Person and those of you joining over the webcast. I am super excited about the content that we have in store for you guys today. Before we get started, have a couple of housekeeping items I need to go through. First, the disclaimer. You'll also find non-GAAP reconciliations for the financial information that we present here posted on Appian Investor Relations website. With that out of the way, here is the agenda. We have a lot of content to cover. I'm personally excited a lot of the stuff that we're gonna cover here. You know, as you can see, the first half is focused on technology and go-to-market. The second half, we have a customer panel, partner panel, and a financial update.
With respect to Q&A, I'll request you all to save your questions towards the end when Matt Calkins will join us. For those on the webcast, you can submit your questions in the Q&A feed of the webcast link. With that out of the way, it's my pleasure to introduce Michael Beckley. As you all know, Michael Beckley is the founder, and he wears multiple hats at Appian. He's our Chief Technology Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. I've learned personally a lot from him talking about the technology. With that, over to you, Mike.
Thank you. Yeah. Whoo. All right. I got some few technical issues to work out there. All right. If that didn't wake you all up, I don't know what will. As you know, many of you I've met before, in the guise of Chief Technology Officer. About six months ago, Matt asked me to step in as Chief Marketing Officer. That's probably not a normal thing you see, but it's actually the third time I've run marketing in Appian history, so it's not abnormal for us. What I wanna talk about is what plans I had, what we've executed, what we have to do for the rest of the year. Our clear urgent priority is always pipeline, and so that's been my mandate, to double the pipeline.
The way I set about doing that was first and foremost, to differentiate our messaging in an increasingly crowded low-code market. So we did that, and I'll talk a little bit more about this later, but primarily by shifting from leading with low code to leading with process automation powered by low code in our new data fabric. That's been very effective already. Of course, to increase our market awareness. Appian has been really a quiet company for a long time. We haven't run massive brand marketing campaigns in our history the way you expect tech companies to do, and yet we've somehow built some significant scale, and you know, nearly half billion in revenue.
Now I think it's time we have the ability to invest in building our brand, and now's the right time to do it. How do we go about doubling the quality pipeline? Well, first off is that targeted segmented messaging. You can imagine as CTO, the first thing I did when I took over was a data-driven analysis of who buys Appian and why they buy it. Not surprisingly, I found that they were buying us to automate their complex processes, to modernize their case management systems for digital transformation of mission systems. The natural conclusion was to think like an investor. Like, if I was a private equity firm that had just bought me, what to do is to focus on those high proclivity buyers.
Leading with process automation use cases for low code was the obvious answer, and it's been very effective, and the pipeline is already up about 44%. That's the main initial cut. The second thing was to revisit our content and our website and our engagement with our buyers and their entire buyer journey. Recognizing that today's buyers are far more sophisticated, and they have a lot more information than they've ever had before, and therefore, you need to speak to them more specifically about exactly what problems they have and how we solve them. The old marketing department was great at creating content. The new marketing department is great at creating technical content that exactly answers questions that a buyer will have. This is actually not even up to date.
The website on the left was what we inherited, where it was all about people and more abstract. Now we're actually. We focused from low-code to end-to-end process automation. If you go to appian.com, you won't see these happy people anymore. You'll see actual images of the product, because it seems obvious that we should be, as a software company, showing you what we are and what we do. I would invite you to go to appian.com and take a look for yourself. The other major thing I did was take our biggest R&D investment and make it marketable, and that's the data fabric that you all know. We've been working on this for over four years.
This is a massive R&D investment, our biggest ever, in creating this virtual database that you heard Matt Calkins talk about this morning, and it's patented technology. For years, we just called it low-code data features. It was not having the kind of market impact and not driving the awareness and not driving the segmentation that we expected or needed. Last year, I took advantage of the latest release, a bunch of new functionality, to package all of those low-code data features up into what they really were, which is this differentiated data fabric, and launch a new brand and do what people said we couldn't do, which was get people excited about technology.
In fact, our PR agency at the time told me that no one would care, no one would write about a technology without talking about it in terms of human interest or, you know, customer story, that all they cared about was, you know, what's Appian's culture like, and, you know, what are our DEI initiatives. They just did not wanna write about technology. I fired the PR agency, created this brand. Next thing you know, we have incredible coverage in data fabric and uptake in it. We've written about it in Forbes and all the tech press, and it's now a whole category that's widely copied and emulated. You see companies like IBM running a nationwide ad campaign claiming that you should build data fabrics, which is great 'cause they don't even have one.
You know, certainly this is effective and it's what's driving our lead gen. People are clearly understanding how Appian's approach to low-code is wildly different from the big tech. This is the complete suite anchored by the data fabric, highly differentiated from other participants in the low-code market, like the companies like OutSystems and Mendix that have nothing to say about process optimization, process mining, and certainly don't have anything like a data fabric. They have an integration library, and that's about it. This is a highly differentiated approach for those most valuable low-code scenarios where you're actually automating a business process, not just building a simple app.
I've also refocused our marketing on our top-performing segments so that we can more efficiently scale the business and develop integrated marketing teams that are combining our industry expertise, our customer stories, our PR, our analyst relations around our clearly differentiated features that are designed for the needs of each of these different segments. In financial services, we're talking about, you know, risk management, re-regulation, compliance, and customer onboarding, KYC. In public sector, you see our contract writing solutions and case management. In insurance, we have our connected underwriting solutions and our strategic partnership with Guidewire. In life sciences, we've made great strides in specifically helping with pharmacovigilance, clinical trials, clinical trial startup, and of course, deviation management when there's manufacturing deviations.
Clients like Merck have saved themselves close to $100 million by being able to get back into production faster when there's a quality problem on the production line. This is the kind of direct story-based marketing to specific buying personas that is working. The next level of this is account-based marketing, taking those relevant, powerful stories and tailoring them to the unique needs of each of our high-value customers. What is unique about our approach to ABM is now, of course, I've injected a whole new technology stack into this so that we're using machine learning models to accurately score and predict the buying patterns and stages of our prospects. We're working with our partner community to engage them.
For example, a very large global bank, I'm not sure if I can use their name in front of this audience, so I won't, but one of the top 3 banks in the world, we've been working with for many years. In our ABM strategy, we involved a partner, and they were able to introduce us into another segment, the wealth management part of that business, something we've not been able to get into alone. We're coming to our partners with a powerful value proposition. It's technology, it's $, it's the credibility of our past work in that client, and differentiated technology, and they are just bringing us in and making that introduction. That is efficient ABM. Product-led growth is another part of our strategy that matters, and that's driven by our Appian Community Edition.
We released this two years ago, about a year and a half ago, free unlimited access to Appian's base level product. Sure enough, it's driven rapid growth in the community, over 200,000 developers. It allows for those highly qualified prospects, those developers, to build solutions, prototype them, show them to their bosses, get budget approval, and then come to us for a quote. When we see leads coming out of this system and directly into our new automated pipeline, we see fantastic conversion. It's still another strong part of our strategy. Yesterday, we had partner day here with hundreds and hundreds of partners. I don't know if any of you were able to see that. We were spilling out of the room. We couldn't even hold them all.
That's partially because of this new strategy we've been executing that's our go-to-market leaders call One Appian, and driven by our new partner leader, Mark. What I have done to support that in marketing is make it clear to all of the integrated campaign teams that whatever we do in marketing, whether it's a webinar or a physical event, a happy hour, a tech taco Tuesday, or it's a white paper we write or an interview we're doing with a journalist, that we engage partners wherever possible. All this content you see is what's been created in the last few months in support of this strategy.
Before we begin doing anything and spending any money in marketing, we think about who will sponsor it, who will bring their customers to this, who will bring their prospects, how do we co-brand it, and the results are starting to pay off. That's the marketing strategy. I don't know if we wanna take a few questions now or if we wanna save them to the end. I'll leave that to the-
Save it.
Save it to the end. Great. I look forward to your questions, but, it's been an exciting ride and, really happy to see what we've accomplished. Now for the CTO priorities, I'm gonna turn it over to Malcolm. Is he here?
Just getting miked.
Just getting miked. There you are in the back. Can't see you with the lights. Our Deputy CTO, Malcolm Ross, is gonna take you through our AI investments. Of course, we'll talk a little bit about generative AI and ChatGPT and whether or not it can write Appian SAIL code, you know, if we can teach ChatGPT to speak Appian. You know, I hate suspense, I'll tell you. Yeah, we did it. We taught it. It's pretty mind-blowing. It's pretty cool what we can do now to make developers maybe 2 to 10 times as productive as they were before. That's just one type of AI, and I think what we've done with low-code AI that Malcolm's gonna take us through is even more interesting. Got a clicker for you.
All right. Thank you.
It's your show. All right. Thanks.
To talk a little bit about where Appian's focused on artificial intelligence, I trust a lot of you saw the keynote this morning. It's all a variety of areas inside the product. One of the main focus areas that we talked about in the AI Skill Designer is the intelligent document processing use case. IDP is a very common use case that we expect a lot of our customers to be asking for. This is basically the automatic processing of communications, documents, and extraction of content across a number of large enterprises. The second area is AI for low-code. From this perspective, we saw a little bit of a taste. I'm gonna go into a bit more here around how we're applying it for accelerating the next level of low-code development.
As we shared, you know, we unveiled low code really in our IPO back in 2017, what we see with AI technologies, it's gonna take it to a next level to break down the communications of how humans express their intent to build applications and software. AI for process mining, you saw our vision for Process HQ, Adam Glaser will be covering that in more detail in the keynote as well. AI integration, we also recognize that our customers will want to integrate to OpenAI and to other AI services, so having package connectors to it. At the top level, Appian maintains orchestration layer of all these, how we unify these different AI services in processes.
Our OpenAI plugin, as mentioned before, is available today, we announced this at the keynote, to allow you to easily connect to these generative AI services and combine them inside the overall environment. We lead this also by technology partnerships, we want to remain an open platform that allows our customers to not have to be locked into whatever Appian provides, but orchestrate services from Box, Google, AWS, Azure, partners like Guidewire, to have a layer that sits over all these different environments. On the case study Guidewire perspective, this is a very important go-to-market for us in the insurance space. Guidewire, as you may know, is a leading insurance provider. We have a strong relationship with them.
We were at their event last October, where their CEO was talking about this, to allow us to amplify our insurance go-to-market models with the integration to the Guidewire platform. It's a high demand ask that we see from a number of our customers in the insurance space. Going on, of course, going to dive into a little bit more detail on our AI strategy and show off some specific areas. Where we see our market advantage, and specifically the AI skill designer, a little bit more depth of where we're going there, and also the generative AI features that we're gonna be giving you a preview of what Mike is gonna actually show. Stealing your thunder again, Mike, here. Where we see our AI advantage is first going to a Gartner report.
As a lot of you know maybe, Appian has been using that low-code moniker for many years. It's been a great amplification for us, the low-code phrase, it's safe to say it's commoditized. I don't know of any enterprise vendor who I think is relevant if they don't have a low-code facade on their product. To me, low code is like cloud, where when cloud was launching in the 2000s, it just made sense economically for our customers. You can have a great amplification effect of adopting cloud services and not spending building your own data centers. Back in the day, I worked at Marriott Corporation as a consultant, I remember we had a huge data center in Rockville, Maryland, that through great cost, they invested and built in, now, of course, they're all running inside cloud operations.
Low code in that same sense is about customer value. How can I get customers to adopt the software as easy as possible to gain value? A high-code experience just sits in the way of customer value. Where we've been in low code is we're right emerging from, as Gartner says, this period of low code for IT democratization. That simply means that low code is a tool that's being adopted by almost every single enterprise. The focus of low code, as Gartner says, is moving towards what they call hyperautomation. That's a proprietary Gartner term, but what they're talking about is specifically the unification of automation technologies in a holistic process. That's hyperautomation, which I see we're right here right now. This, to Gartner, is mainstream adoption. I think we're at the cusp of the capturing that market interest in hyperautomation as we plan our product.
As Matt said, we imbue AI in all aspects of our entire platform, from our AI Copilot for design time guidance to back-end AI services which are unknown to our customers. It just automatically tunes things behind the scenes in our new AI skill designer. We allow them to build applications that imbue AI across their automations, taking in Appian's native AI services for claims, for contract writing, for customer communications, and accelerating those through automations. We also feel that we have a distinct advantage in our data architecture. Matt got into this in the keynote session this morning. You know, our competitors are basically trying to push customers towards this. They're saying, "Please move your data into our cloud, and then you can build applications around it." Our opinion is that that's just an impractical request by customers.
They're gonna have Workday, they're gonna have NetSuite, they're gonna have custom-built systems. They're not gonna be able to replace them with a platform of platforms. They need to be able to connect those systems. We feel like we're on top of this market with a data fabric architecture that connects that data and makes it a holistic model. Now, this also gives us an AI advantage because this is what you need for AI. I need to be able to see that entire scope of enterprise data, so I can use that to train AI models.
That's where we're going to be going with this, is really using that data fabric as competitive edge to really broaden the scope of how we can train AI services to every single piece of data across the enterprise.How this works, of course, as Annelise showed in the keynote, is we connect data. We don't force our customers to put data in the Appian database, which we do provide, but they can simply connect to Salesforce. We have a no-code connection right there. They can connect to SharePoint, connect to Oracle, and now they manage this as one holistic data model. It makes it amazingly easy to now to just work with the entire enterprise data set without having to worry about costly API integrations between systems. Something unique that also Matt highlighted here is that security and optimization layer inside the system.
The security layer, I've had many conversations with CIOs about this. I always challenge them, like, tell me the product that you can do this in without our data fabric. The use case here specifically is, take an example where I have, maybe customer information, customer tiers, regions in Salesforce. I have order information over here inside the SAP environment, and I have employee information in maybe Active Directory or some employee database like Workday. I wanna take employee information, say, well, I only want the employees in the United Kingdom to be able to see customer orders that are in the United Kingdom as well.
That requires them to say, well, I need to take regional information about an employee, map that into metadata over inside the customer information inside Salesforce, and then also map that over into the Oracle system and create a security model that bridges that data fabric. I can restrict the data inside the system to make sure people only see the data they need to see. This also is important things like GDPR compliance, other areas where you need to create the secure data layer across that composite data. Appian, I think, has a distinct and unique advantage here. Then behind the scenes, what we're doing with that AI data model is we're optimizing it continuously. When you build an application in Appian, you might build it one way the first day. For example, I might build a pie chart.
That pie chart aggregates data on a specific metric or column. Now, in the old days, before a platform like this that did a data fabric, if I was a developer, I would need to say, I wanna build that pie chart, and now I want to make sure that pie chart doesn't take 10 seconds to render. Well, I need to go talk to a DBA. That DBA then needs to tell them, "Hey, can you tune this data model, apply index or a view," which are things that DBAs do to tune that data model. 3 days later, they get back to the developer and say, "Hey, I improved the data model. Can you tell me how that's working for you?" That slow cycle just delays that entire process.
What we've done in this layer is provide automation artificial intelligence to intelligently detect how the developers are building software on the Appian platform. We know how they're manipulating data in the data fabric. We automatically reshape that data inside the back-end system, completely eliminating the need for a DBA. There are no views, there are no indices. The database is now connected to the intent, now it automatically changes the data model based on the intent. Diving into AI skill designer, we also have a big bet that while public AI is getting a lot of the attention in the marketplace, the challenges enterprises will face is how do they distinguish their business using artificial intelligence, whether they're financial services, insurance, trucking company, AI needs to be imbued into every single business.
If they're using a public AI service that everyone else has access to, how are they gonna distinguish themselves from a competitor? There's gonna be a pressure for all those different businesses to become AI-led businesses as well, to figure out the best routes for trucking, to figure out the best way to process claims that an actuary maybe was doing before, the best way to onboard a customer in financial services using AI models. We believe there's gonna be a focus really on private AI that allows them to easily train on their data set and build AI models that are unique and never shared to their enterprise. They're gonna need a platform that satisfies that allows them to securely develop those AI models. That's why we launched the AI skill designer.
