? And content helps us not only to drive the Awareness in the market, but it also helps for our buyers through their buyer journey to come in and actually understand not only Appian, But what our solution brings as part of the overall unified suite. So not only are we producing thought leadership on our own, We're also co branding with our partners. We're also launching with our partners blogs as well as content in the market, whether it be the 4 Of low code implementation or the low code automation guide where you see the convergence of low code and automation As part of this, or what does it mean to actually bring process mining or discovery into the process?
The other piece, I'll let you read it on your own. I always kind of joke about it that with The Economists And Appian joining forces is IT really in the hot seat as part of this. So you can go through and read this original Content that we just published a couple of weeks out, we surveyed over 1,000 executives and you can see some of the needs in the market. The interesting part was one of the stats was that 83% of the business buyers agree that there needs to be Push for apps and to really to support all the change that needs to happen either during the pandemic and post the pandemic. So our focus on content and thought leadership will be key to growing.
As I mentioned, not only our messaging as Part of it, our brands in the market, but also helping to build that quality pipeline from what we discussed. Matt already showed some of the logos, but for us from a marketing standpoint, you probably remember From last year, over 70% of our net new deals were coming through the partner ecosystem. And by the way, we continue to invest by with marketing, Not only with, but through our partners. And the one thing that we have really changed for this year is to do the co branding with the partners. In addition, we have also created campaigns in a box for partners to use as part of this process.
We also launched a new platform from a Partner perspective this year, where literally on our platform, partners and resellers can come in and create something like a joint value proposition data sheet, All by inputting onto the platform. And within by the end of the day, they could have a co branding piece with us. So this is critical for us as part of our overall growth and go to market is continuing to work with the partners and through the partners part of the marketing efforts. The last part I'll spend some time around. And this is our focus from now until I would say, we get to the $1,000,000,000 mark right and beyond, which is the focus around communities.
We continue and want to grow our Community as part of the overall effort. Just to give you an idea, by the end of next year, we will grow our community by 4x What it is today. And this is done will be done systematically through programs, evangelism as well as a dedicated Marketing piece for the developers. By the way, to give you an idea of how big the developer community is Today, right, if you're following some of the IDC, there's a potential to go after 26,000,000 developers today. And by the time we get to 2024, it's estimated to be $38,000,000 And we look at this as something that is critical.
We'll be releasing a Survey soon, we surveyed about 400 developers out in the market and we deemed it to know low code is to love low code. And part of this is there was quite a bit of hesitation from many of the developers. 83% of them said that, by the way, Well, before they got involved, you knew anything about low code, there was a lot of hesitation. And many of the developers, Not only are they happier in their jobs, but by the way, they are getting paid more and there's a bunch of stuff that we're going to publish as Part of some of the surveys. So this really fueled us to really rethink about our community and our overall growth and investments in community.
One of the pieces that we have added in community and you may have heard, we've always had trials here as part of the overall piece. But this past summer in July, we transitioned to what we call ACE, right? The Appian Community Edition. And you're sitting there thinking, well, it's a trial platform. But what is unique and what we're doing here is that we will let up 15 users use a trial, build out a trial.
Again, they can play around with The environment, anytime we build or we acquire, we automatically bring that into the experience. And there's an entire guided training That is part of the process. So let's say you're brand new to the Appian platform, you've never developed before, there's a guided training for you to go through as part of the process. And what is unique about ACE is now we are able to let you take the trial environment and make it productive instantaneously. So you don't need our help to move it into a productive environment.
You can turn it on from a production side. As Eric goes through some of the go to market and some of the land and expand, can you imagine how advantageous that is? So you could be with combination Our partner building on our trial platform for a new site in Mexico and then you can deploy it immediately as part of the overall piece. So we will continue to invest in the ACE environment as part of our community efforts. And then for us, as I mentioned, it's really getting to that 4x Growth of the community environment and continue to increase the number of certification.
Ace has enabled us to not only grow the Ace environment by 3x, But we've also seen a 5x growth from a certification perspective across the board. So for us, these things will continue to be part of the overall initiative. And if anything, we want developers, As you know, low code, they'll love low code as part of this. And they'll use the unification of our overall suite as part of the And continue to, for us really help us build and leverage our community as part of the adoption. So with that, Eric, I'm going to send it over to you to talk about the rest of the go to market.
All right.
Thank you.
Denise is a great partner, by the way, as our Chief Marketing Officer. She actually catches me off guard sometimes. Dropping the Leonardo da Vinci quote or perspective there, I'm like, I don't know what to think about that. But I'm in my 7th quarter Here with Appian, as a Chief Revenue Officer, we live in 90 day increments. I am so excited for the future of this company.
It's one of the main reasons that I actually came here As we're participating in a market that is massive, You as investors, you all pinpoint how large that market is going to be. What are the business challenges? How do you as a vendor execute on that? We have such an opportunity to be successful here And we have been and we will continue to be. And so my goal for the next 10 minutes is to share with you my perspective From the go to market, in terms of what we are doing to ensure that we actually stay front and center in the market.
Happy to take questions if we have time at the end. I will be here for the balance of the day. So let's go on this journey here. So You heard Matt this morning talking about our value proposition. How do we apply that to business problems that organizations are facing?
That's what we do. We solve business problems. You can say it's low code. You can say it's automation. You can call it workflow.
It doesn't matter. At the end of the day, what we do From a go to market perspective is align ourselves to a business problem inside of a Global 2,000 company. That's our primary market. Massive total addressable market. Pick the number, doesn't matter.
What we do is align ourselves With line of business, IT leaders, developers, create momentum inside of those organizations to solve a complex business problem. That's what we do. That's why we exist. And when we do that, our competition is limited. It's limited.
Can you solve low end form based business process challenges? Absolutely. You can do it with anyone. That's not where the value is. That does not drive business outcomes.
Our strength is we play to aligning ourselves with individuals that own complex problems Inside of world leading organizations, and we go execute on their behalf. That's what we do. And we don't just do it from a direct selling perspective. We've aligned ourselves with strategic partners. Look at the largest consulting organizations in the world.
They are core to our existence. We sell with them, through them and buy them. And we don't just sell direct either. We have a reseller community that focuses on the Lower end of the Global 2000, even below that. We've segmented our business Where we drive efficiency and impact for organizations regardless of their size.
And our customers, once we go in To an organization and they partner with us, we don't leave. Our retention is so high. Our technology is sticky. When it goes in, it does not leave. The only time it leaves,
Acquisition,
change of business direction, but customers do not leave us because of Our technology and what we can do for their business. And that is a great place to be. And that's the market that we live in today. And we will continue to capitalize on that. Matt talked about our value prop this morning.
You think about completeness of an offering, what is that? It's not just software. When we go in, we align ourselves to the business problem. We demonstrate our technology to solve that business problem. But more importantly, our perspective as a vendor When you sign a contract with us, that's where the real work begins.
It's what you do from that point forward that matters. And we have an unbelievable customer success organization That validates what we say during the sales process. We own it, we show it, and we demonstrate it, and we make customers successful. And we do it faster than anybody in the market. And that is why customers partner with us.
If you're a top 3 telecommunications company in the world that has 32 Desperit Systems that needs to modernize a quota order to cash process, We modernize it and we do it and we do it quickly and we put our name on it. And those types of business problems, there is limited competition. And there's real demonstrable Business value in that. And that's how we go to market. It's not features, it's functionality, it's none of that.
That stuff's important? Absolutely. I spend the majority of my time. If I'm not working on operations, I'm in front of customers. Every interaction I have, There's a line of business executive, there's an IT executive and there's probably someone that's in the developer community that's a part of that.
How many vendors can say that? Very few. And that's why I'm here. Such a great opportunity for us. Can't be a CRO and not throw up a slide with customers on it.
We work with the world's leading brands. All of you know it. The interesting thing, if you look at I'm in my 7th quarter, we are seeing a trend outside of the Global 2,000. Organizations that pick a revenue number, doesn't matter what it is, they all have complex business process challenges, And they want to solve for them, and they partner with us. And we serve a lot of that community today through our resellers.
We see the total addressable market actually expanding over the next 2 to 3 years. And that's so exciting. So we've made a lot of investments over the last 2 to 4 quarters. As I said at the beginning, this is my 7th quarter here. And I've said this to Matt before, as As a $350,000,000 company, it's like, what do you want to be when you grow up?
That's what I look at as it relates to the go to market is how do we Become world class in everything that we do. We've made major investments in terms of our operational functions that support our go to market teams, Strategy, planning, go to market operations. We've hired world class people from $8,000,000,000 technology company that's running sales operations. Have someone that's running Core business operations, multibillion dollar company. Just hired an executive Out of a Tier 1 software company to drive our channel efforts as an organization, we are attracting top talent Because we are going to remain and become world class in everything we do.
And that's who we are from a go to market perspective. And it's all about customer outcomes. That's what we lead with. When our sales teams go in and talk to a customer or a prospective customer, It's not let me show you this great technology, speed, time to value, we can make it happen quicker than anyone. We identify ourselves with a business problem, and that's where it starts.
And it ends with what is the outcome that we want to drive. And we pull the technology along with it, And it's world
class technology.
Our focus has and will continue to be Aligning to the customer, understanding what is the outcome they want to drive And bring the resources in, whether it's our sales teams, whether it's our consulting organization, whether it's a strategic partner, doesn't matter. We get on their side of the table. Our competitors, they don't do that. Some of them are huge. They're huge.