As we said, the AI skill designer right now is focused on the use case of intelligent document processing for email classification, document extraction, and document classification. This is the first iteration of it. We intend to continue to develop on this to build this out even further. What we've done in the first use case here is so remove the need for data scientists to know the difference in AI algorithms. Instead of having to know what AI algorithms best suit which use case, we focus just on the use cases. We know those AI algorithms already, and we make it easy and intuitive for our customers to simply choose the use case they want to apply the right algorithm to. Behind the scenes, we have a net neural graph engine that's automatically trained for that specific use case.
Next, they're going to basically train the information through intuitive screens. All they do is upload their datasets. For training email, they simply upload all the emails. This is a specific type of email. Maybe it's customer onboarding. Maybe I have another type of email which is gonna be multiple types like federal contracts, analyst emails. I can set up all the different types of emails I have. We will use natural language understanding to look at those email content and identify which email was the intent of which one. Why do you do this? Through artificial intelligence, we can automate the routing of communications. If you're a business dealing with hundreds of thousands or millions of customer communications every single year, you can use artificial intelligence to triage those and route them instantaneously using AI models.
Of course, how you do this is simply drag and drop and place those inside the overall flow. It's a low-code experience. We're basically saying, "Well, here's my process for ingesting an email, and then I wanna classify the email. Then I wanna take the documents, figure out what they are, and extract the content from it and load it inside the system, all automatically inside the system." Of course, as well, you can go back and measure the performance of those AI models over time to see how effective were they, what was the % gain inside the system. All the talk also is about generative AI, to close out this section, generative AI is really interesting. I'm sure. Has everyone played with ChatGPT already, right? I still find people who haven't heard about it yet, so it's kinda odd.
What we've been doing behind the scenes is teaching these large language models through some custom access we have, the nature of Appian SAIL. What you're looking at right here is the declarative expression language that backends the Appian low-code experience. When our customers are dragging and dropping and building UX, the machine behind the scenes understands it as this expression language. This is what we use as a center point for training AI models. What we've been doing is, and this is all, again, experimental prototype work that we're working right now, how do we maybe extract these SAIL expressions and teach the large language model how to properly understand the low-code experience, as well as create embedding vectors that numerically describe and represent SAIL expressions? This is the machine translation that occurs in an AI model.
It creates numerical probability vectors that are gonna basically say, "What's the probability of the name of this function being this, and its correlation to other functions with a specific intent?" This is kinda the machine representation of artificial intelligence. What does this look like? Well, we take these features in the AI structure and then manifest them in productivity tools in the low-code design experience. Here we see, well, if I just wanna search for information, I can type a natural language search, and using artificial intelligence, it automatically finds all the design objects in the IDE that correlate to that natural language. Before, if you know search, oftentimes you have a keyword base. Instead of using keywords, I just type whatever. "Hey, can you find all the things that are about this?" It goes ahead and finds those. Simple tool.
Another example inside of here, let's go ahead and copy some SAIL code, what we call here, this is expression language, and then ask it to generate natural language descriptions. Another example. This is often called documenting an application. How do I create documentation in natural language that describes what a software does? Achievable by having this training model on Appian's design framework, and then having it naturally describe that context. Let's do a little bit more. Maybe we wanna have a AI copilot inside the interface designer. This interface designer, we wanna, instead of having to prescriptively write a rule, we just want to have it tell us what you wanna do. Do you wanna calculate something? You know, please give me a tax calculation for the state of California.
In this case, let's just go ahead and type and say, "Please give me the list of all service requests which refer to equipment installations of the sublocation warehouse." It's a complex query, and then it just automatically generates the proper code for you based on that query. Again, this is the machine representation, the expression language, but all this is represented in the Appian product from our customers as a low-code design facade that we see right here. It automatically generate. What I would normally do as a low-code developer is point and click and select all the data I wanna filter. Instead, I just naturally, natural language wrote it. Cool stuff. Let's maybe combine it a little bit more. We were having some fun in our experimenting e-engineering side.
How can we maybe combine large language models with other things we do, like AI document understanding that we just talked about? Appian knows what documents are. We extract the content from it. Then also a unique feature of Appian is that we can do real-time code validation, so we can tell you whether a software application's gonna run or not and tell you all the errors in it. Instead of telling a human, what if we created a loop here that automatically told the large language model, "Hey, correct yourself. Hey, this is wrong. This is wrong," and then combine it with a document understanding. Let's see this in a user experience. I might want to say, maybe I work for this company called Mueller, and I wanna build a new digital form.
I have my branding here, but I need to fill in all this content, and the content I want is a warranty claims information. They have this complex PDF form. Through document understanding and natural language, where I give a description of, "Make all the section headers title green," it automatically scans the entire document and builds the entire experience for you. It's digitizing this PDF into an application that can be used right away. We're also writing the SAIL code dynamically and then automatically structuring it properly, so it's validated in real time. You never see an error message. Very cool stuff. Another final kinda demo here. Another exploration of some of the other things, actually some more tomorrow. We've been working on a predictive query structuring algorithm that we can also combine with the data fabric.
We'll see a demo here first, we'll combine it with a large language model to introduce a business intelligence capability across the data fabric. Imagine again that you have a data fabric. It rolls up all the data in your enterprise into this one object I can then query. As I wanna query it, this predictive querying language predicts kind of what the next object is you want. It's a bit prescriptive, but it makes it very intuitive for basically a non-skilled user to structure the query, Appian uses intelligence to automatically know the best way to represent that data, whether it's a single value, a pie chart, a bar chart. They have a low-code design experience, a point-and-click configure to fine-tune that right here.
Kinda nice. You know, it's predictive. It's not natural language yet. What if we then taught the natural language system how to basically understand this query? One of the challenges is, if I say sum of? Well, how many different ways can I say some of? You know, please tell me how many. How many are there? What's the count of? Can you just tell me how many customers I have? There's lots of different ways through natural language to express that. We can correlate natural language to these key objects inside of here. Oops, I actually didn't have that one. You'll see that one at a keynote tomorrow. What that's gonna do is essentially allow you to automatically use natural language that correlates this to calculate all these individual elements and generate this.
This is all, again, to probably summarize prototype work that we're working on around generative AI, which is gonna have an amplification effect of the speed to value for building applications in AI. Also, as we saw with the AI skill designer, using AI inside the applications to automate more routines for our customers. With that, questions, or pass it off to Suvajit as our next presenter.
If anybody has questions, we have time for one or two questions here.
Question, yes.
Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty deep technology roadmap around AI. It's all very new, especially when it comes to generative AI, but how are you guys thinking about monetization? Is this gonna be kinda table stakes for a lot of companies to embed, or is this-
Well, I mean, going back to this AI advantage stuff, I think in the long term, you know, we offer our software as a platform, a platform for our customers to build innovations on. It's a matter of how well does that platform satisfy their needs to prepare them to create AI innovations. First thing really is around that data fabric. You know, that's a distinguishing quality because data is the lifeblood of AI. If you don't have a good wrangle of your data, you can't create good AI models, and we believe that data fabric's gonna be a distinguishing element. The other side is we are the owner of our own low-code framework, we have a lot of. If I go back to these SAIL areas like here, for example, this declarative language is unique to Appian.
It's not only our own language which allows us to manipulate it and then create AI innovations on top of it, but also the source of many of our patents around the overall low-code product. Almost all of our other competitors are using things where they're just using JavaScript, HTML, public source. I would say it's gonna be very hard for them to distinguish competitively using a platform of logic expression that they don't really own specifically. I think this is also part of our secret sauce that's gonna give us that competitive edge. Of course, finally, Appian's known as a low-code vendor right now. We're known as an automation vendor.
We have that market brand cachet that I think will be very attractive to customers as far as their correlation of expectation of these skills to what we're providing as well, if that makes sense. Yeah. A question? Mm-hmm.
Okay, this is Jake Roberge with William Blair. You talked about this morning during the keynote a lot about private AI, and you mentioned it a few times here. What's differentiated about that? Is the data set that your clients are giving you large enough to really train these models off of?
Mm-hmm.
when you're going up against those public AI models that might have a much, much larger data set because.
Mm-hmm.
the data's endless versus your private AI model?
To understand private AI, it's not our private AI model, it's the expectation that customers are gonna want private AI. The difference between a public AI service, which exactly as you say, has a huge data model, is that it also is a huge generic AI model. It's not representative of that company's unique business. That company's unique business, they might have millions of customer communications every single year, which never go into that private AI model because they're private communications with their customers. How can they create trained models on their private data, such as email communications, while making sure that they're not just sharing that with a public service?
Our anticipation is really that while these public AI services do become useful at a generic sense, a great example is natural language understanding, because we all here, I think, speak English, so having an AI model that also understands English is useful for everyone. How many of you are medical experts? That's proprietary knowledge in a specific person. That's kind of an equivalent of the unique knowledge an enterprise has, and how can they create those custom AI models on their specific knowledge, which is what we call private AI. Private AI is really a motivation by customers to be able to differentiate using AI, but not relying on public services by having low-code tools to build those proprietary AI models, if that makes sense. Yeah. Other questions? No. To you, Suvajit.
Thank you.
All right.
All right. For the next 20 minutes or so, I'll talk about our platform and some of the unique differentiators. First, just a few simple, you know, contextual things. You hear all these phrases, high code, low code, no code. What does all that mean? Appian actually does all three. We are a low-code platform in the sense that almost everything in Appian is done by drag and drop, point-and-click. No computer science degree required. With our solutions, which I'll talk about in the end, it's no code. You don't even have to use the platform. You basically get a solution and install it and configure it. We do have ways to extend Appian to do high code if necessary. If you need a specific interface component that we don't have, you can write it yourself.
We have an SDK. It allows that escape hatch. Same thing on the server side. We have plug-ins, and that'll allow you to write, say, some Java code that you need to access some legacy system. We kind of have that as well. We allow you to integrate all three of these, but it's primarily a low-code experience. If I had to summarize, first of all, I've been at Appian for 10 years. I, you know, as I talk to customers and I met a prospect early today, the simplest way I've found to explain what Appian does is that we allow people and data and processes to work seamlessly together on this unified platform. There are three sets of people that touch Appian. First, at the bottom left are the users of Appian apps.
Once you build an Appian app, whether you do it, a partner does it, or our services team does it, people come in and use those apps many hours a day, and we hope that they find the Appian apps to help them. You know, they'll say that it's easy, it makes you productive. That's what we love to hear. Those apps are built by Appian developers. They do require training, and we prefer certification. We hope that Appian developers, if you ask them, and there are many at the conference, hopefully they'll say that Appian is both fast and powerful. It's actually hard to be both. Some of our smaller competitors, they might even be faster. Some of our bigger competitors might even be more powerful.
We really feel that we're, you know, right down the middle, like we are very powerful. Big customers can build whatever they want, and we have things like the Appian Guarantee that we put our money where our mouth is with speed. We say that in 2 months, 8 weeks, we will build you an enterprise app and deliver it to you. We're doing that. Another thing that happens with Appian is that once you build the first app, people usually are suspicious. Like, you're telling me in 2 months you'll give me an app because their experience is that every IT project they'll go and ask about, "Hey, how long does it take?" The answer is almost doesn't matter what the project is, 3-4 years, and I can't start for another year.
By then, you'll probably be on your next job. It doesn't matter. They don't actually believe that in 2 months they'll get an app. Once they see that, they go, "Oh, my God." That's why our retention radiation is as high as it is. People start building more and more apps on Appian, these are not distinct siloed apps. They're all connected at the platform. Administrators basically upgrade Appian, hopefully once a quarter if you're on cloud, or maybe twice a year if you're self-managed. They stay current with Appian, all these apps continue to work well together. This is a busy chart that just shows that we have millions of lines of code inside of Appian. It's 20-year-old technology that's matured with almost 1,000 customers.
These are the four pillars that I like to explain what does Appian provide. You've heard about the data fabric, so that's the starting point often, that we will layer on to your enterprise a set of what we call records, and they allow you to bidirectionally get data into Appian, where you can do things to it, and then you can write it back to where it came from. We have a lot of automation technologies. You've heard about the document processing for emails and paper. You've heard about RPA. When you don't have APIs, bots can scrape those screens. We also have a lot of integration technology on the server side, and we actually prefer that to bots. I don't use a bot when there's an API.
We have, you know, 15 years' worth of technology that allows you to integrate with whatever is out in the enterprise. Then the total experience is about building an app in Appian, and I'll go into a little bit more detail about how you can build it once in Appian. Through our patented technology, it runs everywhere. It runs on all browsers, smartphones, tablets, Android, iOS, whatever your users prefer. The latest addition to our portfolio has been the mining technology. Mining is again, not new. It's kinda like RPA. RPA used to be called screen scraping, and then it was an amazing marketing gig. They pulled it off, they called it bots, and became worth billions of dollars.
With mining, again, it's a 20-year-old technology, but now we believe that it's ready for, you know, transformation. Instead of having a mining vendor such as a Celonis, they'll come in and spend months, if not 1 year, looking at your enterprise, interviewing people, sucking in data, they'll show a crazy picture nobody can comprehend, and they'll leave you with a report to tell you all your problems. It's up to you to figure out what to do with them. You might hire an Appian or a ServiceNow or a Salesforce to try to implement some of those issues. Our vision is not that at all.
We believe that having this under the same umbrella, we almost wanna start you off with an Appian app, and I'll tell you how then that can get mined, and you can see is it doing what you're supposed to be doing. You can iterate under one umbrella very rapidly. That's actually quite transformational. I'll show you some examples. Mining will be deeply integrated with our platform, and it starts with our Appian World release that is shipping soon. The three things at the bottom, those are notable. Those are the three ways and I'd like to distinguish Appian. Some of our bigger competitors, they've acquired some of these pieces, and they've strung them together. We spend a lot of time making sure that these three things are there for every piece of Appian.
It's first and foremost low code, that you don't have to program. You're gonna be able to drag and drop, point and click. Allows us to allow customers to learn Appian in two weeks, they can join a team in two months. They're a productive member of the team. Later that year, they're hopefully leading that team. Low code everywhere. The second thing is everything in Appian is unified. These aren't acquisitions thrown together and leave you to figure out how to make them work. We spend a lot of time making sure that every part of Appian, if a bot crashes in Appian, a human can pick it up and finish the work. If the bot got refused because the user experience changed, the developer can reprogram the bot.
These aren't handoffs between different vendors, and so that's something we take extremely seriously. During my time here when I started, you know, we used to say that, "Oh, we're not gonna acquire companies," and, you know, that's what the big big boys do. Of course, as we grow up, we did acquire two companies. My team has made those two acquisitions disappear into the fabric of engineering. You cannot now tell whether it was an acquisition or built by my team. Now they're part of our team now. That unification with RPA, with AI, with IDP, all of that you'll see in our platform, it really just works seamlessly, and that's one of our strengths. The last is that our customers are the biggest companies on the planet.
They are running their business on Appian, so we take that seriously. To gain and retain their business, we have to be enterprise-grade, so that means reliable, scalable, secure, performant, internationalized, accessible. I can keep talking. There's a lot of reasons why Appian is, you know, costs what it does, because the value is tremendous once you implement on Appian. All right. I want to just spend a few more minutes explaining if a few people in the garage wanted to do what we do, why would it take them a while? 'Cause I wanna show you why Appian is different and distinct. The first is, even before I joined, Appian spent 10 years basically eliminating Java coding, right? You had a process model, you had rules where you could define your business logic without coding. It took them a long time to build that.
I joined 10 years into the company's life cycle. That eliminates an entire layer of app servers and high coding. That was the first thing that we did. The next thing we did for the next 10 years during my time here, is that we've entered this technology called SAIL, which has eliminated all the high coding from a JavaScript HTML/CSS. First of all, you have to learn and master 3 distinct languages, if you will, to build a web app. We've made that all go away. You saw some of the screenshots from Malcolm where it's something you just do in our designer. You just take a pattern, change it, connect to the back end, and you're done. That was the big thing.