You know them. They don't align to that. They try to inflict their will. Our focus, drive the outcome. Because once our technology goes in, it does not leave.
It doesn't leave. And that's a great place to be. So I mentioned we've made a lot of investments over the last 2 to 4 quarters. A couple of the big things we're doing right now is We've got 400 plus people in go to market. The biggest opportunity for us, How do we get everyone speaking a common language?
You can call it a global sales methodology, whatever it is you want. You can use whatever terms you want to use. We're in the midpoint of rolling out a global methodology across the company, Not just go to market. It's product management. It's engineering.
Suvajit knows this. It's marketing. It's sales. Our company will speak a common language when it relates to the point of business impact. That's a heavy lift.
We're halfway through it. And that's going to create efficiency for us in terms of ease of doing business, becoming more customer centric In creating that velocity, this is going to enable us as an organization to be a long term player in this market. And that's why I'm here. This is a great example right here. Can't use the company name.
I would tell you, this is a traditional customer how they partner with us. It's a land and expand model. This is a top 3 global financial institution. I'm sure some of you probably know who this is, but if you look at how customers partner with us, this is how it starts. They pick a project, they have a business problem, they go solve it.
We make them successful. We do it with speed, Create value in a short period of time and then it just percolates from there. That's what's great about the technology business. If you are with a vendor that can put your software in and it drives success, It percolates throughout the organization. And this is a customer that like a lot of our customers that are spending Large amounts of money on an annual basis with us that continues to expand every quarter.
I've been here 7 quarters. This customer, There has not been a quarter where they did not buy more software from us. It's not because we're great people. It's because our technology drives business outcomes, and that's how you survive. Couple of things on just how we go to market.
We're a named account focused company. We have 400 plus people, named accounts. We tier the organization, limited coverage. We have teams that focus on 1 or 2 accounts and then others that have a handful of accounts. But we try to align to understanding their business, Especially if it's a public company, our sales teams, if you said, if you read Section 7 of the annual report, They would all know what that is.
Most vendors don't even know what that is. That's how you understand a customer's business before you even have an interaction with them. That's what we focus on. And the technology comes in behind it. As I said earlier, we talk about customer outcomes and this total sell mindset.
When we come in, we're not just trying to sell software. We're driving an outcome. We bring our customer success organization in To drive that outcome as quickly as possible. And we always ask the question, are you getting value out of Appian? Majority of customers say absolutely we are.
Can you define that value? Most can, But that's where we're making investments in terms of you think about value engineering and how to help a customer realize those Business benefits, so that they can go deliver that to the Board of Directors or the IT steering committee or whatever it is. That's our focus. That's what we do. We talked about that in terms of how we organize global strategics, Enterprise, mid enterprise, resellers, you will see us from a go to market perspective Become more laser focused in terms of how we look at our customer segmentation.
Focus is key. You want to go sell to all just HSBC. If you're in Europe, you're going to go sell to them, That's one person. One person owns that account, as they should, because it operates like 32 distinct Organizations. That's how you create scale in a software company from a go to market perspective.
Focus people down, align to the line of business. And then we're a platform company. I love saying that, by the way. Use the word platform, right, creates value for a company. You can just Doesn't matter if you're a startup, you can say I'm a platform company and somebody will give you a bunch of money.
The reality is, is we have to become more solution focused as an organization and we're doing This is key to our future. I'll give a great example. Public sector And the work we're doing in government acquisitions is a kind of landscape term there. Delivering out of the box functionality for customers That you can turn on creates immense value and it's realized benefits literally almost day 1. We just finished our fiscal quarter.
I can't comment on that. I was smiling this weekend. I mean, my Georgia Bulldogs won. They beat Arkansas, if any of you are football fans. I look at our Public Sector business and the work we're doing around acquisitions, Big reason that we're successful there.
And we will continue to do that whether we go horizontal Or we go more vertical. That's an untapped market from my perspective, And we look forward to executing on that. I'll close off with just some of the investment areas. We talked about the global sales methodology. We've entered some new markets.
We're looking at other markets to go into. I would tell you this that 7 quarters in, There were 2 vertical industries that we had not really penetrated over the last 2, 3 years. And we put a focused effort on that, Manufacturing, distribution, telecommunications and made some inroads Last 2 to 4 quarters. And we'll continue to do that because we're going to focus our teams. And we put our money where our mouth is.
We have some unique licensing models. We will guarantee a project outcome. And we'll give customers the opportunity to license with us and develop as much as they want Over a certain stated period of time, our competitors don't do that. And the reason we do, as Matt talked about this morning, We have great technology. We're an engineering and product led organization.
I'm proud to be a part of it, and that's why I'm here. Because you're when you're a software company, you're one of 2 things. You're product and engineering led Or you're a sales led organization. And when you're a sales led organization, and that's the most important thing, the technology suffers. That's not us.
We don't have everything we need from a go to market perspective. But here's what we do have. Unbelievable leadership, product led And is very focused on driving a customer outcome. Matt talks to more customers than I do. I have not had in 7 quarters, I have not had an uncomfortable conversation with a customer because of our technology.
That's unheard of. And that's why I'm excited for the future. We're not the biggest player. We're going to be around a while. We're not going away.
And we're going to kick their butts as much as we can. That's my spiel. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Eric, Dennis. We'll save all the questions towards the end. I just want to remind you that you haven't played Alabama yet, so. All right. We'll have it take a quick 10 minute break.
Good afternoon. How are you doing today? We want to get a quick mic check to see if our those of you that are presenting remotely can hear me and make sure we can hear you.
All right.
All right. And yes, everything sounds good on this end. Thank you very much.
Thank you. We're going to get started guys. We're going to get started To be on schedule, there's a slight change in the schedule. Next up is our partners panel, which will be led by Mark Wilson, who is the Chief Partner Officer and Founder. This will then it will be followed by the customer fireside chat.
These two sessions I'm personally excited about. These are some things that I always look forward to in my prior job, actually talking to customers and partners. With that, I'll turn it over to Mark Wilson.
Sri, thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mark Wilson. I run our partner organization here at Appian. I've had The opportunity to focus on that exclusively over the last 4 plus years and over that time we've really seen substantial growth In what we do with partners and next to partners and collaboration, really around the world.
I'm excited today, very excited today to have with me 3 senior members from core partners with Appian. They're going to talk a little bit about their journey with Appian today, What they see going forward into the future, but also be able to answer some of your questions at the tail end of this session. So to start off with, I'd like each of them to introduce themselves. We'll start off with, Kamal Narang, General Manager of Healthcare at GDIT. Kamal?
Kamal, we're excited to have you here. Next up is Alan McIntyre, Senior Banking Director globally with Accenture. Alan?
Good afternoon, Mark. Thanks for having us today. I'm Alan McIntyre. For the last 5 years or so, I've led Accenture's Banking business globally, which covers everything we do in the retail and commercial banking space, Including payments, mortgage and consumer lending. And I've been quite closely involved over that period with the development of our Appian partnership.
So happy to be here today.
Great. Welcome, Alan. And finally, Todd Lohr, who is Digital Practice Lead at KPMG U. S. Todd?
Great. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for having me, Mark. Todd Loehr, KPMG. I've been working with Appian for the better part of a decade now in my role at KPMG and I lead our U. S.
Business for digital consulting that spans the gamut from our cloud and engineering business To our data and analytics business and also includes our low code platform and automation businesses collectively. So looking forward to the conversation.
Very good. And again, everyone, all of these firms represent sort of the path that Appian has been on in working With our partners really around the world, you're getting a perspective a little bit from the public sector, a global perspective with the industry focus on banking And as well as sort of a domestic perspective in the United States. And really my first question to all three of them is, how have you seen your Appian practice grow Over time, and is that tracking with your perspective on the low code automation market in general? And perhaps we'll start with Alan.
Yes. Accenture has a partnership with Appian going back, I think, 2015. But we were managing it for a long time as a cross industry capability that was So one of the things that I wanted to do was to take some of these cross industry partnerships and to focus far more on the verticalization of them, In my case, within the banking industry. And I know that that was the direction that Appian wanted to head as well. So it made a lot of sense to work more closely together.
Also had a lot of overlap in our client bases. We weren't necessarily working together, but it's always easy to partner when you're doing it from positions of mutual strength. And we did see a surge in interest in low code based automation. I think particularly with Appian, The ability to bring together workflow, case management, process mining, AI based decision support. And really the big driver from our perspective has been increased efficiency for our clients.
In many respects, Retail and consumer banking is in a blow above a revenue recession. Revenue growth has fallen into the last 5 decades. And really since The financial crisis, we've seen traditional banking take less and less of GDP as a percentage. So in that sort of world efficiency, it becomes very important. And the leading digital banks in the world now have seen absolute headcount reductions over the last 6 to 7 years.
And one of the reasons that they're able to do that is by taking a lot of what had been intensive manually intensive processes and bringing automation to them. So that drive for efficiency has really been something which has been set behind a lot of the work that we've done with Appian And the ability to do things faster, better, cheaper using the type of platform that Appian provides. So we've been very happy with the trajectory of our partnership And also the specificity, increasing specificity, I think of the partnership of being able to bring specific solutions to the pain points that our clients have.
So Alan, I want to extend on that a bit. I know you had a chance, I believe, to see Eric's presentation just prior to the break. And one of the things that he was highlighting Was the continued growth that we've seen at just a particular customer. And I wanted you to express to the audience sort of what Accenture's perspective is on that similar Expansion capability that you've seen from Appian in financial services as an example.
Yes. I mean, I think one of the key points And this is something that we drive home with clients is to think about Appian as a capability, not just a solution. Once you have that Capability, you can find different problems to solve. And one of the barriers often for client adoption is getting over the hump to build the capability. Yes.
If I take the example, say, the PPP lending program last year in the U. S, a lot of banks just threw bodies at that program Because the idea of building a technology solution seemed daunting within a matter of a few weeks. If they already had an Appian capability, they had People who were capable of working with the platform, then the natural inclination is to say, here's a problem that requires automation, it requires process management. Let's use the capability that we have here to solve this problem rather than treating it as something you have to throw 3,000 or 4000 people about with paper based processes. So I do think that often the challenge is getting clients over the hump, getting them to adopt a capability mindset.
I think once they have that and they've built some skills and they've seen the demonstration of value added, then lots of different problems lend themselves To the Appian based solutions. And I think that that's what leads to the type of land and expand type relationships Well, you start with one application or one use case. The client gets comfortable that we've been able to solve that problem together. And then the next time a problem pops its head up, it becomes a little bit more easy to say, think about Appian as a potential solution for this, Even though it's not something that you had originally built the business case around.
Great. Thanks, Alan. And Kamal, tracking similarly, GDIT has seen A lot more business alongside of Appian in the public sector. I was hoping you could give us a perspective on that as you've seen the Appian practice grow within GDIT.
Sure. The federal health market of itself has seen an unprecedented volume of change over the course of the last 24 months ago with the pandemic as you can imagine, right. And that's where the excitement about the low core, no core platforms that can accelerate over the development of complex systems Has really been very enticing to our customers. What we have seen is when you look about Appian and the results You can obtain open a sustainable and extensible framework over that Alan was talking about, think about more of a platform Has really made so many more of our things to go open in addition to workflow automation, that we know go up. I think we're just within the federal health sector, okay, we have, I don't know right now about 6 to 8 6 implementations going on At the FDA, supporting various regulatory aspects of workflow management today.
We have a couple of implementations going on at CDC. Again, these are agencies that really need to put that fast low code, no code of automation, okay, source of activities. And just talking about internal GDIT, Marco, you know this, we have been using Appian to automate to our Local processes are internally quite gdiet for a long time. You got to eat your own dog food and we love what we do. And it's just easier when you can go out, you can sell it to the customers because you not only are selling them a capability that's going to work for them, but you can tell them about your personal experiences, open lessons learned and how it's looking for a year.
Yes, I think that's great. Thank you, Kamal. And Todd, the history of Appian and KPMG, of course, has had a lot Behind it, one of the things I'd like you to talk about is how your practice has changed and altered, I think very much parallel to sort of Appian's vision of the market itself. This began as BPM, it moved into low code and well, I'll let you tell the story from there, sort of how you see Your practice with Appian tracking to your own view of the market.
Yes. So as Mark said, I joined KPMG About 10 years ago and had worked with Appian prior to joining KPMG and had just started building relationships, so that they were one of the first as we Built our technology consulting business, one of the first alliances that we included in the portfolio. So it's been quite a journey of acronyms, I would say, Starting out with VPN, but there's plenty of kind of other acronyms in the mix. And we've seen in the 1st couple of years, obviously, a doubling of our business Pretty consistently given the size and the scale and the consistency of the market. Even as a more
mature practice in the space as compared
to the rest of my portfolio, I'm In this space as compared to the rest of my portfolio, I'm still looking at pretty aggressive growth goals, both for the last several years as well as The next several years when I started kind of forecasting out the growth of the market, certainly want to keep our business in line with Just from a trend perspective, I think what we're seeing, even something that was happening pre pandemic, Which was kind of the conversation around digital transformation. And I think Alan made a good point of this as earlier. It's less about clients. I think the market is shifting from I have a specific use case, I need a technology for that use case, I'm going to go find the right But really more looking at a platform play and making some of those foundational investments in platforms like Appian. And once you get them in the enterprise recognizing what you can do around that to kind of capture a broader digital transformation Capability and kind of moving yourself from point solution more to looking at the portfolio, looking at your enterprise and understanding Well, we typically call it kind of call that white space around your technology stack where your ERP ends or some of the custom apps or the cloud Begins, there's still a lot of plays for automation.
And I think what's been great about Appian is they continue to add to the platform and really kind of Send it to be more of a broad automation platform. If you look at kind of the inclusion of RPA and more recently with process mining, it's really creating this one stop place Where you'll be able to explore, understand kind of those gaps in your technology stack and be able to fill those gaps and do so at scale. And I think that Obviously, it provides a great opportunity for partners in this space that are not looking for kind of wrench turning specifically on platforms, but really being more of that broader transformation Partner and helping businesses kind of reimagine their stack. And as I said, pre pandemic companies were already down this path, but I think that Across industry, the 2 other gentlemen represent 2 are probably the hottest industries, but even across all the other industries, You're seeing the same kind of impact, right? Each were impacted differently by the pandemic, but each of them have had to think about Where do they take their business next and where do they make their technology investments?
And they're thinking about them much more transformative than they were prior, right? Before it was more about incremental change and I think a lot of organizations with some of the shocks over the last 18 months are thinking more transformative investments in their tech stack.
So sort of following up on that, Todd, I know this and I just want you to validate this because I think the audience would find this interesting. You go back a few years, even 2 years, even a year, Inside an organization like KPMG, you had a separate AI team, you had a separate RPA practice, you had a separate BPM practice. That's all becoming consolidated in your go to market today and that's purposeful. Is that fair to say?
It is, yes. And I think our clients aren't The days of calling and asking from one of those things, I think which were the buying patterns of years ago, it's less around I need a Technology and more about I need a broader solution or I need help with something that's much more business and transformational. And We've really challenged ourselves as technologists to create organizational structures and then even roles within those structures that look across the technology stack to bring the capabilities. And I think a lot of organizationally what I'm doing with my business is in reaction to what we're seeing in the market where all A lot of the platforms are starting to a lot of those technologies that used to be the spare pieces are centralizing in end to end platforms. And as such, we as technologists Plead to have the full stack capability to be able to support our clients on that journey.
Very good. And Kamal, you're starting to see the Evolution of low code automation really begin to take a root in the public sector. What do you see now and what do you how do you think that's going to continue to alter The market dynamics that GDIT is getting ready for and the investment decisions that you're making today?
Yes, I think we are some days, look, I feel we are barely getting on the modernization trend, the digital transformation trend, okay, of modernizing systems. What you saw over the last 2 to 3, 4 years Well, a lot of people have moved with the workloads that they had over to the cloud without really thinking about the reengineering and modernizing over those legacy systems. And now that they are on the cloud, they're talking about, oh, yes, let's go ahead and reengineer and remodernize. And products like Appian that took a not only an Sensible to AI and MLO that Todd talked about and also provide you with the integrations because your product has to sit within the client's ecosystem And especially over the federal government. And you have security requirements like FedRAMPOCA, etcetera.
So the integrations that the platform like Appian provides makes it easy to adapt to it and integrate it. And at the same time, have the flexibility as policy changes and you need to go to change your rules Or your workflow routing mechanisms, it's very easy to do. So I am expecting we're to see customers of India RFP really Asking for those kind of things. And again, it's an integrated platform rather than just asking for BPM and AIM outlook as we were talking about earlier. So it's just going to grow in the federal market space, because we're well I'm seeing from the trends.
And Alan, I know I think you're seeing similar Exactly similar transactions or transitions in financial services as well. It's fair to say that the Financial institutions that I think we're all talking to today have an enormous amount of technical debt, not all of which they can get rid of right now, and they need to transition What are your perspectives on sort of Appian's competitive advantages in that market as we look to the next few years?
Yes. I've been a back end consultant over a decade of years. And I remember sitting with colleagues saying, what we're going to do when Basel II is finished. And the reality is that Banking and Financial Services has a complexity in the regulatory environment, which is a gift that keeps on giving in terms of the vector of change. So I think that when we look at the application of these technologies, it's about really raising productivity.
So if you take something like LIBOR, the LIBOR transition as an example, it's something that's going to it's costing many of our clients 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars. So the ability to bring something to the table that can shave literally tens of 1,000,000 of dollars off that cost makes for an absolutely compelling business case. And the business case doesn't have to be a trade off between efficiency and compliance or efficiency and accuracy. That what we're looking to do with a solution at Appian is be able to say no, there is a trifecta. You can do things faster and more productively, you But you can also improve the quality of the decision making.
You can bring in the right information. As Kamal said, the Integrations here are critical. The ability without spending a lot of money to pull in information from different sources, Yes. Format that information and use that information in real time to support decision making. Yes, I'll give you an example, which I think is very Which is the line between automated underwriting and manual underwriting and commercial credit.
And then within Manual underwriting, making that underwriter more and more efficient and productive is the difference between unprofitable small business customers and profitable small business customers for a lot of banks. And making the future visible, bringing solutions to the table that say, this is what the future can look like you can alter decision up to this level. You can make it more efficient. You can make money off of a $50,000 $100,000 credit. Painting that type of future on the basis of the technology capabilities is really what we're trying to do with clients, really getting away from the, okay, here's a solution to problem, but more painting a future vision of what banking can look like and the role that platforms like Appian can play in it.
Wonderful. Thank you, Alan. Sri, I'd like to open it up to questions from the audience either here or online if we have questions that come in.