All of these, by the way, are patented technologies, and this is why I'm saying that it took us a long time to build SAIL, and we have 3 patents on it already. We have patents on the build once run everywhere. We have a patent on automatically we parallelize the query, not paralyze, parallelize, right? We can find out that your UI is calling SAP, Salesforce, and PeopleSoft, and we can farm out the queries to all of those things without you having to do anything. I have a master's in software engineering, and I'll tell you that parallel programming is one of the hardest things. I've heard somewhere like 2% of developers can do parallel programming. You don't need to do that stuff. We'll take care of it for you. A lot of great technology there.
The last thing we've done in the last five years or so is what we call the data fabric. I've been in software for about 35 years now. This is my ninth job and third IPO. I'll tell you, I've filed a lot of patents. When we filed the SAIL patents, it took the traditional multi years to get approval. You file it with the patent office, there's an almost immediate rejection, 'cause a patent is a novel solution to a unique problem. Of course, they first don't believe it. Over the years, we actually built an Appian app to track our patent filing 'cause it takes that long. When we submitted the data fabric, we unified basically a transactional database with a analytical database.
Those have always been separate worlds, and we pulled them together into a patented technology, and they gave us the patent in 2 months. It was amazing. I thought it was a rejection. They said, "Never seen anything like this approved." Right? Pretty incredible stuff, if I may say so. Let me dig into a little bit of the big picture of Appian, 'cause at the conference today, and some of you, I know you've been around Appian for a while, but we have so many piece parts now that I think it's worth a picture. It's worth a 1,000 words. First of all, going way back when, we are a great BPM tool, business process management, so users down there can submit forms and interact with the system through workflows.
Those workflows are powered by rules, decisions, process models, and those are all things that we have built into Appian. Of course, it's not all about the workflow, it's about data. A lot of the data comes from these external systems I talked about. With our data fabric, can integrate to anything in your enterprise. I talked about the total experience. Now with the data and the workflow, we surface those up as applications. If you're doing field service work, you can use our mobile apps. If you're in a federal basement where there's no internet, you can use us offline. If you're a financial advisor with two big monitors, you can use it at your desktop, right? You pick what you would like to use. Total experience is about that build once, run everywhere.
We've extended our data fabric through a lot of integrations. We're an open system, we love REST and SOAP, open, you know, OAuth and all the open standards. We follow that closely and make sure that we continue to integrate with the latest, greatest. When there are no APIs, that's when RPA is useful. I think what I've seen over the last five years with RPA vendors coming online, you know, to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. They actually oversold RPA. You should use bots only when you must. It's not, it's not good to run bots because bots are running on unmanaged environments. They, dirty secret, they crash a lot. You know, they're not always precise because the UI changes, the bot gets confused.
We basically recommend using RPA when you must. In all other cases, we prefer server-based integration. It's running on a hosted environment, it's stable, it works, and it scales. We have all of that. If you need RPA, we have it built into Appian. We have intelligent document processing. Malcolm talked a lot about all the AI we use, but over the last few years, we've really specialized in using, you know, AI for document extraction and classification. First, when you get lots of paper or emails, we need to use classification to send it to the right department. Is it a customer complaint? Is it a lawsuit? Is it a invoice, right?
If it is an invoice, send it to the finance department, and then they can extract the billing address, the payment amount, and the due date and send them a check, right? Again, all done through AI. Customers that have been using some of this automation, they report 85% straight through processing. The other 15% is there when they can't figure out somebody's bad handwriting, and humans are still smarter than bots, at least. I don't know about AI. Portals. People ask me throughout this conference, what is the feature that I'm most excited about? This year I have to say portals. For the first nine years of my decade at Appian, we were relegated behind the corporate firewall. We could only run business-to-employee apps because Appian couldn't be put outside, you know, the firewall.
Last year we shipped portals. It's off to a fantastic start. We actually announced it at last Appian World, and we had 10 seats for beta customers that would help us mature the technology. We had 60 people in line. Of course we took 10, and they're all happy customers, companies like Netflix and Victoria's Secret, they've adopted portals and are building several of them. What is a portal? A portal allows you to essentially put an Appian interface in front at a very high scale and with a very high user experience fidelity. I'll talk a little bit more, show you some screenshots, but portals is amazing stuff. Now you take the same Appian that you always loved, and you can use it for your vendors, for your customers, for your partners, and put it outside the firewall.
Almost there with the picture. Everything I talked about again, low-code, drag and drop, point and click. Mining essentially is now built into our fabric so that any app you build in Appian, I'll talk about how that's automatically mined, and gives you some great insights. You've seen some screenshots, but I'll show you one more in my presentation. A few years ago, we moved away from Google Web Toolkit, which powers Google Mail, to React and React Native that powers Facebook. It was better technology. We shifted our entire tech stack from one to the other, and our customers didn't even notice. Okay, there were a couple of bugs, but we hotfixed them, right? We basically got your entire applications like we lifted and shifted to better technology.
We're doing that on the server now. Every Appian app written since the company started still runs on Appian, now it'll be run on top of Kubernetes and Docker, which is gonna have a lot of benefits, and I'll talk about that. Our customers often build internationalized apps, localized to different currencies and date time formats. We allow that to be done very seamlessly now. Because many of our customers are Fortune Hundred organizations, they have global reach. Last but not least, if none of this impressed you, because we've taken 3-4-year IT projects, made them 2-3 months, how about 2-3 weeks or 2-3 days, right? That's what our solutions provide.
During the pandemic, as one example, we built a solution called Workforce Safety that allowed people to come back safely and, you know, work through the pandemic. I got the Pfizer shot. Pfizer is a customer. True story, they used us to survive the pandemic and build a vaccine, so pretty cool stuff. Solutions are basically our no code approach, and hopefully it'll continue to grow as a, you know, significant part of our business in the coming years. All right. Process mining. What is the big idea? This slide shows you an example from Appian. Like any company, we sell stuff.
When a salesperson needs a price quote, they come back to Appian, and it involves a lot of people across multiple teams, probably using NetSuite and Workday and Salesforce, and I might miss a couple. If you as the business owner, if our CRO wants to know why is it taking so long to get a price quote, and Chris is nodding back there, as the business owner, he may be interested in reducing cycle time. He wants to make his quarterly numbers, right? Maybe our cycle time is 35 days, but it should be 7, right? You would not even know that. As a business user, you wanna know about business impacts, right? Cycle time. How about cost to generate a price quote? How about your carbon footprint? If you have the ESG guys after you, right?
These are business metrics, and with our Process HQ that Matt announced, you're gonna see these in a UI that anybody in this room or even your bosses can understand. It's very simple. If you see that the cycle time is not what it is, Chris can double-click and find out what's up, right? Oh my God, legal is taking too long, right? Maybe we need to hire some more lawyers or, you know. You can find out and fix part. Maybe it's an opportunity for automation. Maybe there's a whole part of Appian that's not being leveraged, and you can further automate. How do we do all this magical stuff? Within Appian, we believe the best kind of mining is when you don't have to mine. Every app built in Appian going forward will be automatically mined for you, right?
I'll tell you how that works. On the Appian side, you got it, you're covered. We mine it for you. If it's an external system, you have a couple of choices. You can either use our data fabric to send events on when stuff's happening, say on top of SAP or PeopleSoft or NetSuite. You can basically load that data into Appian because these are log files, and you can ingest them, and then you diagram it. With that picture of mining, you can zoom in to where the problems or opportunities are. Typically, has anybody seen a mining model diagram? Anybody seen Celonis mining diagrams? Yeah. They're all pretty crazy, right? You look at it's like, "Whoa, this is a lot of stuff." There's a dial, and you can zoom into the areas that matter to you.
You can actually look at what they call the variance. Now, that wasn't a very good term in the last two years. Once you find the variant that's off track, you can go fix it and improve it. How do we do that? We have events of it, and that'll go to Mark Matheos, so he'll probably reject it. It'll come back to me, I'll attach the receipt and resubmit it, and then I'll get paid, right? All of these are the business events. You know what's not interesting? That I call the Web API, wrote to Oracle. That's technical details. Nobody cares, right? Our mining technology is being given these business events, which are essentially in English, and then it can know how to tell you what's going on. With that picture, we go into the data fabric.
This is what a data fabric looks like. You've probably seen this picture a few times. The middle piece, let's say, is an Appian app in pink. That's where we have a lot of our what we call records. Records are essentially the nouns of your system, the customer, the order. A customer has many orders, so it shows the relationships, the one-to-one, one-to-many. What's all this other stuff, right? Typically, if you're building an app, say order fulfillment, you're probably talking to the CRM, the ERP, the finance apps, and we can layer on with our data fabric things that you never have to look at SAP again, right? It's there, whatever, you just cover it up with Appian and use it effectively. With that data fabric, there are three massive benefits you get.
With this, again, patented technology, you get to build these kinds of reports, and I mean you. All of you can build these reports now because even a few years ago, our best partners would take probably two or three weeks to build a complex information-dense report like this. This was built on Appian World stage last year in a matter of minutes because you can basically pick a record, and we'll create the report for you, and then you can drag it around a little bit and make it what you want. Incredible reporting, much faster to build, no SQL involved. We're probably getting a lot of DBAs angry 'cause their jobs are going away. That's the first benefit. Fast to build and fast to run because again, I talked about how I'm a programmer.
Don't hire me for my SQL skills because what I write will probably not work very well. Here, NoSQL involved. Number 2, security. You heard Matt talk about the security. Our security is now declarative. If I want to say that an account executive can look at his or her orders, the regional vice president can look at the few salespeople under him or her, and then the CRO can see all orders. If you had tried to build that security in Appian even 1 year ago, it would have been a multi-week project, and if you screwed up, you probably have a data breach, right? Complicated stuff. SQL views, stored procedures, triggers. I wouldn't wish it on you. Now, you literally would enter that in Appian, just as I said, in English. AE gets to see their orders. RVP sees all the AE orders.
Chris gets to see everything, right? That's the way it works. It's actually incredible. That's number two benefit, fast security. The third benefit is basically the fact that the data fabric allows you to connect with the mining and lets you do the inspection as to what's going on. This technology has been adopted a lot. You heard Matt talk about how it's already in a year, you know, almost eight or nine of our customers out of 10 are using it. We are constantly improving the scale of this technology. We started with a half a million, doubled it to $1 million. Annelise talked about $4 million. I'm already eyeing $10 million. We're continuing to keep up with the pace of our customer adoption. All right. I mentioned integration earlier.
A data fabric is as good as the data in it. We are constantly enhancing our, you know, reach to other standards, OpenID Connect, API gateways, whatever is happening in the world, we have teams of people tracking that and making sure that the data fabric can stay connected to the rest of the enterprise. Process automation, this is about RPA and IDP. I'm not going to talk about IDP because Malcolm spent a lot of time talking about AI. What's up with Appian RPA? The main things are over the last few years, after we did the acquisition, we made it into a very competent offering right now. It does do all the standard things that you expect. We build your bots, and because it's built in Appian, it's all running seamlessly in the same environment.
It's the same design objects that you expect in Appian. If you build a bot now, you can find out who else depends on this bot. How do I package this and deploy it from development to testing to staging to production? Right? It's just a natural part of Appian now. Of course, our enterprise customers do understand that RPA is brittle technology, so they can run it in high HA mode. You can assign to robot pools. Again, we're building out the things that our customers have been asking for, and we have some fairly large deployments of this now working in production. Almost there. Two more sections. The total experience. I talked about portals. I'm really excited that the same technology that people were using called SAIL, you were building sites.
Now you can build portals because you already trained on that. That's one of the benefits of Appian. When you learn a part of Appian, it's the same thing everywhere. This portal was built in Appian, and because portals are typically customer-facing, when you have business-to-employee apps, you pay your employees, I guess they don't have choice. They get to use the apps you give them. Whereas not so much for your customers, the user experience is at a much higher bar, right? It has to be pixel-perfect. It has to be engaging. You know, now we allow you to build up to 10 pages on a portal. Each page can have 10 subpages. Again, we can pack a lot of punch into these experiences.
Hopefully it passes the muster of your UX teams because they want to make sure it's branded and it's gorgeous, and we can build these in Appian right now. You may decide to put the navigation at the top or on the side. Again, just giving you all the flexibility. You could do these with SAIL earlier. I'm going to talk to you about what you want, and we'll build it together. By the time the meeting ends, we're done. We don't have to write documents. We can just capture the requirements inside of Appian.
Another exciting thing we've added is that customers have asked for a long time that, "Can you just give me a place where I can put my standard components so that my rest of my developers can use it?" A large company might have a standard billboard with a certain branding color and a legal disclaimer. Now they can put this into Appian, and then everybody else has to use it. Then if your branding color changes because marketing does that, then everybody gets that upgrade because it's in one spot. Really powerful stuff built in here. In closing, cloud native, this has been the transformation I talked about, moving to Docker and Kubernetes. Why does it matter? It matters because now we're positioning you for much higher availability. If a piece of Appian crashes, Kubernetes will detect it and restart it.
You wouldn't know it happened. If you need more scale, you know, we have a process engine that starts with 16 engines, and you can double it to 32, but these are both magic numbers, right? The right answer is how much money do you have, right? We'll allow you to scale it elastically. That's what we're working on right now. We have our technical work is done. About a third of our customers are already on Kubernetes, and the rest of them will migrate over the next, you know, 12 to 14 months. The reason for this sort of slow migration is that our cloud that we have is a decade old. It has all the compliance available on the planet, all the way from, you know, SOC 2 to HIPAA, you know, PCI to FedRAMP.
We're regaining our certifications on the new tech stack. As Appian's business expands, we're opening up, you know, regions in Japan as that market expands. We've recently got the IRAP certification, which I just went to Sydney a few months ago. Everybody's like, "Where's IRAP?" Because they wanna sell Appian to the Australian government, and they need that certification. We're working on FedRAMP. That's coming on the new cloud, you know, hopefully by early next year. We're putting in all these compliance frameworks so that we can sell at scale, you know, wherever on the planet. At teed-up solutions, so just briefly reminding what solution is, kind of the middle ground. You can obviously buy Appian and build whatever you want, that's limited by your imagination. You can try to use a packaged application.
You know what happens there, right? You buy an SAP and millions of dollars later, it's still not what you want. You know, solutions don't have to be like that. You can actually build, get something from Appian or our partners, or more importantly if you buy any one of these solutions that we now sell, we have three suites of solutions right now. The biggest and most successful is in federal acquisition management. We have two decades of experience, domain knowledge of federal acquisitions. I heard something like about half of what the U.S. government buys goes through Appian. We're trying to get the other half now.
We are very excited about this government acquisitions management because it has a full suite from managing your requirements for what you're trying to procure, to awarding that to a vendor, to, you know, down to the clauses of what you're arguing about to make sure that everybody can respond to that. Full comprehensive suite. Each of those purple boxes you can buy 1 at a time, and they just play well together. Same thing, our biggest verticals are financial services and insurance. Surprisingly, we have solutions in those 2 verticals. If you're onboarding your customers in FS, if you're doing KYC for compliance, you can just buy the solution and hopefully in weeks or months you'll get, you know, off to the races with it instead of spending multiple quarters building a custom 1. Really exciting change here.
I'm hoping that in coming years, we're gonna see solutions displace the platform as a growing part of our business. It's just a pointier tip of the spear. You don't have to show up at the platform and say, "What do you wanna build?" You can say, "You want KYC? What do you wanna change?" Right? That's gonna be the change there. All right, in conclusion, second last slide. What did I just cover, right? If you wanna remember three things about why we believe Appian is different or better, we are the fastest platform on the planet, and I can say that with confidence. I once had a slide that when Usain Bolt runs, he's only competing with himself. That's how we feel about our speed.