You can either direct to the individual partners or you can ask Mark and he can direct to the appropriate panelist.
Thank you for taking the question. I guess for all of you, if you could Sort of draw the trend lines, sort of coming out of the pandemic and sort of pinpoint how the priorities of your customers have changed as it relates to Driving more resiliency and agility in their businesses. And as advisors to these customers, How are you making the recommendations on the sort of which technology partners you should bring to the table? Because I know you're working with Appian, but also across a number of players in the ecosystem. So how are you guys walking through customers in terms of building those capabilities coming out of the pandemic?
Hopefully, you all could hear that question. Todd, if you want to take the first take on that.
Sure. So I would say First part to your question, we have seen a lot of our clients and I think that to the point that was made previously, Recognizing on business agility that the world changes pretty quickly and they had some organizations had capabilities around Low code and tooling like Appian that allowed them to pivot and do things pretty quickly and differently in the face of an enormous amount of And so I think more broadly though, all organizations are thinking about making those investments and having a part In the architecture, Kamal made an excellent point on cloud is actually accelerating that. Everyone knows they need to move to the cloud. And I think they're starting to get to that disillusionment of just moving to the cloud isn't necessarily getting you the business case. It's all about rebuilding and digitizing and Replatforming once you get to the cloud and using tools like Appian to get there.
As far as the competitive landscape, We typically look at there's only I would say, when you look at the landscape, there's lots of different companies that say low code, right, which is a bit of a challenge for our clients. Although I would say there's only a handful of them that are really moving in that kind of broad based Platform actually with low code, right. I mean, some of them are actually they call it low code and then you just go and look at they have a coding window inside their application. That's not That's just code to be clear. But there's, I would say, a handful of kind of key players in this space.
When we advise with our clients, it's typically each one of them I think for where we are today has different pros and cons depending on the The use case, level of kind of citizen development that you want involved, again, often being kind of a Double edged sword. I don't think we're there yet in the market. But with that said, we are moving to a world where there's going to be less and less Technical people driving some of the build and change of these applications. So that's one of the things we would look at and assess. Some of the platforms are going to be better at that than others.
Degree of rules management, case management, workflow, kind of whether it needs to be mobile enabled, Is it internal employee application? Is it external customer facing size, scale? There's a number of things that we would walk through with our clients. I would say bottom line without kind of giving you the which is best for which use case. Most of our clients that we deal with as a firm are going to be kind of large Fortune 50 ish, Fortune 100 Enterprises, most if not all of them are thinking a multi platform strategy as a fit for, given the different parameters that I played out.
They're actually getting an architecture that's going to play with a different a number of different platforms in the space.
Okay. Another question over here.
I have a question either for Todd or Alan. If you could elaborate on kind of the state of process mining in your current businesses. Do you have a standalone process mining practice currently? Were you already partnered with Lana or Solana or somebody else? And then Kind of more important, I guess, more germane to Appian, kind of how does the acquisition of Process Mining change the type of conversations you expect to have with your customers?
Thank you.
Alan, you want to start off on that one?
Yes. I mean, I think like many things, there's not much new under the sun when you think about process mining. Yes, there's been various iterations of that certainly over my career as a consultant. But I think what is changing now It's the level of ambition and the speed. Accenture has an applied intelligence business, which is where process mining sits underneath, Which is the ability in my mind to learn quickly as you're flying the plane.
And when you think about the economics of a financial institution, a lot of the cost is associated with exception handling. So if you think about something like the international payments business, If there's a broken wire payment, you have to go in and fix it. And it's a diagnostic exercise to understand why the wire has broken and there's various ways why That might happen. But the ability to understand and then squeeze out those exceptions over time through process mining And to understand not only the human interventions, but also technology issues that go with it and continue to learn from those Processes, both the good and the bad, getting exceptions out of those businesses is the way you get towards the ambition of sort of 0 operations That we've begun to hear many of our U. S.
Clients talk about. So I mean, 0 operations is not going to occur within my working life, But there is clearly a level of ambition, which I think has been stimulated by the pandemic around Why? Why do we need manual interventions in these processes? What is it about the processes that we need to understand to stop someone having to reach in and do something? And I think that the pandemic has accelerated that.
It's raised the level of ambition. And for us, it's a key plank of a programmatic approach to efficiency within our clients, particularly with respect to back office and operations type functions.
If I could add 2 things to that, I think it's important to understand the context of the process mining question with what our partners are doing today. One is, is that we see this as a way of Extending current Appian implementations to find the next projects that need to be worked on. Referencing Alan's example there, we may be handling a piece Of an international payments or a global payments transaction and we might go looking for the next 2, 3, 4, 5 projects as associated Because there's a process mining exercise that happens. The other things, and I don't know if we have time to get into 2 details here, but Accenture, KPMG, others are looking and have looked at other process mining capabilities reaching back Further into their more consultative practices, and we continue the conversations with them as we get ready to launch our process finding capabilities. So we'll see that's there.
I think we have the next question.
Thank you. This is for all the panelists, but can you characterize the most enthusiastic users of the Appian platform within your firms? And more specifically, if you had to compare them 2 years ago to today, are they more or less technical? I'm just Who's attracted to actually implementing and solving these complex problems, both within your companies as well as in your customers?
Kamal, you want to start us out on that one?
Sure. Okay. I mean, I think in terms of excitement, given looking at the talent, The fact that you don't need traditional programmers can have, okay, analysts who can folks who are more on the business side, Implement rich user experiences, right off, using the tool, I think about that itself, okay, it just brings A whole breed of users who are excited to go to using with the platform. So that's one thing I've seen. And customer experience, as you know, is a very big aspect of what we do In the federal government and the richness of the customer experience that can occur and be had and the speed of which we at which they can get it, I think we see a whole variety of different Uber users who are excited about such a platforms than traditionally what you would have seen initially with the CIOs and so on and so forth.
That's great. I can't pass up the opportunity to get more comments on that one as well though. Todd, do you want to chime in there too?
Yes. So Appian's interesting in that as a firm, my team focuses on helping My clients or I guess other third parties select, implement, scale the use of the technology, but we also use Appian ourselves throughout our business to do a whole number of use cases, both in kind of our back office as well as in our middle office and Increasingly more in our front office, when you start looking at us as a very large big four consultancy, inclusive of auto and tax, we are starting to use it to Look at how we deliver our services to our clients and have a number of use cases there as well. So it's been great to see that because I see Even on the process mining example before, we have 10,000 odd people asking clients right now like How does a process work? And I see the future there being of consulting and a lot of professional services, kind of the using technologies like Mining to help assist what traditional consultants would have done with brute force. And then ultimately, the more utopian view of that It's actually solving some of those challenges, not with a lot of technical resources, but really putting the hands of the technology In people, Sands that actually understand the use cases, whether they're functional or industry.
And so I see that shift happening for how we as a professional Services firm need to react. And so that's where I get I'm excited about helping my clients do that, but I'm really excited about helping the firm along that Journey for where we look in the next several years as a professional services company.
Okay. We have time for one more question.
Perfect. Thank you, Arjun Bhatia, William Blair. I think all of you touched on thinking of Appian as a capability Rather than just a solution, which means presumably you can use Appian to solve multiple problems over time. I'm curious how Your engagements, how you've noticed the timeline to get customers to take off the training wheels, Meaning enabling them to build on Appian on their own after maybe you've helped them with the first application or the second application or the third application. What does that timeline look like and how has that changed over the past few years?
Alan, you'd like to start off?
Yes. I mean, it definitely accelerated because I think that the level of understanding of what low code, no code means has skyrocketed. So if you go back a couple of years ago, when you spoke about local, people still thought that you need armies of programmers and it's akin to writing cobalt for Mainframe. Yes. No, I think that there's an understanding that the skill set is required and the ability to adapt your processes using that capability can happen relatively quickly And that you can build cohorts of people within an organization who understand the platform and then can very quickly adapt processes.
So I think that the comfort level with the type of technology has certainly improved over the last couple of years. The other thing that our clients are demanding more and more of is embedded business intelligence. So don't come to me with just the generic platform. Come to me with something that already embeds some business logic, some accelerator, some modules that already already understand the nature of payments or credit or back office operations. So that as we look to And the platform out, we're plugging in things which are already 80% there, 90% there.
And that's certainly from a partnership standpoint. Accenture has been investing and developing those types of accelerators to really break through resistance in clients that no, this is going to take too much time or too much work That we can demonstrate that actually those prebuilt modules here that are very close to final, they just need to be customized for your particular use cases. So I think a lot of the barriers to entry have come down over the last couple of years due to familiarity with the technology, But also the verticalization that I talked about at the beginning of the session.
Great. Thank you, Alan. And thank you, Kamal. Thank you, Todd. Thank you, Alan.
Next up, we have the customer fireside chat with one of our longtime customer, Aon.
Hi. I'm Pavel Samudio Ramirez, The Chief Customer Officer of Appian and the leader of customer success in Appian. And I'll be I'm glad to be here in this conversation With Bob Olson, Vice President and CIO of Reinsurance in Aon, he's been a long standing customer of ours and has a lot to share. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us and share with us and the community of people that are looking at Appian on how you are doing with our technology given that you've been a customer for a while and you have been able to achieve a lot. But before we get into the achievements and the actions and the learning, I want to ask if you can introduce yourself, your organization and your role in the digital transformation of your company.