Like, no one else can even come close to matching our two-month guarantee on getting something done. That's not just an idle brag. For the last 10 years, my boss, Matt, has said in every 2 years, you have to cut in half the time it takes to build an app, and we've been at that, right? That's a legitimate differentiator. Another one is, as I said, every day there's another 5 low-code companies out there, and probably you're looking at them. For them to be as reliable, scalable, and enterprise-grade, that took us at least 20 years. We're still working on it. That's the hard stuff, right? That's what separates the, you know, the big companies from the ones that are upstarts.
You can ask any of our large corporations why Ryder runs their transportation business on us, why Bank of America runs their organization on Appian. These are companies that have bet on us. Lastly, because we're in so many industries, we have to be very flexible, right? We can't just do this or that. We're not specialized in one particular domain. Our platform can build almost any domain. We run airports, we run restaurants, we run. I mean, there's just a variety of use cases that's quite staggering, we have to be very flexible, customizable. In closing. Oh, sorry.
you know, I said I've been here for 10 years, for the first many years when I used to come to events and meet customers and partners, I used to hear, like, I'd ask them, "Why did you buy Appian?" They'd say, "Oh, we operationalize our business on Appian. We run our processes on Appian." That was cool. You know, that's good business to take. Lately I'm hearing something else that's much more exciting. You know, as I said, I've been in software for 30, 35 years now, someone asked me, "Why are you still here," right? Why Appian? 'Cause I do think that low code is transforming the business, right? It's literally putting people like me out of a job. I'm a high code developer, right?
What would take you know, months or years to even start getting, now I tell people, if you have an idea, in most big companies, if you have an idea, you know what happens, right? You call a meeting, somebody writes a document, you talk to the IT guy, and you're like, okay, whatever, right? That's the end of that great idea. Nowadays, we challenge people, just build it. Just build the thing on Appian. In a few days, maybe a couple of weeks, it's up and running. If you like it, build on it. If you don't like it, don't talk about it, right? It is still faster and cheaper to do something on Appian than to argue about it. I think that's a singularity for our industry.
I honestly believe now that finally I can say every one of my nine jobs, I've always been like, "Why does it take so long in IT, right?" I hope I can not have to, you know, basically hide anymore because now we can build apps as quickly as you think of them. With that, I'm done. Any questions?
Thank you, Surjeet. I think we're running a little bit late.
Great.
Christian.
Maybe one question.
I know we have some.
Yeah.
Oh, you. Okay.
Thanks. Andrew DeGasperi, Berenberg. This one on the Kubernetes transition. I'm not sure if you talked about this before, but are you, I guess, taking on some incremental costs as you're doing this, for the next 12, 18 months? Is there any tangible benefit once you complete that from a cost perspective?
Yeah, very good. These are big investments, so yes, pretty good incremental cost, because we had to take our existing code, chop it up into services, and move it over to this new tech stack. We've had a multi-year investment in making this technology transition, but it's one of those essentials, right? Like if, you know, if you need to move this building to a new foundation, I mean, you have to do it, right? We've taken this on. All of these data fabrics, the portals, all these big investments I talked about, they're all things that we put multiple years of investment into and continue to, you know, keep us viable as a, you know, as a leading platform. What benefits do you get once you get to Kubernetes?
That's more of a nuanced story. What we are targeting right now is first we want to get over to this new tech stack and get customers over to it. Right now we have two clouds. We have 70% of the customers on the current cloud and about 30% on the new cloud. As we move them over, you know, we want to get back to one cloud so that everybody's on the same system, so my team doesn't have to support both. Once they're on the same system, then you're gonna start seeing a lot of these additional benefits. For example, our IRAP certification came in a matter of days. Like, I was literally, like, surprised because it's on a new technology stack, what would have taken much longer in the old technology, right?
There are benefits of how quickly we can get clearance and certifications. There is benefits of customers that I said, once you're on the new stack, it's gonna be more reliable because Kubernetes is better at managing services than humans are. Longer term, two other big benefits. Elastic scale is the other one I talked about. Now, Appian has a lot of moving parts, right? When you talk about elasticity, is it our process engine? Is it our reporting? Is it our data? Is it our, you know, documentation, document management system? We are going to systematically, over the years, start making every piece of Appian elastically scale. So that you don't have to worry about any of these limits, right?
The most forward-looking thing I'd say is once we're on Kubernetes, right now, if you're a cloud customer, you get a choice of one. It's called Amazon. You know, in the future with Kubernetes now that we're on a new technology stack, we are able to then say, "Hey, if you'd like to go with Microsoft and Azure, if you wanted to go to Google Cloud," those are also choices that we can offer. That's a little bit further out. It allows us to now do this fairly cheaply. All right, I think I'm over my time slot, so I will pass it on to Chris.
All right. Good afternoon. I have the great privilege of talking about how we take all of these wonderful solutions that Suvajit is building and how we get them to our customers. For the next we'll break a few things. I will cover market opportunity, which you've heard a lot about already. I'll take it to a perspective of what I see from our customers and partners. Spend a little time talking about our sales strategy and how we do go to market, and then we'll wrap up with a couple of customer examples. You know, before I jump into that, I know I'm relatively new, I think, to most of the audience. A few familiar faces here. I joined Appian just under a year ago.
I'm not gonna take you through and bore you with my career history, but I'm often asked the question, why did you come to Appian? It really boils down to three fundamental things, the job, the company, and the market. From a job perspective, I've been blessed throughout my career to lead and build high-performing sales teams, and that's my DNA. Saw a phenomenal opportunity here. The company, when I had an opportunity to meet the founders of the company, to meet Matt, understand the vision, understand where the company is going, the technology, did some due diligence on my part in talking with some customers and partners out there. If you're in sales, one thing that you wanna have is knowing that you got a foundation of rock-solid technologies that customers continue to buy and build.
You know, I've had the years spending in technology sales, software sales, SaaS sales. In sales, you wanna be in market. It's very declining market where customers don't necessarily wanna speak to you. We don't have that problem here. When I look at all of those that came together with a company that's literally in my backyard, it was really the kind of the perfect trinity coming together of those three components. That's why I'm here. Thrilled to be here, and just see a phenomenal opportunity moving ahead for us. Market opportunity. We've talked a lot about this. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here. We've got just a phenomenally large TAM out there.
When you take a look at analyst estimates, you look conservatively $60 billion market when you talk about what's happening in workflow process automation. You start adding in RPA, you start talking about not only the low-code aspect, but the process mining component. We've got a massive market opportunity. The other really thing that was exciting and a key part of my decision in coming to Appian was there's no single market leader out there. There's not a Cisco out there that owns two-thirds of, let's say, a switching and routing type of market. This really to me is a phenomenal opportunity to be the disruptor in being able to grab that share out there.
Some of the mega trends that are happening out there, you know, you hear this a lot from our customers, developer shortage, applications that are being demanded by the business at an increasing pace, accelerating pace. Those two converging are creating an opportunity that the market adoption for what we do is becoming absolutely critical for businesses in running those applications. Another thing I'll point out here is the efficiencies with workflows. I've sat through no less than 16 different customer meetings today. This is coming up not only at the business unit level, but at the corporate level with regard to how they drive better efficiency in their business. That's automation and workflow, and it's becoming something that is truly reaching the C-suite at most of our large customers out there.
The other piece I'll highlight here, we are very blessed to have some of the best and brightest partnerships that are out there. Something that you'll hear a little bit when we have our partner panel is the investments that we have our global systems integrators as well as our regional integrators investing specifically in Appian, recognizing the market opportunity, but also looking at how that helps drive accretive services revenue for their business. We'll talk a lot about that, more about that in just a bit. Sales philosophy, I wanted to talk a little bit about this, how I approach the market and how we're driving our teams.
I think if I, before I jump into some of the specifics here, started my career right out of college with IBM, and this was many, many years ago. This was in the days when, the IBM uniform was a blue suit, white shirt, tie, and nice shiny wingtip shoes. In fact, I was thinking about it as I got dressed today. If I wore a pink shirt and jeans back in those IBM days, I definitely would have been fired and probably would have been arrested for violating policy.
The thing that I didn't appreciate as a 20-something-year-old when I joined IBM, which I passionately believe in now as a sales leader, and took that approach in that they wanted to build a world-class group of sales professionals and building a profession around us that wasn't a team of people that were out there selling mainframes and PCs, but really a group of people that were becoming trusted business advisors to their customers. That was one of the things that I think, you know, again, I look back and grateful for the opportunity that I had and really has become the DNA in how I approach going to market.
Value selling, not how we go out there and talk about process mining, RPA, low code, but how we take that and really turn it into how we are driving discernible business outcomes for our customers. High-performing teams. We're placing a lot of investment. We'll talk a little bit about some of the investment, but really making sure that we've got the best sales professionals out there that know how to drive value selling. Mandatory enablement. Sounds simple. A lot of companies, you know, and I've had this in my past, fall down because they treat sales enablement as more of an opt-in type of culture versus a mandatory. We are a very complex sale.
We need to make sure, especially given the competition that we have out there and the emerging competition that has started to come out with some of the major players, we've got to be the best out there at explaining not only what's happening in the marketplace with regard to workflow, but how that translates into those true business outcomes for our customers. As I mentioned before, leveraging our partners for scale, really building that partner-first type of model that we talked with our partners yesterday about. From a go-to-market strategy, really three fundamental components that we're looking at here. The first is leveraging what you heard today around our platform around true an enterprise-class approach. Not a departmental approach, but really looking at the entire enterprise, building that next generation in dollar ARR types of customers for us.
If you look at our enterprise, we are an enterprise-focused company. You look at the enterprise customers that we have, I could just say that we've got 80%, 90% of those that are facing these types of challenges, not at a business unit level, but at an enterprise level. Building that next class of $10 million ARR customers. The other piece is around net new customer acquisition. You've heard a lot about this throughout our session. We are a company that has just under 1,000 customers. We are very aggressively pursuing this. How? We've placed a massive investment over the last 6, 8 months in building out sales capacity. Frontline sellers, our SDR organization, sales development representatives, to make sure that we have the capacity out there to touch the market that we need to go after.
Lastly, continuing, this is gonna be a common theme, we launched a new partner program yesterday to our partner community around really forging a much tighter relationship around the partners that are investing in us. I'm gonna spend a lot more time talking about the strategy there. If you take a look at all the things between the capacity that we're adding in the field and leveraging that amongst the partners that have a massive customer base out there, really putting the incentives in place to help us with the net new customer acquisition. Would not be a go-to-market or sales presentation without having the proverbial pyramid in the chart here. Very quickly through how we are... I am a big, I'll call student of market segmentation.
How you sell to the Fortune customers versus how you sell to the lower enterprise or the mid-market or a territory sale, different selling motion, different way you go to market, different types of people that you need. We place a lot of investment in getting a data-driven approach around how we approach our marketplace, looking at customers by name, by territory. This year, we rolled out a four geographic theater approach. We've got focus on North America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We carved out a specific focus around our U.S. public sector business, which represents just over 20% of our business. We wanted to have that as a separate deal with them. From a segmentation perspective, very simply, and, you know, I know you see a similar chart with other companies.
At the top end of the pyramid, this is where we're placing an immense amount of focus around in a very high-touch model, rep standard. The customers is the ones that have that opportunity to drive that $10 million+ ARR. Enterprise and our, I'll call high-end or mid-market enterprise, this is where we get into many more accounts per the reps, really leveraging a partner-led type of model, forging relationships at the top with our global systems integrators, the Accentures, Deloittes, KPMG's and so forth. Our approach at the territory level going after the lower end of the enterprise, leveraging the great partnerships that we have with the RSMs, the CBIZ Cignys and so forth on a regional basis. We're seeing great traction with this.
We've got some great momentum that is happening across each of the geographic theaters in this particular model. We're gonna continue to invest in building out the partner component. On that note, if you take a look, we had yesterday, the largest partner event that we've ever had as a company. We had 320 partners standing room only in our partner session. I recently brought on board a new partner leader to lead our strategy here, somebody that I had history with in the past that not only knows the partner ecosystem, but really knows how to build a partner culture and accelerate business with partners.
I'm often asked the question, you know, "Chris, how many partners do you want?" My general answer to that is, this isn't a thing about quantity of partners. It really is a, an aspect around the quality. We want to invest in partners that are investing in us. I feel very fortunate that I am inheriting a phenomenal base of partnerships in the marketplace. We really do have a who's who relative to the types of partners that are gonna help us achieve our goals, both from a large customer perspective, but also get accounts. To talk a little bit more about this, really a multi-pronged approach with regard to what we're doing. Very similar to what we're doing from a sales perspective in building a value-oriented sales organization.
We're really placing the emphasis on building value around our partners. Again, investing in fewer doing more with fewer partners, investing in the partners that are investing in us. You know, as I have built partner strategies in my past, there's really what I call the four C's that I take a look at: coverage, capacity, capabilities, and commitment. We're looking very heavily across each geographic theater around investing in those partners that are helping us get into new markets That's the capacity. Investing to make sure that we do have the right kind of experience that that partner can deliver to the end users, and then perspective plans that are truly meaningful.
To kind of put this in perspective, the conversations that we're having with the large GSIs, you know, we do good business with them today, they are aspiring to build practices that are literally $100 million-$500 million dollar practices with Appian. That's the kind of service revenue that they believe that they can drive. How that translates to what we do within Appian, each of these should be representing kind of a $100 million dollar practice for us as we move forward. The partner-led approach, this is where we wanna, as part of our segmentation model, really make sure that we are investing in getting behind the partners in helping them sell.
In the past, I think we had a little bit of tension in the marketplace with regard to how we went to market, and we are truly pulling this together, as you heard earlier from Mike, with this One Appian approach around how we truly lock arms with our partners, build those business plans, and go to market together. We talked about the segmentation between the GSIs and the regional partners all focused around net new customer acquisition. Again, the real where they have an immense amount of excitement about the relationship with Appian is the significant services opportunities that they have the opportunity to drive. One of the other things that we did this year is recognizing that Appian has the ability to serve such a multitude of industries.
Every industry out there has the types of challenges that we address, whether it relates to workflow, process automation, and so forth. What we made a very conscious decision to do is really recognize what are those areas that we have the opportunity to become famous, that we become known as the solution that's meeting those needs in these particular industries. We wrapped ourselves around 4 very key industries, public sector and government, both from a federal government perspective, as well as local municipalities, financial services, insurance, and healthcare, pharma, life sciences. These are areas that we have placed an immense amount of investment. We've got significant traction out there with regard to very key customers. The business outcomes that we're driving have immense amount of value to these customers.
You know, conversations that I have in government wrap around how we're helping them, you know, drive better efficiency in government. Probably a little play on words there, but the saving money, how they get, you know, how they get their services better to the public.
Life sciences, a very significant customer of ours that I'm the executive sponsor, when I ask them the first question around, you know, "What's the value that you're getting out of Appian?" I would call it probably the most significant business outcome, which is, "You're helping us save lives by getting drugs to market quicker and helping us get through compliance." These are the ones that we also, as we look at, and you heard from Suvajit earlier, the ones that we're wrapping ourselves around the types of solutions that we're delivering to the market. You heard him very quickly talk about Government Acquisitions Management, what we call our GAM suite. This is something that we started noticing a trend around government agencies wanting to improve how they actually buy things.
A very complex process, numerous vendors, lots of paperwork, lots of process involved. We wrap this around what we call our Government Acquisitions Management Suite now, have that productized, and we're gaining an immense amount of traction in the federal agencies that we're now going to be taking into e-procurement to serve the state and local markets. That's then led to, in the insurance space, something we call claims that ultimately gives better customer experience and onboarding for customers in the insurance. This is going to be something that we're going to continue to build solutions, not on our own, but the real exciting thing is when you talk to our partners, the hundreds of solutions that have been developed by our partners to meet specific needs and how we wrap around our partners to help accelerate those to market as well.