Yes, thanks for the introduction. Yes, I'm Bob Olson with Aon. I am the CIO of the Reinsurance division within Aon And I also am the co lead of our enterprise architecture function in Aon as well. And I don't know if you know, but we're in the business of helping companies make better decisions, which is might involve risk, health, retirement, investing, Reinsurance and more.
Excellent. And Bob, what is within your role, How do you frame the contribution of you and your group in relation to the changes that the company
requires? So my role in the group is really to help come up with strategies to use technology to hit our business objectives in the reinsurance space in So it might be looking at growth strategies, how to interface with our clients, how to help our clients grow, but also how to improve our operations to provide better Services to our clients and run that efficiently and effectively for them. So my role is really to kind of bring technology to the table to help achieve those objectives for our clients.
All right. Excellent. Well, yes, I imagine a role like yours is actually full of new Every time, I imagine there might be a long queue of people knocking at your door to try to show you the latest. Now at some point, You decided to use Appian. Can you tell us a little bit about what drove that decision?
What was behind either the Business need on one hand, but also what did you see at the time of selecting Appian?
Yes, for us, I think the area that pushed us over the edge to pick Appian was a need to move faster. So we had a pretty aggressive objective to re platform Some capabilities that we had across the business, reorganize, really hub some activities globally across the firm So that we could be more effective, more efficient, free up local people to do more advisory work for the clients, but yet push Some of the administrative work offshore into some hubs to be more effective. In trying to do that with our legacy It was going to be very long, very expensive to be able to change those systems. So what we ended up landing on was we wanted to use some low code capabilities And some workflow capabilities to drive that change for us much more aggressively than we could do otherwise. So we looked around at a number of different options.
We evaluated more than a half a dozen different platforms. Appian for us ended up being the first choice because For multiple reasons, because the community of Practice around there, there was a lot of organizations and some community of interest online that really kind of drove a lot of capabilities. The tool itself was leading edge, but also mature in terms of the development capabilities that had Exactly what it looked for from a development perspective. And It just satisfied the needs that we had for workflow, for integrating with RPA, for integrating with AI and let us Have the right integration with our legacy systems. So it was the best platform that we saw for having a very flexible approach to integrate with our existing systems.
So what today we're largely using APIs to drive the integration, and we thought Appian was probably our best platform to do that with.
Excellent. That sounds like the right criteria at the right time. Now can you let us know a little bit about What type of applications? How is the replatforming going? And to what degree have you been surprised, satisfied And we're from there?
Yes, absolutely. I think the first area that we applied Appian was in our claims area. We were Looking to have a lot of our administrative operations to provide better services in a more consistent common way across the globe. And yet and at the same time empower our local claims advocates to represent our clients more effectively. So we brought in Appian.
We implemented a workflow. We actually used the 8 week guarantee from Appian to move very quickly to deliver some results Really in 8 weeks, we actually stunned our claims group with the progress that we made. We were able to provide a workflow process for them to ship Claims offshore, track exactly the status, get the feedback back and deliver the results to their client Very effectively with dashboards and KPIs to monitor the progress along the way to make sure that our service was actually improving and not thinking backwards. And I think from then, we've kind of expanded to more aspects of the claims process into the queries that might come up into the settlement issues and related areas. So I think what we found was that The speed that we could deliver something to the business was just remarkable.
I think it really, it really impressed Business, I got them on board and engaged really quickly. I think the agile process that the Appian customer success team put in place Was phenomenal. It was that we thought we were pretty good at agile practices already in AM, But I think they brought a new level of efficiency to that and I think we ended up improving our overall agile processes on the back of leveraging their team by applying a few of their practice. So I think the combination of the customer success team from Appian combined with the tooling and then our Folks who knew the business and knew how to integrate with our existing systems really well just made it a really, really fantastic story. It was some really good results, Not only just for our business, but for our clients and to kind of be able to be recipients of that better claims service.
And then since then, we've applied Appian in a number of other situations, too numerous to account, but in some cash management methodologies, In some facultative reinsurance transacting processes and so forth, and we've had the same level of success. I think a rapid way to deploy business capabilities. They see the results immediately. You get automatic
updates as Appian updates the
platform, so you can stay current with the So you can stay current with the latest web browsers, the latest mobile interfaces and so forth. And really to be able to give us that Efficient way to innovate in the front end, but still leverage all of our deep capabilities on the back end through an API integration mechanism is just a really good, Really good spot for us. We're finding Appian we're able to apply it in far more places than we thought we were going to be able to initially, which was
a really pleasant surprise. Wonderful. I am delighted to hear how you share your experience on reflection. In fact, part of The feedback that I get from many other customers is similar, one of surprise in more than one way and they get
Significantly,
I mean, we can see the possibilities of programs with different very different It's precisely because of the power and the reliability, but also of the speed. And I'm delighted to hear that you went down the Most efficient way to get to know our platform, which is the Appian Guarantee, the idea of having an enterprise ready application Open running in 8 weeks is, I think, unheard of even now in the whole ecosystem on That is a wonderful way to get to know what we are able to deliver. Now you spoke about The interactions and surprising actually some of the business, what would you say was most surprising about using Appian? Is that a speed or is there something else?
Speed combined with just the amount of capability that it brings to bear, I think We sat down with our business design teams. They were I think they were expecting us to talk to them maybe once a week and come back with something after a couple of weeks. We hit some momentum where we were talking to them every day. They were coming in the next day and seeing results of what they asked for the prior day On a regular basis, so having them it got them very excited and willing to spend a lot more time with us on the process because they were seeing results so quickly throughout the path. So I think that to me it was really delivering a lot of pre built components that Appian has stitched together through APIs to our back end The build these and bringing them to life for them so they can see it real time, I think that was the magic ingredient that really made this a really huge
Right. Yes, that's wonderful to hear. I know many of our customers struggle because they are unable to create the right dialogue Within their companies, between the business and technology in general. And I and you can understand why that, that In some cases, it's a dialogue that has been full of is now full of mistrust and distortion. But the ability to We work together and see results fast, can change the dialogue internally in very significant ways and allow Organizations to be able to define better what is needed and how to get there.
So it sounds like you've experienced some of that in working with Appian.
Yes, I think you hit it on the head. I think business and IT alignment can be a hard thing to do. I think we're pretty good at it, NAND, but It's never easy, but I think the fact that you can have very frequent and daily conversations and the business can ask Questions, they can change their mind, they can see the results. And we don't complain if they change their mind, we say that's fine. I think it was a good idea.
Let's pivot, let's try it a little differently and they like that better. And having that trust and the dialogue to be able to see the results and have that real time feedback And have the flexibility to react to that really quickly. I think that has built a lot of trust and has improved that business IT alignment.
Yes, fantastic, fantastic. It's I am here. I'm delighted by hearing your experience because ultimately in the view of that we have, Customers should be able to get new capabilities at a general level to create applications fast. And that, of course, requires technology, but it requires A very different type of dialogue between the IT teams, the technology teams, the innovation teams and the business. And often people say, yes, I agree that the dialogue is needed, but what they mean is I want to be heard.
And I think dialogue is a back and forth. And if you have a tool that allows you to try something, test it, use it, play with it and then retry and improve In a really, really rapid time, it changes the dialogue. It becomes a real dialogue, I suppose, a co creation exercise as opposed to just Taking orders or giving orders.
Yes, I agree. A rapid tool like this makes it I think to me being able to have Try ideas, test ideas, change your mind is what's so nice. I think in the old days, you would It would be sort of a longer cycle. So you'd get into situations where obviously you say, well, I meant we said, well, you said this 3 weeks ago. So, well, I meant this.
Well, simply you said this, so but it doesn't matter now. You put it out quickly, you get the reaction, you dynamically change it, you get a spot that you're both very happy with very quickly and there isn't an us versus them. It's just you're the team, you're working on, you're building it together and you have quick results.
Fantastic. That's a definition of success on its own in my view. Now you made a point earlier in the acquisition about Bringing Appian for specific use and then being able to see new areas where Appian can be of value. Can you say a little bit more about How would you think about the first type of problems and then how do you think about them moving forward, the type of problems where Appian can be of value?
Yes, I think when we first went into it, we had a very specific problem where we're trying to apply some workflow to kind of a case management scenario. And I think Appian's perfect for that sort of a scenario. So that's kind of where we were targeting and thinking about applying it. I think once we saw the tool and used it successfully, we realized, Wow, there's a lot of capabilities beyond just simple case management or workflow, not that that's simple, but A lot of capabilities beyond that, that we can apply this against. And we've actually replaced a lot of user interface and front ends with this Appian capability Way beyond that, so just general application building, not specific case management workflow is what we thought was great.
And I think one specific area that was very surprised and gratified to see is that we had several applications that We're getting a little older. We needed to replatform the front end. We didn't need to rewrite the whole back end. We had it layered very nicely where we had business logic database logic, it was properly layered, well done. But you want to redo the front end UI every once in a while because things move on and change.
And typically, we would have went some JavaScript route and created some web platform that would have taken some time to develop. I think We're in a lot of cases, we're able to apply Appian for As the new front end UI talking to our existing business logic and it let us re platform the app far quicker on the front end. And Also, it gives us the automatic updates going forward as browsers and mobile apps change. To get that automatic update when you're in a large corporation is huge because getting funding to keep your apps up to date can be a challenge in a lot of corporations. So having that automatically done by Appian in the background is a huge blessing and it frees up money to do other things.
Fantastic. Fantastic. Yes, we have an articulation of how we can view value for customers as Some sort of steps or levels. And we think about the first level being precisely when customers have one specific business problem, this is an application that they need to Fix or create very, very quickly. And that is that's a great place to start.
But then we know that we can move from there to a more General approach and we use the selected as the platform of choice for a number of problems that the companies have identified. So we move from projects to programs. And then we can go to platform. The platform choice is when a company has enough confidence That they say we are going to use Appian for problems that we have identified and problems that will come because there will be a number of challenges coming our way [SPEAKER JEAN FRANCOIS VAN BOXMEER:] And that is a natural progression. And then in the higher levels, you can aim to do actually innovation, Change how you face the market or face your customers and so forth and leverage Appian to improve how those Services or products are delivered and we believe that our application can serve customers in any one of those levels.
And to some degree, you just painted a picture of you going through Different stages of being exposed to the technology and being able to bring it To be of value to the company incrementally and in an ever increasing space.
I was just going to add one point to that as I 100% agree. I think One area in particular that's been interesting is that we've been playing with document ingestion and artificial intelligence and machine learning for Quite some time in the insurance industry, which reinsurance is part of. There's a document, kind of a heavy workflow with a lot of firms have. And we've done a lot of things, used a lot of big name vendors, Python libraries, all kind of things to do something in that space. But one of the most successful things we've done just That was very easy was leveraging Google AI kind of through Appian, we found was something we could Experiment within our claims side very, very easily.
It's a low entry bar to get there. You didn't have to conquer the world. You could have some small wins to improve your workflow and auto populate some fields without having this massive Auto populate some fields without having this massive project on the side. So I think, as you said, Finding ways to incrementally add value, there's applying it to new business cases, but there's also it's an easy entry point to Test and apply some new technology that Appian's already integrated with as well. So we found that really helpful.
And it may not work for every situation, but To be able to easily apply something like that with your existing workflow, that's really powerful. Absolutely. Yes, I mean,
that is actually the vision that we have that you can use our VPN capabilities to orchestrate and define the change That is needed to then use a number of technologies to automate and certainly AI is one of them. We are now doing it as well in other domains, including RPA, where we think that, in fact, Including RPA, when we think that, in fact, RPA as a separate offer would probably Nothing in the future because it has to be connected to what is the actual process that you want to, not only the one that you have today, where are you taking the organization towards And the ability to change the process and then automate it, in our view, will be a lot more valuable than just doing those two things independently. Today, there are some organizations that have actually different teams working in those 2 camps. And they don't actually talk. The technology teams, they don't talk A lot because the vendors, the industries, etcetera, have segmented those needs, but we believe that they should come together because it will be more beneficial to Our customers.
Yes, yes, absolutely agree with that.
Excellent,
excellent. Well, I know we are going to run out of time soon. I just want to Ask a question about how do you see the future of your use of Appian? And is there anything specific that you would like to be able to share
I think we're quite optimistic about expanding our usage of Appian across the firm. I think the ability to deliver Quickly, the ability to orchestrate different processes, test new technology, respond to the business quickly, build that Bill, that trusted relationship, as we've talked about, I think is providing a lot of value and a lot of projects. So I think as the message gets out there across Firm, more teams hear about it. The business is actually coming to a lot of our technology teams saying, hey, can we do this as well? So I think I feel quite optimistic that this is going to continue a really nice path for us across Aon and And that we'll be able to apply it in more and more places and be able to test some of the integrations with some of the technologies we've talked about at the same time.
So yes, quite confident that really pleased we made a fantastic decision with Appian and we're on a great path with it.
That's wonderful to hear.
Thank you. Next up we have Mark Lynch, our CFO.
Thanks, Sri. So last but not least, the numbers guy. So I'll kind of go through the numbers pretty quickly. Four highlights that I'd like to go through today. One is basically through the numbers demonstrate the strong growth and margin profile of Appian.
Most of you as investors understand that the predictability of the business model is improving over time, solid customer and unit economics and Finally, some of the areas that we're investing for sustainable growth in the future. So 1st and foremost, Matt had talked about I think the best metric if you measure Growth rates for Appian is the cloud subscription growth rate. And as you can see, for the past 4 years from the time we IPO ed, The CAGR for the cloud has been 48%. And if you look at the past 6 quarters, it's been greater than or equal to 30% very consistently. So it's a sustainable growth rate.
ARR, we actually unveiled a couple of little metrics here for you guys. One is talking about the total ARR growth over the past 4 years, it's been 33% plus on a CAGR basis. And for the cloud ARR, it's been growing at 40% plus, which mirrors closely with the revenue that we talked about a second ago. So let's talk about different growth, like watching how the company is growing in different aspects. You heard from Ann earlier today about how We landed with a particular problem and then we've expanded and hopefully ultimately will be throughout the entire enterprise.
This graph here talks shows 3 different cohorts. 1 is Customers, the navy blue are customers that have purchased $100,000 or more in ARR. And as you can see, the cohort for the past 11 quarters has grown pretty consistently every single quarter. The middle cohort represents ARR greater than or equal to $250,000 and same thing, it's growing nicely. In the bottom cohort, the Royal Blue is growing at those represent customers that purchased $500,000 or more in ARR.
And once again, that cohort is growing very nicely over the past 11 quarters. Diving into the gross margins, The software margins are best in class at 90%, which past 6 quarters, 80% of our Software bookings and cloud, so the fact that you have software margins at that level with cloud is pretty substantial. The gross margins, you can see the improvement going from 64% at the time of the IPO up to 73%. And If you think about the other component of the margins, the services margins, and those have been fairly consistent in the 30% plus range. But the reason why you have the gross margin improvement over that time period is really the mix shift in revenue.
So at the time of the IPO, we had 50% revenue, which was software, 50% services, and now it's 70% subscription revenue and 30% services. And the other interesting thing with this slide is the fact You can see the improvement in the predictability of the business. Obviously, subscription based revenues much It gives you better visibility, it's easier to predict. And so when you go from 50% to 70%, the business model is much more predictable. How do we license the software?
Eric kind of talked about the different ways we do it. We're 100% subscription. Regardless of its cloud or on prem, it's 100% subscription. We price by user base. It was basically in the early days.
The past couple of years, we've been doing application specific licenses and we just recently came out with a license on effort to build. And so we're basically trying to be as flexible and easy to do business with our customers in whichever licensing methodology they want to use, we can accommodate them. And finally, the average contract length is anywhere from 12 to 36 months. Net revenue retention we talked about, Since the time of the IPO, we've been saying that expect our net revenue retention rate to be between 110 and 120. We were actually pleasantly surprised that it ticked up above 120 last quarter, Right.
So from a modeling perspective, think of that 110 to 120 range from modeling out Appian. The other great thing, and Eric talked about this, is the fact that we're sticky. Our gross renewal rate was 99% for the past 4 quarters, best in class. And as a result, the LTV to CAC has been in excess of 7 over the past 4 years, and it's been in excess of 7 and it's actually growing. And really a big piece of that is the fact that you have a 1% churn that lifetime value of the customer, it becomes a pretty big number.
We rolled this graph out. I know Conor is excited to see this graph. He reverse engineered it when we IPO ed. This is representing the cohorts, the ARR by annual cohorts. And as you can see, the cohorts have been growing The vast majority of the cohorts have been growing every single year, year over year.
Now let's kind of dive in and look at the way we expand and what's happening within our customer base. Let's look at our top 25 customers since January of 2017. As you can see, the total growth rate for these customers has been 4 And the CAGR is approximately 41%. And the growth rate is very consistent, right, and it's very smooth. And let's look at like 3 different journeys.
One journey, we've got a top 25 bank here, a top 25 pharmaceutical and a top 25 insurance broker. The top 25 bank, we were brought in by a partner. We basically helped them build out a case management System for their new line of business and based on that success rate, we went and basically they use us to modernize their call center operations on Midwest, and we've been used throughout the enterprise very consistently. And you can see the spend trend, spending trend is like Eric talked about a little bit earlier, it's like almost every single quarter they're buying more and more software, which is great. And the total spend there grew 40x over the lifetime of the customer.
And really the reason why it's 40x is the initial land was relatively small. The pharmaceutical, you can see it's growing 10x. And on the far right, you see a larger land, Right. And then consistent usage over a few quarters and then a significant investment in Appian during Q1 of this year. Those are 3 different ways at which we can land and expand.
It really demonstrates the power of the platform. When you get to this size, we're a platform. We're not a solution, we're not a tool for these customers. They're looking to use us to build lots of applications throughout the entire enterprise. You're probably tired to hear me say this, but I've been consistently saying that we're we feel that we are a 30% plus grower for the foreseeable future.
And how do we get there? Matt talked about the accelerators. The accelerators also help the growth rates. Growing strategic partners, super important. You heard from our partners today about How they're growing their practices, international expansion is obvious, solutions Matt talked about and so forth.
So these are the obvious areas of which They allow us to grow and continue to grow 30% plus. So last but not least, the target long term model. In 2016, prior to the IPO, you can see our margins. Our gross margins were 62%, sales was 41%, R and D 17% and G and A 13%. And so at the IPO, we basically put out a long term market long term model that show that we expect our gross margins to be 75% to 78% based on what we expected the revenue mix shift to be At scale, sales and marketing would be at the 34% to 36%, R and D 14% to 16% and G and A 7% to 9%.