Why we win, you heard a lot about this earlier today, I won't spend a lot of time, but truly this idea of how we approach the market, not as low-code or not as process mining or RPA, but how we truly drive this as a fully integrated suite. Every single customer that we talk with at this conference wants to have that conversation. Just got out of a meeting prior to coming here, where they very clearly said, "We wanna have one vendor that can pull this together and really help us drive our entire workflow process, and not have to deal with different vendors as it relates to RPA." Probably one of the things that I would say has been one of the best-kept secrets, and I'm so thrilled in my role that we're really getting out there.
This is one of the things that's gonna have a massive differentiator when we have the ability to talk with customers, that we don't care where their data lays, whether it's on-premise, in a cloud or multi-cloud. They don't have to worry about complex technologies to be able to pull all of that in, but how we help reach all of that data. One less thing that they have to worry about, we pull that. The fact that we've got the referenceable types of customers that we do have that are some of the most, not only highly regulated, but trusted players in that financial services, government, insurance, and healthcare, this helps us tremendously. The customers that we met with today all fell within those categories and leverage the relationships that we have with those customers.
lastly, as we talk a lot about driving these truly impactful business outcomes very quickly. Matt talked about this on stage. We have something called the Appian Guarantee, where we take the idea to application in a matter of weeks, 8 weeks or less, that we approach our customers with. average ROI that we're finding in our customer community out there is less than six months, and the speed to application development is in orders of magnitude 10x and above. you pull all of that together, getting speed to market, hitting the ability for us to drive those critical applications very quickly, really gives us an edge in the marketplace.
I'll wrap up very quickly with two very significant customers of ours to kind of show. We talk a lot about, and one of the things we're very proud about as an organization is our gross retention rate. You know, we talked about that on our, on our dollar revenue perspective of being a 99% very sticky customers. Traditionally, this has been a layer model: land, adopt, expand, renew. Couple examples here.
This is, unfortunately could not use the name, but one of the top three banks in the world, that started with us with a very basic application, really after some of the financial crisis that happened in 2008, really focused on the finance organization and getting into risk and was a, I'll call, relatively modest type of land. But what was exciting about this is throughout the course of the years, you started seeing a logarithmic type of curve that happened with regard to how applications started getting spread throughout the bank, first locally and then across the globe.
Over the course of what's been the last five and a half years, we've seen this grow not only within finance, but then getting into compliance, getting into credit risk, customer onboarding, getting into the commercial banks, lending, ultimately on a global basis throughout all the organizations. This is a customer that we've seen over the years grow from about a $1 million ARR customer to something that's now over $10 million ARR. This is an account that we truly believe has the opportunity to double over the next few years as well. The second one, I'm allowed to use the name. I'm not allowed to use the logo. It's the US Marine Corps. We do a significant amount of business in the Department of Defense.
This was a very significant win for us, again, about just under 6 years ago, where they came to us around a very basic application around helping them with supply chain and logistics, actually getting packages to marine bases across the globe. This started as a very modest application at just under $1 million, and then throughout the course of our relationship, again, continued to grow to about an $11 million ARR customer, getting into everything such as our GAM suite and how they actually procure and acquire, recruiting, onboarding, troop deployment, things that we are truly making very, very massive business outcomes that are protecting our men and women in uniform. These are applications that I would call we have the conversations around this with other the defense departments across the world.
Again, for your time, a little bit of idea around how we go to opportunities. I know we're bumping up against break, I guess we'll go to break and we'll hear from our customers.
Morgan Stanley. Thank you for taking the question. There's not many, you know, chief revenue officers that are gonna come into this year with 40% increase in sales capacity, and you're fortunate in that respect. The question is, with that capacity, how are you gonna put that capacity to work in what is likely to be the toughest sales environment since the Great Financial Crisis? Is it a focus on particular segments? Is it a focus on those four core verticals that you laid out? Are there, like, new use cases that you are, or new playbooks that you are advocating for that all resonate in this type of environment?
Yeah, that's a great question. I do have to, first of all, acknowledge and thank Mark Matheos here for having the confidence in me to place this kind of investment. You're right. I, in my career, I haven't had the opportunity to be blessed with being able to hire. In fact, coming on board, this was, we had to ignite our teams around hiring probably the largest amount of people we've ever done in a short amount of time to make sure that we did have that capacity. On your question specifically, there's a few areas that we place the investments. One, as we talk about these specific...
I wanna make sure I'm fueling the growth around the areas that, despite the unknown economic times, can say with a good degree of confidence, the federal government's gonna be spending money, and that'll also trickle to the state and local government where we've been under-penetrated. Have had traditionally a very small team in the state and local, so we're getting very prescriptive, not going out there and saying, "I'm gonna do everything for all 50 states," but we're picking out the top 12 that we know are very, have very similar types of challenges that the feds have, State of California, State of New York, Pennsylvania, the big states. Placing a lot of investments in those. That's 1. 2, continuing to double down efforts in those key industries that we talked about, financial services, insurance, healthcare.
Another area that we placed a lot of investment, one of the challenges that we had is just the capacity of inbound types of inquiries and also getting outbound from our sales development representatives. We added a significant amount of capacity. That was a lower cost type of investment. Perfect example of how that's paying off, met with a customer earlier when I asked her, you know, how she knew about Appian. This was a customer in Central America. She went on, downloaded a white paper, and because our teams were able to reach out in a very short amount of time, it created that dialogue, created an opportunity that has, you know, that we're closing now. Those are some of the key areas.
We placed some of the investments within the partner organization to build the scale around the key partnerships that we wanna build, the large GSIs and so forth. That gives you some idea of really. We got very prescriptive about it. This wasn't just saying, "Hey, we got, we're throwing a dart on the map, you know, and where it lands, we're gonna put a person." We got really data-driven, you know, specific on this. Part of this, when we took a look at in the U.S. as an example, when I came in, we had about 3,000 accounts that were loaded up in Salesforce in the U.S.
When we looked at our market opportunity around really what qualifies as the ideal customer for us, we went out there, did work, to get very prescriptive around what are the customers we wanna go after. We increased that base to 15,000 in the U.S. alone. We're doing that across the globe to get really, really focused on the key customers so that we can, we can get really laser-focused on the ones that we know have a high propensity to buy. That answer what you're? Thanks.
Pankaj Chandak from Granite. You talked a lot about, I mean, in the presentation, the marketing and the investments, their improvements, plus you have a sharper focus. How would you assess the productivity of the quota-carrying reps in the past, and what should we expect?
So again, so it's really two-pronged on that, right? I inherited a level of legacy reps that have been here for a while, and as you can imagine, given the complexity of the sale that we have, it is a longer-term sales cycle, so reps that have been in place that have built the relationships with the large financial institutions and so forth. The other area that we placed investment in is the whole area around sales enablement. Because of the amount of people that we ramped up or we brought on board, we've got to ramp them up very quickly. This goes back to the comment I made about a mandatory enablement type of culture.
We placed a lot of investment in making sure that we built that boot camp type of mentality to get people up to speed very quickly. Since we hired those more towards the end of last year, as I take a look at, you know, what I'm seeing going forward, very optimistic with regard to how we're shortening the time that it takes for people to get up to speed to be productive. Again, we've got a lot of newness in there, so, you know, it's gonna take that time. Investments we're placing in the people about how we get them up to speed quickly.
The productivity in a normal environment, based on your past experience, how much where you think we should get relative to in the past?
I would say, from what I saw in the past with the investments that we're placing, I'd say If I'm looking at a rep that we recently brought on board to full productivity, my goal is to really have that, you know, happen in the 9-month type of timeframe.
Nine months for ramp up. Actual productivity per rep relative to in the past, should they be 25% more productive?
Oh, you're saying as far as the actual per rep?
Per rep, yeah.
You know, for this model, given some of the things that you brought up, we're very cautious around, you know, expecting a massive growth on this is why we place a lot of effort around the actual capacity aspect of things. I do expect that as we look at going into the next few years, I would generally say that I'd expect somewhere around a 25% increase in productivity from the base of reps that we would have.
Thanks for that. I know we are up against time. We'll take a quick break. For those online, we'll be back at 3:20 P.M.
Great. Thank you. We good to go?
We're good.
All right. Well, welcome. Well, we ended on a very positive note talking about how critical our partner ecosystem and our partner strategy is to our business. We talked a lot about yesterday around building a partner-led and partner-first type of model. With me today, I'm thrilled to have three of our very significant partners. Gentlemen, I can't thank you enough for, you know, coming up here and being willing to do this. I know we've had an opportunity to spend a lot of time together. I hope that what you are seeing coming from Appian is truly showing our commitment to the partners, and I can't thank you enough about what you all are doing in helping us build our business globally. Why don't we just kinda start out.
You know, we've got three. I know you all come from very small organizations, across the globe, but, if we could, maybe just give a quick introduction of who you are, your role at the company that you're with. Let's start there.
Sure. Hi, everybody. Usman Tareen. I'm the Managing Director within our Cloud First Practice, and I look after our low-code, no-code practice here in the North America.
Great. Good afternoon. George Kaczmarskyj. I'm a partner at EY. I lead what we call our process solutions and automation practice in financial services. That basically means any automation technique that we can apply to manual processes in our clients' financial services.
Yeah. Hi. Chandra Surbhat. I'm vice president, and I head the digital experience business for Wipro globally. For us, internet process automation is a key element of digital experience, of which Appian is a key vendor product.
Fantastic. Thank you. Why don't we start, I'll start with a very simple question. I know, in speaking in, you know, over the last few days and actually over the last several months, in how we've built the partnership out together, I'd love to hear, as you started down the journey with Appian, you know, how long? Talk a little bit about how long you've been working with Appian and maybe a little bit of insight into, what was it that got you embedded with Appian. How did you know, how did you really start? What, what were some of the compelling reasons? You know, Chandra, why don't we start with you?
Sure. No, it's a great question. Now, if you think about the way the software engineering is going, it's all about how fast can you get anything off the ground, because the market is changing dramatically. The businesses want agility, and low-code, no-code is a great way in which we can get things faster to the market, and that's where Appian plays a great role. When I think about anything that we could do from low-code, no-code or a process automation, it's about not just case management, not just about customer servicing part, but largely about front-end customer experience that we could transform. More and more consumers would love to do a lot of things on their own, self-service, where they were very little patience to get down to a call center or a conversations with an enterprise.
What we can get them in an experiential transformation way, how can you reimagine the process? How can you mine the process on an ongoing basis? How do you automate, and how do you get those decisioning capabilities and instant mechanisms in which the consumers can experience all of what they want to do from an enterprise standpoint is key.
For us, in that context, when we think of Appian, this is a journey that we have had great success over the period of few years, the ability to impact the organizational processes, reimagine the process in a rapid fashion, look at all of the opportunity through mining, process mining, look at the automation and with AI capabilities, and of course plug in anything from an RPA standpoint, we take a holistic view of it, has been a great way in which we could impact for our customers. That's been our journey so far.
That's great. George, EY?
Yeah, Chandra, I.
Echo a lot of what you said. you know, the dynamic that we're seeing in the market right now is certainly a need for agility and speed to market, and we're being responsive. We're also seeing, beyond the pressures of efficiency, we're seeing growth. We're seeing our clients not wanting to scale linearly by throwing bodies at the problem as they're growing at the same time. The need for automation, end-to-end automation, not task level, but end-to-end process automation is paramount for these organizations to compete and reimagine the way work is performed in the future. To do that, there needs to be a portfolio of automation technologies and techniques that need to be brought forward. What we're really excited about with the Appian platform is it transcends those techniques.
It brings a full suite of capabilities that we can bring to our clients and ultimately achieve business outcomes by reimagining end-to-end processes, much like you talked about, through process reengineering and then applying the right technology and technique to the process. For us, the journey's been about 4 years. We incubated and started in with financial services, and now it's, you know, significantly expanding across the globe.
Awesome.
Yeah, much like the same, I would say digital transformation at scale, right? When the clients are looking to, you know, do a lot of things, there's only a few tools that can do that, right? Appian is one of the top ones. We can not only do the low-code part, but also the automation part, as well as process mining or PA, right? You can buy one license, and you can do digital transformation at scale. That's one of the biggest reason why would we pick Appian. We've been doing work in Appian since 2013, but in the last few years, I think we've seen a lot of growth and demand in Appian, and clients really wanted liking the tool and asking us, and it's been a pretty growth for us.
That's great. Thank you. You know, we've had a lot of conversations about, truly what I'll call, not just doing deals together, but truly building a practice together, right? You heard it yesterday in the partner session around you know, our commitment is what are the investments we're gonna be placing in partners to build that out, the investments that you guys have placed. Before you came in, I made a comment to the team, and a couple folks have challenged me on this, you know, when I talked about the growth potential with the types of organizations that you have. You know, I know in some of the conversations we've had, we have, interesting business that we're doing together.
as we talk about really building significant and relevant practices, you know, am I too out there thinking that we got the opportunity to build multi-hundred million dollar types of practices within your business? George?
No.
Good answer. You know, why don't we drop the mic on that one. The... you truly see, right, you know...
We do. We think the market, you know, aside from the market share between the three of us and our peers, the market's significant. The demand in our clients is only increasing. I think to say $100 million business is very fair.
Yeah. That's really because of the capacity that you have, you know, again, not in selling the software, but really the kind of services revenue and the type of value that you ultimately bring to your customers.
Right.
Yeah. How about... 'Cause I know we had somewhat of a conversation here and-
I would even say the opportunity is much bigger than $100 million. Gartner is projecting about 60%-70% of, you know, development to be done on low code, right? If you think about the market, it's humongous. Especially the front end, right? A lot of companies out there, they have older tech, which what we call digital decoupling, right? What we don't wanna get rid of the entire stack is, you know, if there's a mainframe in the back, it does a pretty good job at transactions. What we wanna do is we wanna complement it with, you know, newer technologies like, you know, cloud-native architecture, user experience, mobile, things like that that Appian provide, process mining, stuff like that.
Instead of ripping and replacing, we are seeing a lot of demand in terms of complementing that. Those are like multi-year large projects. Absolutely, I think over, the demand is much higher, and it would be much bigger than $100 million practices.
That's great. Chandra, how about yourself?
Yeah, no, I think I completely agree. The ability to rapid showcase value in 8 weeks, 10 weeks, as you saw in the morning in some of the keynotes. Once the value is shown, the ability to further expand and grow within an organization to be of a significant digital transformation impact is very high. That's where some of our customers, we may start off on a smaller initiative in terms of what we could impact for a particular process, for a particular use case to a department. We have seen large scale enterprise-wise adoption. As Usman said, low-code/no-code is what all of the analysts are talking about. 70% to 80% of the software development will be on these platforms. We do see these capabilities very easily, Chris.
Let me build off that one there, Chandra. You mentioned the low code, and I got a lot of comments earlier about, hey, we didn't hear much about low. In fact, we didn't hear anything about low code this morning, right? It was more around, you know, how we're trying to approach from a workflow and a process automation standpoint. Would love to get your thoughts on kind of the positioning of how we are going out to market now, you know, not really hammering home on that low code is. You know, I think we've evolved. Low code is not what we do, it's how we do it.
as we start talking about selling this platform that combines RPA and process mining and, you know, intelligent document processing and wrap that around low code, how do you feel about the Appian strategy there?
Sure. No, I can take that. If you think about it, you are right. About 2-3 years back. Organizations were experimenting with. In a true essence, when you're impacting a process, when you are looking at process from reimagination standpoint, from a mining to automating to the AI part of it, where the process can be triggered off of any particular emails. Low-code makes it much more sweeter and better because you are getting off the ground much faster. I agree with the positioning and all the organizations get it and customers get it, that it is off of a low code, but what they're really looking for is much beyond a low code in terms of its full suite of product, full suite of capability for the end-to-end impact.