So you get to the operational Leverage of 20%. We feel confident that the revenue mix shift and the reliance on partners is happening actually faster than we expected. And we believe that our Long term model updated at scale gross margins we can achieve at 80% to 85%. And then taking the leverage from those gross margins, We're going to continue to invest in the business. So sales and marketing, we're ticking up 4 basis points from what we originally talked about 4 years ago, 38% to 40%.
R and D is Still very, very important area to continue investments in, so 15% to 17%. G and A, 7% to 8%. I keep on telling Matt we're going to get below 10%, so sooner or later we'll get there. And then operating margin at scale, we expect to continue to be 20%. And that's it.
That's all I got. So Matt, you want to come up for
Thank you, guys.
Cool. Thanks.
Hi. My name is Malcolm Nelson. I work at Accenture. Can you all explain At the best as you can, the stock performance for 2021. I know the stock market is very volatile, And a lot of it is not in the company's control.
We can't control investors jumping in and out. But what statement would you make to calm The investor sentiment and give confidence because the company is clearly growing, clearly adding new technologies, Making the right acquisitions. So how do we explain January, February's performance to now?
Yes. Well, first of all, thank you for asking the question. And let me take my best shot at answering that. I want to start by echoing your observation that the company has clearly grown. It's clearly matured.
We've got a bigger, a broader vision. We're putting it together. We have debatably successfully put it together during the course of this year. I feel really good about the progress the company has made, both practically in terms of top line and theoretically in terms of positioning ourselves for this new wave of the market. Now, so I feel like the part that we're in charge of, I'm really pleased with.
You note that the stock Price has shown a lot of volatility, and some of that volatility has been in the downward direction. And I that's the part that's outside of our control. I can't control why investors buy or sell. We can just do our job and make the company great and point in the right direction And hope that that's appreciated. So I may not be able to answer in the end the real thrust of your question, but I think that the part that we can control, we are
Thank you. Matt, when you were giving the competitive overview, You went through kind of the 3 buckets. There is an emerging group of companies that are coming up and labeling themselves as no code With the ability to handle complexity, what do you think about this no code bucket of Software companies that are coming out, is that an opportunity for Appian to expand into? Does that end up being too simplistic for The complex applications and processes that you're building.
Low code, first of all, thank you for answering for asking that. Low code and no code are exactly the same thing. It's just which marketing phrase you want to use, but it's the same thing. We use low code because that was first, because we think it's a slightly more modest label and because we own the URL lowcodedot But there's no difference and it doesn't matter. And there's not a meaningful debate going on between low code and no code.
Most of the time When you design something in Appian, it doesn't take any code, but sometimes it does. And so you can call it whichever one you like. I consider it the same market.
Okay, very helpful. And then maybe one for Mark. You had the customer cohorts, 100 ks, 250, 500. I noticed they were all obviously going up into the right, which is great. What is the typical timeline that you see from getting a customer From that $100,000 bucket to over $500,000 And when you think about the drivers, does that end up being more users, more applications Or a little bit of both.
What is the primary kind of driver of that growth?
Yes. As I showed with the 3 different individual company, the purchasing journey, if you will, with Appian, they're different. Each one's different. You could have a large Land, our ASPs on the initial land are generally $150,000 to $200,000 so much bigger than most SaaS companies. And so some May land quickly, like Aon, I think they talked about how quickly they discovered the power of the platform, right?
And then it was almost like a pull versus a push As far as sales goes, and what we ended up doing with Aon, for example, is we sold application specific licenses. So the first one was a modernizing of the claims process, certain parts of that claims process. And then they bought more licenses to modernize different parts of it. And now they're looking to do things that are outside of the entire claims process, and they're buying Those on an application specific licensing, some customers buy on a per user base, right? And their users, which is important From Appian's perspective, it's not just the people that are developing or building the applications on the platform, but it's also people that are actually using the application once it's Been delivered in production to the customer.
Thank you very much, Matt and Marc A really exciting Analyst Day and really great content.
I guess I had a couple of
questions, but I guess The main one is going to be around your perspective, Matt, on how the growth equation may have Changed, meaning from time of IPO to coming of the pandemic and now coming out of the pandemic. If you think of The ingredients of growth, it's going to be the size of the customer base, the size of the customer base, how much you're expanding, Pricing and more products, right. And I heard a couple of themes I think were hinted at, which is there was this community addition. Eric in his presentation talked about some traction around non Global 2,000 accounts. So in terms of those parameters, Is the growth equation to get to that 30% sustainable growth, cloud subscription growth that Mark highlighted, is that in what ways is that changing Going forward versus what we've seen in the past?
Yes. Well, there's certainly a lot of change going on. And I think that we're mastering it. I think we're ahead of the change and pioneering it. So I think we're on the right side of this.
We're ahead in terms of creating the correct Platform and the assembly of functionality, I think we're substantially in the lead on that. I think we're doing a good job at Banding our community and lowering the barriers to entry in order for an individual to become a participant in the Appian community. I think that the technology we're putting together is going to have a better claim at the high price tags than our competitors do. Appian's always been at the high end of our market. And a lot of the competition that I showed in that competitor slide is actually not high end competition.
It's relatively feature in different competition That is going to be successful proportional to the reputation or the placement of our competitors, but not to a direct comparison. They're not even really Trying to create a direct competitor to our feature set. They're trying to win without reference to features, which only works with a certain kind of a Customer and generally it's a low demand customer. You asked earlier in fact about our Differentiation and how we would win against you mentioned ServiceNow. A couple of hours ago, you said, how are we going to win against ServiceNow?
Why would A customer pick us instead of them. And let me just say that with regards to ServiceNow and everybody else on that list, Appian is the experience leader. Appian is number 1 in customer satisfaction. We're the pioneer in this space and we put all of our focus onto it. There's a place in this market and in a lot of markets for best of breed.
And so we are that best of breed. So that's one reason. Another is that we're early to realize this new Architecture. And so we have an advantage of time. All the competitors I listed, out of the 3 components that I mentioned that our architecture now has, Our competitors typically will have 1 or 2 of them, and they're not even integrated well, if they've got more than 1.
So we're substantially ahead on that, and we're going to be able to mint new Use cases and success stories that depict that success. The great thing about this market, you started your question about change. The great thing about this market from our perspective is that it's still changing. That the dynamic, the growth dynamic, the competitive dynamic, All of that is still changing because in proportion to the rate of change in a market is also the efficacy of a best of breed competitor. And as that best of breed competitor, we relish the fact that the variables are shifting.
The expectations are different. The urgency is different. This is perfect for us. This is exactly the kind of environment in which a best of breed but smaller firm can win. So We welcome all that change.
And while some of it is unpredictable, I can't tell you exactly what the dynamic is going to be for revenue or something for growth. I can say that things are playing out in our favor.
Appreciate the thoughts, Matt. And then maybe for Mark, maybe A long term question and a short term question. When you talked about the updated target model and that long term those long term targets, Any sort of like revenue threshold or time line on when you hit those target model milestones?
No. We just say at scale. So that's when we think we'll hit that. I mean, if you see it, like our gross margins have improved. They've almost gotten to the 80% already, so.
Right. And then Eric, in his presentation, mentioned that he was smiling this weekend because the quarter ended and also Georgia won. I have to ask, but with the quarter ended, any sort of thoughts on or any sort of view on Q3?
Is that for me?
Yes. I'll
take it if you don't, but you go ahead.
Yes, that's we're in the quiet period now. We don't comment on that stuff. But Eric's smiling. I don't know. Maybe he's happy about the bulldogs.
Matt, I have a couple of questions that have come through e mail. I want to just read them out. The first one is, talk about customer reception of Lana Labs so far. You're the first to put together processes, Process mining plus low code automation. Talk about how this differentiates your platform and how you plan to bring this technology to the market over the next 12 to 18 months.
Great. The customer reception for the Alana Labs acquisition so far is Extremely enthusiastic and we're actually having to make them wait a little bit before they're allowed to use it. We acquired this product, it's a terrific product, But we need to do our typical set of Appian checks and upgrades and tests and security verifications and so on Before we can put it out with our own logo on it. So we've actually had to push back crowds of customers who would like to be using this Right now, believe me, we're getting it done quickly. But the feedback has been great.
I think the intuitiveness of the combination Process mining and process modeling strikes everyone immediately, and they realize this is a great combination. And so the demand has been very strong, And we are rushing to satisfy it.
Okay. This question is about the partners. The partner channel has How are you drawing more partners to invest in your platform versus other competitors? And what are your long term targets for partner influenced business mix.
Yes. Let me first say that I'm not actually trying to draw more partners. We want The same number of partners, but great. It's not my goal to have a higher partner count, But rather, better, deeper, more substantive partner relationships. So we don't need more partners.
We just want the partners we have to grow deeper, more thorough practices, and that's what's happening. They're building Training programs, they're building large committed teams. They're pitching Appian more frequently. From the beginning, they are building solutions on our platform. These are really my goals, along with great customer outcomes.
If we can achieve that, then I've got our partner vision. That's all we need. And they're actually there's only so much you can do to convince a partner to do that. They have to do it because they see the business. They see the direction.
They're visionaries themselves. They See where the business is headed, and they're having success with our product. And so that's what's happening, and that's the reason we're getting the growth that we
One more question on the partner channel. Do you believe there will be a time when the channel will run the majority of Appian implementations? Or do you want to retain Your professional services organizations and continued performing architecting development and delivery.