Yeah, Chandra, I think you bring up an interesting point. To me, low code makes a very feature-rich product accessible to developers. It gets to the, what you said earlier, time to market and speed of delivery. I think the other thing to think about, you know, low code is almost now a necessity in what you're bringing out in the platforms. If you look at the significant demographic shifts we're seeing now in the workforce that's entering out of college, they're very technically astute, capable. Most of them can code in Python right out of college. They expect accessibility to this kind of technology, and it's gonna accelerate their ability to deploy applications. You know, I know we don't talk about it as much anymore.
You know, everyone is RPA vendor, then they're a low-code, no-code vendor, and now they're generative AI companies. Those trends come and go, but these are features that are.
In two ways, right? I mean, I do a lot of calls with our clients where they're trying to understand the low-code market because it's a very mixed message segment, right? I don't want to use the word diluted, but, you know, everybody's a low-code vendor these days, right? How do you separate from the herd? How do you show the client that you're not just faster go-to-market, but there's a lot more, you know, efficiency and other things baked into the product, right? That's where like, things like RPA, product, process minings and business rule-based automation is key to separate that.
The other thing is, you know, I think because there's so many vendors involved, this is just my opinion, low-code is going to become a feature of every product, right? That would be mostly contributed to like having a workflow. Some drag drop ability for you to either build something simple, fast on that ecosystem or extend that ecosystem, right? I think for positioning Appian more than just a low-code is I think is the right way to go about it because it's just not a low-code, it's a lot more than that.
This architectural approach that we're taking or platform approach that we're taking, it resonates.
Yes.
Okay, good. Another good answer. Thank you. You know, as we look at the partnership, one of the things that we've also talked about, we talked about this earlier, is the investment that we're placing in taking a more solutions approach to what we're driving. You know, as we were mentioning earlier, while Appian has an investment in some key areas like our government acquisitions, management suite and so forth, where we're seeing immense amount of traction happening is with our partner community. You guys are close to the customer, developing great solutions. Would love to get some thoughts around, you know, the future direction and how we continue to grow our businesses together there.
Do you wanna get started? Go ahead. I think that's, I think that's the way to go because most of the clients that we talk to, they're looking, if not the full solution, they just want something out of the box that can accelerate that development, right? Like what the panel is talking about here, faster go-to-market. Even us, we typically don't build behind closed doors. What we do is we collaborate with our, with our clients and gonna build something and then take that to go to market. We do it on Appian. We've done like more than 10 platforms in the last year. Appian is also used for our patient services Intune platform in Life Sciences , right? All the workflows based on Appian.
Even though it is a platform and you can build any sort of like a custom application, I think it is essential for building some strategic industry application for even if you don't sell them, giving them you know art of possible what it would look like. I think that's a, that's a must-have these days in every tool.
I love that comment. That's what we were just talking about earlier, about, the concept of, you know, while that might not be something that is an immediate need for the customer, it is almost like a Trojan horse that opens up the art of the possible, what you can do with a platform like Appian. Yeah.
Absolutely. I think the ability to create an industry framework, industry solution and accelerator is a great value proposition for us to combine with the technological capability of Appian. That's where the value comes much more stronger. We have a financial risk and resilience solution that's built off of an Appian. When you showcase to the customer, it's just not about a product, it's actually packaging it with certain capabilities which influences directly certain processes of theirs, is a great value proposition. Then the customer starts understanding the art of possibility of what a particular product can do and into their domain, into their actual real processes. Sometimes, it could also be a function of showcasing that and doing a much more different work sometimes.
That gives them a way to reimagine that these capabilities are real, and that's a high impact for them.
Hey, Chris, you asked about solutions. You know, the platform is powerful. It's also accessible, and our clients can implement it themselves. They can hire for capacity. That's great. You know, but for us, our strategy is to come to our clients with specific business outcomes we're trying to make a difference in. For us, solutions are paramount. Like, we're not gonna go in there and charge a certain rate just for capacity. I mean, it's possible, but it's not differentiating. All of us can do it, but where we're gonna compete is we're gonna have certain things that are very relevant to our clients, and we're gonna bring them forward to the market. What I like about your strategy is you're enabling us around the solution views that we have and that we can take to market.
You know, love to compete all day long, but we're gonna have different things we bring. Your comments to us over the last couple days around, "Hey, how do we help enable your solution development? How do we help go to market together on it? What do you need from us?" is really important for us in the partnership. Thank you for doing that.
Thank you. I'm glad to hear that reinforcement that. Really, it's just the onset of what the art of the possible is and how we partner together and really start to propagate the solutions that you all are developing as part of our sales strategy to really open the market. Let me ask one more. The. Then, Sridhar, we have questions ability to ask? Okay, we wanna open up for some of the questions here, but let me just ask one more. We're entering into an environment where this, you know, I think it's arguably, you know, easy to say that this world of workflow process automation is becoming one of the hottest areas within technology today. It's top of mind. We've all had conversations around this.
What that ultimately leads to is we're probably entering into, one of the biggest competitive environments. We've got some, you know, major names that are out there that are getting into this. If you had to give advice to us as-.
I think given the range of capabilities that Appian brings us is rock solid in terms of being end-to-end. The partner conversation that we just all spoke about, the ability to double down on partnerships, the ability to enable a joint solutioning, which differentiates truly, brings all the capabilities of Appian and brings the industry and transformation capabilities of our partner, which truly showcases art of possibility, could be one of the real differentiator, I would say. If that can be further propagated, that would significantly differentiate.
Great.
Yeah, gosh, so many things going through my mind. The space is unquestionably getting crowded right now. Some of it is, some of it's grounded in fact, and some of it is hype, right? In terms of marketing that some companies are doing versus other ones. A couple of thoughts. One, you have a very strong feature-rich set of capabilities. You need to double down on that. I think the other thing is brand awareness. You know, who is Appian? You know, it needs to get out there, and people need to understand it.
Yeah, that's great input.
I think so most of your competitors are either in SaaS providing additional capability to do additional stuff or like, you know, it's an ancillary product to kinda core services, right? They will always lag behind, in our opinion, 'cause that's not their core business. Appian will always be ahead of them because that's your core business' platform, not like SaaS offering, right? I think the thing that it is hard for most of the clients to understand is what Appian is, right? It's so big. A lot of time, they will come to your conference and look at it like, "What can Appian not do?
Yeah.
You get that, right? I think some type of a branding, in my opinion, which kind of helps simplify. It is a great product, right? How can you use it? That's some sort of a team that simplifies it for people who are not very sophisticated buyers would, I think, really help the brand a lot.
Specifically, like, here are the outcomes you can drive by leveraging Appian.
Yeah, something like, which is relatable. Like, if you say ITSM-
Right.
certain vendor comes in mind, right? Something... 'cause most people are not very sophisticated buyer. They're not doing the things in and out like we do, right? We can look at a platform, we can tell what is good, what is bad, but they don't, right?
Yeah.
Chris, can I add one more thing?
Yeah.
When we spoke yesterday, I said our clients come to us with 2 big questions, right? One of them was, Product A and B here. I've got a use case. How do I know when to use Appian? Those are questions we're being asked. I think to the extent that you can bring that differentiation and explanation to the market-
Yeah.
will help our clients be able to navigate.
No, I appreciate that. I think that's spot on. We're going to turn over some questions. Before we do that, I just, you know, I wanted to say just again, can't thank you enough for the partnership and the investment that you all have placed in this. Thrilled to be going to market with you. I was asked a question earlier about sales productivity. I'm passionately a believer that by properly leveraging our partner ecosystem helps me build sales productivity because of the one plus one equals three aspect of rule. Extremely excited about the partnership opportunities that we have, and thank you, gentlemen, so much for that. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Sanjit Singh, Morgan Stanley. Thank you for all your insights. That conversation was super helpful. I had two questions, one specifically for George, given his financial services expertise. I wanted to toggle back to that question around competitive differentiation, 'cause you guys have partnerships not only with Appian, but with the ServiceNow of the world and the UiPath of the world. When you guys go to clients, when is it the right time to bring Appian to the project, to the initiative, and when is it more appropriate to bring ServiceNow into the mix versus UiPath? How do you guys think through that decision in terms of what's best for the client? That's the first question.
George, specifically, maybe as you answer that question, just around financial services, we've had issues in the banking sector. How are you thinking about selling in an environment where financial services spend could be increasingly under pressure? Those would be the two. Thank you.
How about if I start in reverse order?
Sure.
You may have to remind me of the first question a little bit, but look, financial services is always fun to watch. It goes up and down in terms of spend growth and retraction, regulatory. You know, banking in particular is very focused on efficiency as of late. It has been, it continues to be. I think we will see more shift towards regulatory and risk use cases and focus, and I think platforms like this will adjust really well to that. I think, you know, safety, security, scalability and platforms for financial services is paramount. Without that, it's not gonna get through the front door in most of our clients.
I think we'll see, you know, when we look at solutions that we can sell, we're going to organize around the things that are relevant to financial services at this time. In banking, it'll be around, like I said, resiliency, safety, regulatory. In insurance, it's gonna be a little bit more around growth and an interest rate hedge, right? Asset management will continue to be focused on efficiency and frictionless experiences on onboarding of funds and PE hedge funds and stuff like that. You know, I think there's a pretty wide categorizations of the types of use cases that this platform will be able to do comfortably all those. We just need to invest and build those outcomes. I don't know if that completely answered your question. Did it help? Okay.
The first ... How do you sort of decide when?
Right.
Do you take, like, a siloed approach and say, "Okay, Appian for workflow or an UiPath for RPA brings Celonis for process mining?" Are you... I avoid the question as many ways I can, but it sounds room. Typically multivariate decision points that we have to go through. It depends on the use case. It depends on the financial construct or your licensing arrangement. It depends on, you know, how much market share might be within one vendor than another one inside of a inside of a client. You know, the example you gave, if it's an ITSM use case, and you're already a particular, you know, vendor platform user, you might go that way.
If it's in the front office and you happen to have, you know, a big call center implementation on the platforms, you might do this. We don't get a ton of questions around, "Hey, which platform should we bring in-house?" We get a lot of questions around, "Hey, we're building a use case." Then we have to go through a, you know, a decision criteria. We actually advise our clients to build structured decision matrices around when these use cases come up to know how to arbitrate between the different platforms. If it's complete white space, it's a very long discussion. I know it's a little bit of a non-answer, but there's not one answer one way or the other. For us, internally, as we build solutions, we have to go through a similar process.
Most of the time we'll look at a combination of feature functionality and business relationship around what we bring to the market. I don't know if that helps.
George, I thought you told me last night that you base it on alphabetical order. Maybe I misheard that.
I don't know.
I think George covered a lot of it. It is my case. What I will say is that it usually takes
Automation really investing value prop to combine all of these into one platform and adopting the full platform versus piecing together the puzzle with the UiPath or the different solutions that are out there.
You can go ahead.
Yeah. Absolutely. Customers do understand. If you think about, a lot of tools came out which are purely RPA for quite some time. There was tons of bots built. Beyond a point, it was a governance nightmare. Customers struggle, and then you move into a low code for certain use cases. You've got mining, that is again a differentiated part. When you think about these different investments, customers definitely struggle. And beyond a point, governance nightmare and dealing with relationships and stitching these three different pieces together. It is always a good value proposition when you can solve a particular use case, when you can solve a particular business problem, think through from a mining standpoint, from a process reimagination standpoint, designing the process, and then, of course, plugging in the last mile through RPA. Customers definitely see that differentiation.
Yeah, I think they see it, but certainly the more mature advanced ones. You'd be surprised, we still come across some that don't. They tend to be mid-market, smaller, a little late to the game. I think that while it is really nice to be able to bring a whole portfolio of capabilities under one platform, that may not always be realistic and more mature, larger, certainly in financial services, some of the larger banks, we have to work in a multi-tenant strategy and have the flexibility of being able to integrate across different platforms. You know, we've had this conversation on Appian, you know, it can do both, which is really important to us and really important to our clients.
'Cause if you already have, for better or for worse, bots running amok in an organization with a particular vendor, I have a lot of legacy that I have to integrate with and possibly continue to build on top of it. Yes, most understand, and some can take a pure platform play. Others may migrate towards a pure platform play, but a lot we're seeing is we gotta work in less of best-of-breed, more multi-tenant environment.
I agree with most of it. I think where you're going is you're saying today, get out of the public sector, because no, if you don't go to public, Appian will be dominating the world, so. Another decision.
I think we're gonna. Again, gentlemen, thank you so much for doing this.
Thank you very much, sir.
Love the partnership. Thank you.
Sure.
Thank you.
Quick transition here. I think I've had the opportunity to meet some of you. My name is Marc Wilson. I'm one of the four founders here at Appian. I have the opportunity to lead the discussion with a couple of our customers today. I think we'll start off with some introductions. Again, go ahead.
Currently, I'm focusing on automating some of the fund accounting operations. That's my introduction.
Outstanding. Steve?
Name is Steve Felix. I'm the Director of automation at OCC. My team's focus is centered around BPM, Appian, and
Have the background that they have. What I'd like to get started with is, just to get a sense of how your relationship with Appian started, what got you into Appian, and what that history has looked like.
Sure. It started somewhere around 2016, 2017 for us. The Appian team was where IT team was coming mostly for our process team was working with legal entities, setting up the legal entities, managing the life cycle of the legal entities. We created across different jurisdictions, right? It's not just in Delaware all the time. It's across the globe. We go and set up the different jurisdictions. We have to set up the legal entities based on where we do the investments. The teams that was working on this was the tax team, legal team, our PA, partnership accounting team, and even the banking operations, right? To bring all these together in one group, That was the primary focus why we want to use Appian.
By far, like, we have about, like, 500 users using this legal entity lifecycle management built on Appian. This is again, like, in 2016, 2017. We have about, like, 16 applications in Appian now, covering our capital distribution process. We do our tax treatments for K-1 in Appian. We have a legal and compliance system, that is built for investor compliance monitoring and side letter compliance. List goes on. I think, like, you know, now we are in a phase where we're looking at the next three years where we can use Appian. It's a good journey.
Before we leave that, though, tell me a bit about sort of how that evolution happens. I mean, the impression I get, this is pretty standard. What we see is you get started on one application, and then you wind up sitting in a seat talking about the 16 that you built. How does it go from that one to, let's say, three, four, five? What was the sort of mental path or mental changes or approach that needed to change at Carlyle?
Sure. If you see the user group, like, who is working on the Legal Entity Lifecycle Management, they touch many of the areas, like fund management has a part of this. Like, we have our tax team, we have our Partnership accounting is huge. The conversations with the deal team was all manual, right? When they started seeing the benefit of what the EOM, we call it Legal Entity Lifecycle Management, and Appian can do, that's when, like, our stakeholders came forward to us and asked, "Hey, look, if we can build this, can you create more solutions?" Right? That's how, like, these ideas were born. Mostly like, you know, like it's many requests comes from our sponsors saying that, "Hey, we use Appian, like, you know, we have proven it in EOM.
Like, you know, why don't we expand it to other areas?" That's how it started.
Very good. Steve?
Yeah. We started our journey, one year earlier, we started with Appian in 2015. We looked a couple other vendors at that time. Pega was one, IBM was another. They just really didn't fit. IBM was kind of too big. You had to buy too many pieces to kind of put a package together. Pega was just, it seemed like it was geared toward large organizations. Appian had the right fit to help us along. The first application that we built, we actually beat the Appian Guarantee 'cause we built in six weeks instead of the eight. It was a huge win for us. It was huge win for our corporate action department, actually. That's the first application.
The big benefit there was that prior to Appian, we're a highly regulated company in a highly regulated industry. We're audited all the time. They're audited all the time. It would take about two weeks for them to go through an audit, provide the evidence, go through the different systems, emails, DocuShare, documents, right, to provide that evidence. Post Appian, post that application, they're able to do the same type of audit in three days. It was a huge win. Word of mouth just spread, right? We built from there. We've added on applications. We started, like I said, with the first application in six weeks. Fast-forward a few years, we started a process where we're building an application in a day.