There's definitely going to be a time when the Partner organizations are running the majority of Appian deployments, and that time might be already. So we're not shy about it. We're happy to see that happen. We're Our partners as they reach and pass that milestone, and we're finding ways to make our services Supportive of theirs with new packages like the Appian Boost program that allows a few of our customer success personnel to be On-site for their deployment, just to be sure that everything's going according to our methodology, and they get some experience seeing how we would have done it, and we get to make Sure that they're doing it in concert with the way we would do it. It's a great learning experience.
It's a great success enablement experience, and it puts the partner in charge. We're happy to do that.
I have more questions, but if there's anyone who want to ask here.
Hi. Thanks for putting this on and taking the question. My question is around the concept of the mainstreaming of low code. So for Matt, what have you noticed in terms of the Change in shape of customer conversations as low code has become more mainstream. And then for Mark, have you noticed any change in sales cycles as this has happened?
Thank you.
Yes. Let me start with how the conversations have changed. Years ago, neither our investors nor our customers knew what low code was, Back in 2017, when we went public as the 1st low code firm to hit the public market, we had to tell people what low code was. And it would be a little confusing and they weren't sure that they wanted it. And once if we were able to convince them, then the next question will be, well, why are you the company that we should work with If we like low code, maybe there's another way to deploy something fast.
Maybe somebody else has a low code product. We found that the first question is almost disappeared. Everyone knows it now. When I say low code, no one needs an explanation. Even people aren't really in the business have at least heard the name.
And when I can back that up with a really simple explanation like it's a technology used by businesses to create new processes, they get it, right? Or low code is a change engine, They get it, right? We've now got to a point where low code is an understood positive So that's a big accomplishment for us and that sets the ground for potential growth, potential large growth. Typically, you have to reach that level of standing before you can see demand take off. So that's really positive.
We still have to show how our approach is better, But I love the fact that there are multiple companies in the market right now who are talking about low code, prompting the question, Partly educating people and making them wonder what can I get from this new technology? That's the wave of popularization that's going to help us Even though we're not the primary source of all that marketing, that noise is going to help us because it prompts a lot of questions. People are going to be seeking who's the best low code and they'll find us.
And then Mark, any comments
on the
sales cycle changes?
Obviously, it helps in sales cycles, right, because you're no longer having And 4 years ago, that was unheard of, right? It was BPM or whatever, case management. Now there's a big uptick in that. So that helps from a sales cycle perspective as well.
Got it. And then one follow-up, if I may. One of the big themes has been about how Appian allows customers to deploy more quickly. Could you lay out what are the common roadblocks or bottlenecks that customers are running into that Appian is solving faster than competitors?
Yes, for sure. For years, we saw that one of the biggest slowdowns in making a new process or an application was Connecting to the data that you needed across the enterprise. So we worked for years on this and just this year, this spring, we came out with a new feature that we call Low code data, because we've done low code for applications, now we're doing low code for data. And this allows you to connect easily To data across we do one introspect across the enterprise. We create objects for all the data we find.
And now a developer who isn't a data expert can still select those objects from the menu And not have to know how to log in or how to get performance out of these different databases. They can just say, my app needs that and it needs this other thing. And then we handle making it performant. We pre cache the joins. We'll cache the data where possible.
We'll make it easy to design with external data. And then we make it easy to execute with external data by the caching and the pre joining so that this can be performant as well. We think about the things that slow people down and we attack them. And so this is an example of how we're taking away one of the speed bumps That otherwise would have slowed down the making of a new process or an application.
Great. Thank you very much.
This is Ed Maggi with Berenberg. And thanks guys for putting in the together. This is great. A broader question on RPA. We see your larger RPA competitors commonly offering solutions for automating on top of legacy systems.
Is Appian's vision for RPA the same or is it highly levered Or more so levered to automating on top of applications built using Appian.
No, I believe RPA belongs Operating on legacy systems, that's where it's got a natural advantage. If you want to communicate with a modern system, you generally just use an API. RPA has a special advantage in connecting the systems proportional to how old and out of date that system is. So that's definitely where you want to deploy your bots. I think it's great for reading and writing like it's great for repetitive tasks Anywhere, but particularly places you don't have an API, we view it the same way they do.
The key realization, and we're probably all going to come to this, and if they haven't now, they will soon. RPA is One piece of a spectrum of functionality. It is by no means the total piece. You can't do full spectrum automation With RPA, you certainly can't do full spectrum low code. RPA is 1 piece.
And I think there have been some efforts to try to make RPA everything. RPA isn't even close to being qualified to be everything. It does a certain kind of a task, a repetitive low exceptions, Connecting with an out of date system kind of a task, and it is the best for doing that. And so what we don't want to get into, and I don't think anybody's going to be able to stick with this for very long, is the whole all I have is a hammer, so everything looks like a nail mentality. RPA It can't be your only tool or you won't be optimized the way you address most of the tasks.
It's one tool in a balance.
I know we're running out of time. I just have 2 more questions. Let me just ask Mark Flynn since he's been quiet. Subscription revenue per customer has remained flat in recent years, though your rate of customer net adds has been picking up.
How do
you think about the trade off between driving more volume with customers and selling more Appian into your customers to support your goals of being a durable 30% grower
They're both important, right?
I mean, at the
end of the year, last year, we ended the year with 6.93 customers, right? 6.93 customers. So that screams we need more logos, right? And so we're working on it. Eric talked about how he's doing that.
But the net revenue retention, 120, When we get in there, we expand. So I think both of those are very important to our future growth profile.
Got it. One more question, numbers. On the last call, Mark, you talked about improved sales productivity. What type of new sales methodologies has Eric Cross That's driving stronger productivity versus years past. And give us a sense as to where you are investing more in sales rep
So Eric talked about the new sales methodology that we're halfway through implementing. I'll be honest, we've been a company has been around for 21 years. We've never rolled out a sales methodology ever in the history of the company. So this is revolutionary for us. It's expensive, but I'm sure it'll prove itself out.
And as far as investing all the verticals, we're looking at Basically, I think we're underserved in all the verticals from a rep perspective. So we're aggressively hiring sales reps to go into different verticals or different Named accounts and also helping partners become more productive as well. So we're investing in all those areas.
One question on the pricing, Matt. Could you just give us an update about your thoughts about around pricing models? Have you seen a per app pricing model progress with your customers? Do you see opportunities for the other pricing models that can optimize the alignment of the value you're delivering and the revenue you're generating. Yes.
I love to think about
pricing, and Appian's a bit of a
pioneer in pricing models. We've slightly Appian is a bit of a pioneer in pricing models. We've slightly deemphasized our per app pricing recently because it is arbitrary and takes a little bit too long to negotiate. And we've switched to something that scales instead according to how long it takes to write an application. We call this our unlimited pricing model.
And it means that whatever you can build during a certain amount of time, you can have as many applications as you can build. You can have as many Users, as you can connect, there are no limits other than just how long it took you to build it. And you could buy 1 month of development time or a year of development time. But as soon as you buy that, you and us are on exactly the same page. We want to move.
We want to build as much as possible. You want to build that because you've already committed to the pricing. You don't know what you bought. So you want to make it as big as possible. And we want it because we want you to You realize the benefit of our platform.
So we're totally aligned and we race forward and I love that. I like taking the obstructions out of the way. Don't worry about negotiating the next application price. Let's just get aligned and move. Appian is built to move.
It's built for speed. And so that licensing model encourages everyone to move as fast as possible. So that's our latest innovation.
I think those are all the questions I have. I think there's one for you.
This may be a cool last question. As the leader, Where do you have it's a 2 part question. Where do you see the company in the next 5 to 10 years? And What is the strategy about sourcing talent to bring the vision to fruition because you can't do anything without talent? How do we diversify our talent with women, people of color, different talent?
So I'm a banker at heart. I work for a consulting firm now, but I'm a banker, but I love the company. So If I have a bank in mind, a commercial real estate background in mind, how can I add value to the firm if I wanted to work here And get involved with the community as well with the company? So
I guess
we can answer with that.
That's a great question, Malcolm. And I'll be happy to wrap up on that one. We think about this all the time. And let me start by saying that opportunity is one of the most important factors that we optimize Sure. At Appian, we're trying to give everybody the opportunity.
We're an empowering organization. That's true for our employees and it's true for our customers, But we exist in order to grant opportunities. Now we can do that by looking beyond formal qualifications And seeing the talent and the capability that exists in each candidate. And that's what I've been doing for 22 years. For the majority of the lifetime of this company, I have done all the interviews, which is to say no one got a job at Appian without talking to me.
I realize at this scale that sounds like a joke and it is, it would be a joke. I can't begin to do that now. But for a long time, I literally did that. And the reason I did that was so that I could apply my standards, which is an elevating, empowering standard whereby we believe in someone's ability Instead of just their written qualifications, that's one of my favorite things about this organization is that it believes in people And it gives them the opportunity. If you're making a career change, if you're moving to a department that wasn't your regular, right, If you're stepping out into the unknown and trying to do something that nobody would have believed you could do, well, I know what that's like, Right.
I wasn't qualified when I took this job either. I totally understand. We believe in people and I think that's the key. Don't lock people Into a job based on their qualifications, instead allow their ability, their natural talent and their will to define what they should do. Appian's gone a long way with that philosophy And we'll continue in that direction.
I think it's a really cool question.
Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Mark. I know we've run a little bit over time, but Really appreciate everyone joining us today. If you have any feedback, we would love to hear that. And alternatively, if you have any questions, Please reach out to me at investorsappian.com.
With that, thank you everyone.
Thank you all.