Through COVID, we adjusted, and we started building application a week just to kind of give, breaking a half by somebody on a, on a call all day long, right? It's different when you work with someone in a room versus if you're, if you're on a Webex, all day long. Kind of that
What particular features?
That's the point.
With that speed component as well as the
For it's one-stop shop. You have to go to one application to get all your evidence. You don't have to go and look DocuShare. You don't have to pull up some other documents and compile all that evidence, right? You, for Appian, for some of the groups, they even really.
Yeah. That was really, you know, because I started in the last second to capital any of the users apart, like 10 difference, write emails, fill adopt. There was some source for the work. Going back, you know, that was the advantage they were seeing, that led to building more applications.
for both of you, would you consider
Kind of your organizations, you know, how do you manage the lists, for example?
Yeah. Many of these requests, like, are coming out of, like, from our C-levels, right? Like, when we wanted to, like, we want to increase our fundraising goal to X amount, right? Like, that's when, that's the early stage when, like, IT gets involved. How can we create innovation there? Like, you know, how do we interact with the markets, the trends? Like, how do we bring in all the analytics in one place for the team to make meta decisions? We get involved pretty early on and I think, like, you know, that's pretty obvious benefits have been seen with that.
For us, again, it's the word of mouth. Our legal group is one great example. We build one application with, you know, a couple of users, but they're driving the application. They're driving the requirements, the design, and things like this. We build that out, we release it, but it involves others. People send requests like, "Well, if you can do this, why can't you do this?" right? Like, there's then additional demand. All of a sudden, people want this from legal, and we find ourselves, and now we have five, six applications with them, right? Because it's just, it's providing that transparency.
I just don't know how someone from legal said, like, "Hey, I was showing my application to somebody at CC, and, like, why I gotta reach out to them?" I was like, "Why aren't they building this for us?" It's the type of communication within our company, being able to see the features, being able to see use, and the speed of development, through them.
Both of your firms have had a number of years working on this. How would you describe the way in which you've enabled your teams to be able to construct? What does that journey look like for you?
We used what we did probably is not the right thing as we did with the big bang, so could you take weeks. What we wanted to do is like, you know, we wanted to bring all 500 users into these applications. We think our partners working with them is a big thing. We have a great partner we work with, and we treat them as part of our strategic solution that we create. That is really, really key for us, I think. We don't have a big in-house Appian developers within Carlyle, but we have great partners that help us. That's the way.
We kind of take a piece of the show. We really do most of our development in-house. We have a small team of developers that build our own apps. I think again, that kind of speaks to the ease of use and rapid development in Appian. We focus on continuous improvement. Like, we work our team, and we work with our dev. Having Appian also continuously improve and doing quarterly releases, we're always on top of that. We, we upgrade every quarter, right? Any new functionality that's being released, we're looking at that. We're looking to see, okay, how do we, how do we utilize that? How do we provide additional functionality for our users?
Again, it's enabling developers to be able to do that. We also have something that we implement as innovation time. It's allowing our dev folks, our BAs and QA time to be able to kinda ideate. It's not just this app that you have to work on, but what's some of the other benefits do you see that we might be not thinking, but this might be thinking about, right? It might be from a support perspective, and that's from an Appian-wide perspective. We're really all about kinda putting the tool in the hands of the developers, in the hands of the QAs and letting them drive it.
Yeah. I think Flag is there with approach here. That's important, Flag.
Yeah, I chalk that up to what I like to call the corporate psychological differences that we see out there. You know, the notion of we can do it ourselves, or we have partners, or some combination thereof, or Appian services, all those paths that different customers have taken. Tell me a little bit about some of the things we heard this morning. What feature sets of know me or, you know, the additions with things like RPA and Russell, can you tell us about those? On the flip side, what do you wish Appian would add?
Okay. We migrated to cloud last year. It was not, I'll be transparent, it was not very easy to convince the stakeholders why cloud. Once they were able to do it, like, you know, Totally features the high availability auto-scaling, specifically during quarter close, year-end close, like, the load spikes up. When we were on-prem, like, there was always band-aid solutions. Like, our engineering team needs to step in and, like, apply. Now with cloud, like, you know, those things are gone. I could say that, like, you know, after migrating to cloud, our process efficiencies have increased about, like, 30% on all the fund-related operations. Even the capital call distributions, like, you know, we have reduced significantly by 90%. These metrics was published to our CFO a couple of months back.
Cloud features are awesome. Now our next three years roadmap I was talking about is going to be digging more into IDPs, RPA, process mining. Those are the next cycles. Where we would want more is on the reporting. We want to see more reporting capabilities out of Appian. It's great, but, like, you know, We need more.
For us, RPA is one that we're really interested in, and some of the AI skills. RPA, so currently we're using Blue Prism, and we have, like I said, we have a very small team of developers. Having in-house expertise on two different pieces of software is obviously more difficult. It just, from a support perspectives and things like that, it kinda takes away from concentrating on one thing. Appian RPA, if we can, we're actually going through a feasibility right now, converting some of our Blue Prism bots to Appian, see how that works. You know, putting all of that into one platform is really beneficial for us because we're, again, we're a small team.
If we can have everyone focus on one, it's just gonna be a huge benefit for us. The other one is some of the AI skills that you guys are coming out with, in particular document extraction. For us, there's huge potential. We started with IDP, with one of our teams, and we're just looking forward to extraction, to be able to really look at documents and extract all the data. I think it's gonna make our lives easier. It's gonna make a lot of our stakeholders' lives easier.
Very good. We'll take some questions.
Thanks. Derrick Wood at TD Cowen. Have you guys had any internal discussions about generative AI and the possibilities that, possible investments or use cases or concerns that you would never even touch that internally, or if you are having conversations?
For us, it's, yes, we've had some internal discussions about it, but the environment that we're in, the industry that we're in, we're very cautious. Everything that we do needs to be reviewed by regulators. Everything that we do needs to be kind of looked at. That's a scary topic with that audience. Right? We're not there, right? It's not worth kind of having that conversation yet. It's not developed to a degree that everybody in our audience and our ecosystem would feel comfortable with yet.
For us, like, you know, actually it's interesting you ask the question. Like, right now we are looking at using Appian totally for a different use case on corporate accounting area. Like, where we wanted to build a custom solution, potentially, we are looking at it to build a custom solution for our global procurements and contracts. We are actually talking about that, like, you know, how can we use AIs to read the contracts and, like, you know, populate the documents. Even, like, this morning we were talking about the keynotes, can it, like, recognize the document patterns and, like, give us what we need? We are exploring that. Not on the front side, but on the corporate side, we are. Yep.
Yeah.
Just a question over here. There's been a lot of talk about the platform of Appian. I think you mentioned Blue Prism. What would stop you guys from standardizing on Appian? Like, talk about who else you use internally, if it makes sense to standardize on Appian, you don't wanna be locked in. Secondarily, you know, there's a lot of money spent on Appian for the average customer, average large customer. Where does the spending come from incrementally from here? Talk about the data fabrics that come from database spending. Where, you know, where is the incremental spending as the account gets bigger and bigger for you to come from?
For us, actually, like, you know, actually, answers to both the questions are pretty much going to be the same. Finding the skills, right? Like finding the right skills, you know, that's where we take most of the time very carefully, right? I just mentioned we have more of work depending on the partners working with them. We involve them with our business conversations. One reason is like, you know, The reason is like skills. Like if you look at it, in the market, it's easy to find like, hey, one person who knows UiPath, one person who knows Blue Prism, and like somebody who knows. Again, that's where we depend on the partners, right? To complement that. There are solutions and work arounds that, but one area is that, like, you know, like we need one person who knows everything.
From us, from the kinda integration perspective, again, we're a small team, so having everything in one platform or limiting technology as much as possible, is really key. Like, 'cause that's where we see the benefit. If we have to segment our small team into multiple groups supporting various technologies, it just becomes much harder. Customers get confused, right? When I talk about customers, it's our internal customers. They wanna kinda have something that's familiar, something that looks the same. That's really kind of, for us, that's where the big benefit is.
In terms of IT spend, you know, where does the incremental pockets of money go to Appian? Where does it come from? Is it just new?
For us, it's not. We've been a customer since 2015. It's something that we have built in, right? It's something that we know, we're gonna be renewing so there is money, there is forecasts and just budgeting for that. It's not, you know, year to year or anything like that. It's not like we're looking for funds here or there. It's pre-planned, it's pre-budgeted.
We take a slightly different approach, so we do annual budgets. We work with our stakeholders and come up with like what is the best like of all the requests that are coming in, right? Like, you know, we sit down and talk with our product owners to understand, hey, in this year, what are the features that we are going to deliver? We look at the ROI, how quick we can deliver the ROI. That all feeds into our CIO and to the CFO. The funding comes from our CFO office. Like we do need to show the ROI breakdown to both our CIO and CFO every quarter, which we do.
We'll take one more question. All righty. Thank you everyone. Thank you guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think we're up next with Mark Batayeh.
Blow through some of these slides a little quicker than I thought. The good news is we've had a lot of kind of background from the prior speakers. A lot of what I was gonna talk about, in some ways has been covered. I'll just get to like the juicy good parts, and hopefully be done in 10 minutes, and then Matt will come up. This is one of the slides that is a little generic, but these are our highlights, right? These are the core principles for our investment thesis, if you will. Is there a way I can get the screen on here, so I don't constantly turn around? That'd be great. 30% plus cloud subscription growth. Obviously, the cornerstone of kind of our story, and 90% gross margin.
Those kind of elite levels of product, margin. We have a really predictable business model that's been shifting to subscription revenue over time. I'll show that as well. The customer unit economics are really, really strong, with LTV to CAC being north of 7. I think the future slides will double click on some of these items. I'll just probably, in the interest of time, go a little faster. 43% CAGR if you look at our cloud subscription growth rate. If you expand that to term license revenue and look at it through an ARR lens, it's at 30%, which is obviously really attractive as well. I'll spend a little bit of time on this slide. If you look at this, we've stratified our ARR across customer sizes.
I think the biggest takeaway, if you look at kind of the bottom part of this slide with that, thank you very much. That orange and blue color, those are $500,000 and above and $1 million and above on ARR. You can see the robust growth in those segments, right? The notion being like the prolific users of Appian are actually growing even in some cases faster than the smaller users. And even the, you know, the $100K category is very respectable at 114% growth. It's, it's a really good story about, you know, the more you use Appian, the more you like it, the more you buy, kind of feeding into our land and expand motion.
This is another interesting take. If you look at the actual number of quarters it's taken to reach subscription revenue milestones. Because we've been able to kind of maintain this really strong growth rate as companies gotten bigger, the number of quarters it's taken to hit, well, the first $100 million was 30 quarters. The next $100 million was 11 quarters, the most recent $100 million milestone was reached in 6 quarters. We're really happy with that, hopefully, we can continue that trajectory and maintain our growth rate as we scale. As we've been able to maintain our kind of deal size and actually increase it with this time period, we've had a few for new logos. That's fine.
On the growth algorithm, if you slice up the different ways we grow, we have this best in and kind of the recurring nature and the high quality of the revenue that we are closing with our customer base. That's, you know, the expansion motion and multiple applications. You know, our most prolific users often have, you know, 20, 30, 40 applications. You layer on new logos. That was a huge part of what they bring to us and a huge part of our growth in the future. All the different awesome opportunities. Of course, the UI, you know, the, sorry, process mining and RPA expansion. Then, of course, it wouldn't be right to just not talk about the fact that we're constantly innovating.
We're a product engineering company, and we're laser-focused on sustaining our growth. You know, with the platform strategy, obviously, we're focused on the platform and this, like I said, elite level of margin. The mix shift has kind of helped our overall growth. By our expansion motion has been pretty steady. We're happy between 110% and 120%. We've been right at 115% recently. Here's another cohort slide offering you a different, a couple of different lenses to look at revenue. Cohort of customers for a given year going back to 2011, and every single cohort is growing. This speaks to the duration of our customer life cycle and a consistent expansion.
It's, again, it's through applications, through expansion into different departments. You know, the longest are still growing quite healthily. Customers, no surprise there, 62% carrier consistent with the company about large custom fast. A couple different scenarios. You just had a customer. It's definitely supply chain processes, corporate processes that they automated. They do case management with tens of thousands of use cases. All of these are kind of typical. We see a 25x growth in that customer. A multinational bank has grown 38x. A federal agency 67x. This really shows that depending on how small or big you land, maybe the level of growth is a little bit different, but they all grow, and they all grow healthily.
The federal agency started out a little, but that's what university sometimes, and it really is. We talked about productivity in an earlier question. This is one way to look at it. Over this time period, we had a 56% improvement in sales rep productivity. This is merely the bookings per rep over time. That feeds into obviously sales and marketing efficiency overall. Over this time period, that's that first bar, but yeah, we had 20% and 30% growth at those subscription revenue milestones. This is really sales and marketing expense growth compared to revenue growth. We still target 30% sustainable growth in our class subscription revenue. In normal economic times, we've clearly been able to achieve that, and we intend on being able to achieve that in the future.
The long-term model, this is my last slide. A couple of different takeaways here. First, I'll focus on, in fact, the long-term view. Hello? Is this cutting out? Okay. The target model shows kind of our at scale growth. I'm sorry, our at scale margin profile, right? You can see kind of the evolution overall, but the gross margin line is really reflecting what we end up in from a mix shift perspective. Then we've talked about the sales and marketing efficiencies and the operating leverage we can extract from that. That's kind of reflected in that target model, 30%-40%. R&D, we've got efficiencies we're gonna get from our technical development center in Chennai, India, so we expect to get operating leverage from that.
Overall, that's the longer-term 20% view at scale. You might ask, We have had this question over time, what about shorter term? What's the path to profitability look like? What's Happn doing in the next couple of years? I think we've talked a little bit about it from a guidance perspective, right? With like the adjusted EBITDA guide in 2023. I've said that we're gonna target 10% of revenue loss for the second half of 2023, which is really a halving of our loss rate compared to last year. If you take that trajectory and you kind of continue it, we could look at 2023 as a year where we intend on... Sorry, 2024 as a year that we intend on reaching a breakeven point.
Then in 2025, this natural evolution of our P&L will lead to an adjusted EBITDA positive. That's a little nugget for you guys. I know we haven't really talked about that guide path, but that's what we're looking at right now. I think it's certainly achievable given the sustainable growth and then the more moderate kind of investments, given the massive amount of investment we did in 2022. We're definitely not, you know, in any way kind of forcing a profit number or anything like that. We're just telling you the evolution of the P&L. I think I did that in record time. Let me know if you guys have any questions. Otherwise, we'll.
No, no.
What?
Wait.
Okay. I didn't know we were doing this.
You do it.
Yeah. Okay. All right. You keep it.
I had a whole list of questions, Matt. We are running up against time. I was just gonna ask you two. One, talking to our marketing department, I was told our attendance is a new high. I'm sure you had a big day, yeah, for the past couple... How do you feel about it? That's it.
Yeah.
No. Look, I'm glad to be here. We're running a little bit late. Just a few minutes, and then we're taking some questions for everybody. We'll just.
Yeah.
I understand we hit a record in our attendance, so.
One other one is on your people who missed your keynote, what do you think were three key takeaways?
Great. The key takeaways from my keynote, architectural advantages that matter a lot. Our industry is converging. You know this, right? It used to be separate silos. RPA, process management, like, process mining, all these separate silos. They're not. We're in the lead. We have done this. We've unified a process. I introduced us and said we're a process platform. We're simpler architecturally and mission-wise than we've ever been. We are a process platform now. It's important that we achieve a simple definition because in my opinion, the importance of any company, industry or object is measurable in inverse proportion to how many syllables it takes to describe it. For us to achieve a relatively simple description is also like saying we're ready to be a major vendor. We're ready to address a major market.
If you can't describe what you're doing simply, it's not major. We had to find our identity, and that identity had to be concise. We have created a feature. I'm not gonna get too technical here. Created a feature called a data fabric that allows a dispersed enterprise full of data to be treated like the data is unified. It is effectively a virtual database. That's good. It's very different from our major competitors who have all issued this line of thinking, maybe because they don't like the open data strategy. I believe this will be a substantial advantage for us. As we found, a data fabric has synergies with everything we do, particularly AI. It will allow us to train AI algorithms within each organization. That brings me to thing number two.
The other top point from my speech is we have a different philosophy around AI. We think AI should be practical. It's not slide sizzle, it's practical value, and that's what we're aiming for. We believe in low code, approachable, practical value. Secondly, we believe that AI, the AI market, settle into more of a private AI than public AI. Public AI is the typical model that you think of today when you talk about ChatGPT. An organization sends data to Microsoft sends back AI goodness. There's a number of flaws in that model. The people I talk to don't like it. They don't like it because they don't want to disclose their data. They don't want to train Microsoft's algorithm. They don't want to inform their competitors or at least train a model that their competitors can use.
They worry about regulatory restrictions and possible loss of ownership over data if you send it. The data format of AI that's going to prevail is going to be a private first AI, open source AI package, and then train it internally and use it only for themselves. It's gonna be good at the things that their organization does. The custom AI is gonna be as commonplace in a few years as a custom application is today. That's my prediction for the way the AI market goes. Therefore, it's not a top-down vision, it's a bottom-up vision, and we're going to enable that bottom-up vision.
I know we're gonna have a lot of friends along the way because the customers I talk to are not anxious to send all their data over, yeah, to a big tech firm and train somebody else's algorithm. They like our vision a lot better, we're enabling that. I announced some features that are gonna help us to do low-code AI and to train private AI.
Fantastic. We'll open up for questions.
Wonderful. Thanks. Thanks so much for all the detail throughout the analyst day. Two questions as we just think about the longer term operating model. I guess piece number 1, what are we assuming in terms of mix shift of cloud versus anything on-premise versus services that's underlying that long-term model? The second part as we think about the opportunity with generative AI, all the investments
That you need to make. How should we be thinking about both near-term and long-term impacts to margins, especially on that gross margin line, given how expensive these workloads are right now? Thanks.
Should I take the first piece, Matt?
Yeah. Yeah, I think we're generally expecting the mix shift to continue in perpetuity, with respect to the growth rate of subscription being, at least twice as much as services. That's how you end up getting to 80%-85%. I do wanna maintain our margins, but I'll let Matt answer the question about AI maybe costing some money and, how that, how that would factor in.
Well, we're already working on AI, so it's not like it's going to change our cost model, right? We're going to continue the way we are.
Thanks. Andrew from Berenberg. Just on your comments, Matt, about public versus private AI, I thought were interesting, particularly given the focus on issues you're involved in. I just wondered, do your competitors feel the same way? Could they potentially leverage public AI in a way that you don't foresee? Maybe just a bigger thought, if you were to broaden your industry outside of those four which value private data, would that be an issue?
Yeah. Our biggest competitors are not chasing private AI except insofar as we put the heat on them and they have to. The reason is our biggest competitors are more interested in the public AI model because they stand to benefit from That was so obviously to our customer's disadvantage as the one where we take all their data. All right? I think that we have a natural symbiosis of interest. We just need to raise that message. I believe there's already some blowback. Steps toward a private AI model. I don't believe it, and I think that in the fine print is hidden in the fact that they're gonna profit from their customers' data. We need to be very clear and loud about this.
It's another instance of why this market so much needs a pure play vendor, right? Our largest competitors, well, it's good to have a non-big tech vendor in this space.
I had another. Appian's been more aggressive on go-to-market. Just curious if that, if you're seeing that in the marketplace, any changes in competitive dynamics?
Yeah, I'm not seeing much competitive dynamics change. I will say that Appian's goal is twofold this year. We wanna grow, and at the same time, we want to assert fiscal responsibility. So we mean to balance the 2 of those. We're not gonna be responsible by shrinking our costs or being smaller. We're gonna grow, but very carefully, and balancing where we're spending to make it effective and not spending as much where it's ineffective. That's our path. That's our path through 2023. I believe that by the end of it, we will have stolen a march on some of our competitors who kind of recede like a wave, right? Who can't so well modulate their costs and focus on growth areas, or respond to growth areas with growth.
Sandhu.
Good to see you, Matt and Mark. Thank you for hosting this Analyst Day for us. I wanna go back to pricing. I think one of the bigger questions, not just with maybe Appian, but with software overall, is the future of the per-seat pricing model in a world where we may need fewer employees, fewer headcount. How are you thinking about in a world where AI is becoming more democratized, you need less developers, and how does that filter through Appian's pricing decision?
That's a cool question. Thank you. I like to think about pricing. We have alternative methods for pricing already, which I would like to emphasize if it comes to pass that AI is supplanting regular users who would have received a license. In particular, my favorite way to price right now is by the app because customers will accept that. My other favorite way to price is by the amount of developer time it takes to create an application. We are refining the way that we price applications according to that. Either one of those strategies would be leverage proof, so to speak, and wouldn't disadvantage us for the emergence of AI.
I'll just add that, for a couple of years now, app-specific pricing has been the primary way we sell.
What is that as a % of revenue in terms of providing more business?
Well, I don't think we have the exact %, but, from a new deal perspective, it's kind of our default. Of course, there's legacy customers with a per user model that are renewing that we still offer, but, it's very common on the new revenue now for, at least a couple of years.
Majority of the customers are on the application-based pricing.
Thanks. Matt, I wanted to ask about the data fabric architecture, get a little bit better understanding of what that is exactly. We think about, you know, middleware integration. There's ETL, there's service bus, there's, you know, service-oriented architectures. There's been attempts to try to.
Have a sort of data mesh in the past. What does your architecture look today? What kind of technologies are you using and how is it different than what else is out in the market?
The main difference is that it is addressable through a unified semantic layer. By which I mean, it's more than just a set of connectors. It allows you to visualize the entire database as if it were unitary, even though we know it's absolutely not. That, to me, is the primary innovation. There's a couple other cool things. The automatic discovery, I love. The row-level filtration is very cool. The automatic optimization for performance tuning, so if you run a query a couple times, it shows that you want that query in the future, and we tune and put an index accordingly. Right? That's all good.
By far the most important feature, and the thing that differentiates us from the way others have done this, is the semantic layer representing your enterprise full of data as if it is one data layer, if not one data source. We're also interestingly able to both read and write to this, and others who talk about data fabric today are really just talking about reading. Like, we've got... Pretty much all of our competitors are nowhere on this feature, by the way. I mean, some will have connectors, and they'll call that a data fabric, and it's not even close. Others will have a kind of a reporting layer, a profoundly flawed reporting layer in which they're bringing data forward to do some kind of a report, but it's not flexible, and it's only one way.
For us to have a semantic layer with read and write is really startlingly divergent from where the rest of the market is. It's gonna give us an edge in AI because we're gonna use that to train internal algorithms. I really wanna push that symbiosis AI, the AI symbiosis. I also really wanna push the process mining symbiosis because this is giving us access to data across the enterprise. Process mining's greatest flaw is that it takes so long to gather your dataset. It's a giant project. It slows down whatever else you're doing. In both of these primary areas, I'm sorry, AI and process mining, we're gonna use data fabric to give us a speed advantage over our competitors. I'm super excited about data fabric for that reason.
The best thing about it is just how different it is from what everybody else is doing. I speculated on stage this morning that it could be because too many of our largest competitors are all still hoping to centralize data under their auspices and not yet interested in a open and dispersed data strategy.
Matt, Tom Blakey, you have KeyBank. I have similar question that I've asked about pools of spending before in a prior question. This data fabric, does it change the go-to-market? Does it change who you're selling to in the organizations? Again, that pool of spending, I might not be asking the question right, but are you changing the competitive set that you're attacking in terms of who you could potentially get monies from?
Yeah, that's interesting. You know, there are a few pure data fabric companies, and we do not today consider them to be our competitors because we're not pushing a data fabric only sales strategy. If we were, I believe that would change our target selling model. But what we're doing right now is to blend it with the rest of the offering and have the typical top-down, CIO-led sales process that we typically do. But I, you know, Yeah, that's where we are right now. It's, We're just combining it with the platform.
Time for one more question. I know, Matt, you have to go into another meeting.
That's okay. I'll take another. A topping.
I guess just on the financial targets you put out in terms of 2024 going to break even, would love if you could give us more of a bridge in terms of how you get there. Obviously, we have the target model, but where do you see the most leverage, within those line items? Then just thinking also about, I attended the Partner One program yesterday and how partners are going to be involved with all of the new logos and really getting them more up and running at the onset. How do you think about the direct go-to-market investments as you kinda make that pivot in the go-to-market motion?
Yeah. Let me take the first shot at this, and then if you wanna speak to it also. First of all, what Mark said earlier is our intent, which is that we cross break even sometime during 2024, and we are profitable in 2025. EBITDA positive in 2025. We believe that that is achievable because we have seen that when we reform our cost structure this year in our growth with scrutiny strategy, we have the opportunity to reduce some investments which are not paying off, increase others, and still improve our overall margins. The flexibility that that exercise has demonstrated gives me confidence that the rising tide of subscriptions revenue is going to cross the waterline, so to speak, sometime soon. I believe we could do that without any sacrifices.
I don't think that takes off anything from our growth intentions. I believe we can just find that degree of efficiency and then accumulate that degree of renewable revenue. We're just naturally gonna be on target. Again, that's an intention. Right. The next question had to do with partner logos, I believe. Could you clarify that?
Yeah. Just I attended the partner summit yesterday and just really involving partners more at the onset. It sounds like there's no longer, like, direct go-to-market logos and partner logos. It sounds like there's one unified force getting them involved from.
On the onset. Thinking about getting partners more involved there, how does that change the investments that you've been making in your direct sales capacity?
First of all, you're right that logos is our priority. Secondly, I should say it is a priority. We're balancing multiple priorities. However, logos is very important to me because Appian customers are very lucrative and loyal. When we attach-
Of the analyst day today seems to be moniker and sort of, you know, relegating it downwards, which I'm actually kind of happy to see. 'Cause sort of going back to the IPO in sort of 2017, you brought that lexicon to the market. I think in terms of investors thinking about what does Appian actually go for, right? You talked about being an end-to-end process automation platform. I guess the question is, has that not always been the case? I mean coming from your BPM heritage, right? The class of applications that Appian is going for are these cross-departmental, a lot of times heavy process-oriented, internally facing applications. To me, it doesn't seem like there's a search for identity. This is what you guys have always done. It's just way, way more important than it's ever been.
The question to you is that, is that the message to customers? Is that the message to market that you're not something to build websites for or simple websites for? I'm not sure if BPM is a bad word anymore, is kind of the spirit of the question?
I don't think process is a bad word. I said our intention was to provide low-code AI, right? By which I meant, of course, simple AI, approachable. The answer is yes. By the way, when we see how efficient it is in real-time, and we recommend that it would be better if you did this work instead of people with RPA bots, would you like to just switch over to Appian RPA bots? Well, that's pretty convenient. Yeah. Let's do some of that. By the way, would you like to use AI here in order to more rapidly respond and don't keep customers waiting as long? Yes, we'd like to do that. I think it's an organic process of accretion of functionality. We're gonna hit the customer by being a great process platform.
They don't know what they need past that, but we can ease them into it. Our upcoming diagnostic, our real-time diagnostic is gonna clue them into how they can be more effective and use the full basket of Appian's functionality.
Matt, you talked about private AI and how that's, you're really unique in terms of your ability to offer it relative to competitors.
Yes.
If customers still wanna bring in public AI models for certain tasks, here being sort of very open platform, right? Do we have sort of very equal... Pretty fungibly with the public AI models.
That is exactly correct. We are facilitating all uses of AI, public and private, while we advocate for private and facilitate that in a way that other companies do not. You could call our support for public companies will be able to provide. Our support depends upon having a mature data fabric, and our competitors do not. Not only do I believe private AI is more in the best interest or hi-highlights better a differentiation that Appian has relative to its competitors.
Okay. The Kubernetes migration, what's the importance of it?
it's just essential that we rearchitect on Kubernetes. Same issue, right? This is the way software is used, this is the way it's scaled, deployed. and you can't have to go through this transformation in which your software is modularized, and you attach different amounts of hardware to different parts of it. I see that as essentially the ante in the big game. We wanna be efficient, of course. We wanna be portable, and we have to be modern. We've put that investment into Kubernetes.
Matt, I just have one question. I know in your keynote you talk about Process HQ, why you're excited about it. I know it's gonna come or later this year.
Why don't you just talk about why you're excited about it? What is the importance of it?
Okay. Process HQ is Appian's vision for the future of process mining. It is based on the process mining technology that we acquired a months ago. Beyond what that or any other process mining technology on the market can do. It leverages our data fabric in order to fully inform a process mining-like algorithm so that at all times you can get process mining results from your processes that are running, like an instant X-ray of what's going on, what's working, how long is it taking, how long are customers waiting, what is your failure rate in any given process. You're getting real-time feedback of a kind that had never been provided before, by process mining or by any process tool.
Furthermore, you get recommendations on how you should change it, and the ways that you could change it are all portfolio. Because we have a total set of technologies, we're able to say things like, "What you're doing with AI should really be done with rules. What you're doing with people should really be done with RPA." We can make those recommendations for purposes of throughput or of accuracy. You know, we might come and say, "Look, you've delegated this to RPA, but it's throwing off too many errors. We think you need to scale this back to a more expensive technology." We can make that recommendation as well.
This is going to be an engine for intelligent insight into the way your process is running and allow you to react by allocating work to the right worker, all of whom are provisioned within our platform. When this comes online, it's not gonna be so far. I mean, as you say, it's coming up soon. Beta program's about to start. When this comes online, it really bolsters our claim to having a differentiated process platform. Not only have we included every step in the life cycle of a process, we've also got this evaluatory layer that steers the design of your process to the most efficient and effective work set, worker set to get the work done. It's going to be highly differentiative.
in short, it's our vision of process mining, but I think you'll agree, it goes well beyond that. It's fulfilling the promise of process mining in a process platform.
One last question. I just wanna follow up on Sanjay alight one. I know during your keynote, you said, hey, Appian identity is simple than it has ever been.
Yeah.
In that context, you talk about the value, efficiency, future proof and everything. When we last met this group, you know, we talked about a vision how RPA process mining and just features should be part of the platform. Now platform is complete. Can you just talk through that evolution? More importantly, you've met a lot of partners, customers, how is that resonating with them?
Okay. I think we're breaking new ground. Partners are going to be some of the biggest beneficiaries of what we're doing. The purpose of this event is to educate them. I wanted to be so clear in my keynote this morning. I want not just our customers, but our partners to know that this is now their secret weapon, right? We're serving an essential need in the market. We're reducing friction. We're taking complexity out of one of the most important things that organizations are doing today, which is behavior at scale. That's basically what a process is. It's just programming your behavior at scale. Well, that's a really important factor in agility. Organizations need to be able to do that without too much impedance.
For us to make that simple and put together the components that comprise the platform that can allow you to do behavior at scale, is to give them a major competitive edge. The partners we talk to are all looking for a way into the C-suite. They all wanna be a visionary. They wanna talk to CXOs and say, "I've got the next big thing. I'm gonna save you 30%. I'm gonna accelerate the next thing. I'm bringing you AI," right? That's what they're there for.
Like, their bread and butter is margin on hours, but their aspiration is walking into the C-suite and saying, "I've got your next thing." Now my point to them is to say, "We can help you have that next thing." You wanna work up the value chain, you wanna have that entrée, you wanna be a strategic partner, you need a breakthrough technology like this. We're providing more value, we're first to achieve this unification, it's something essential to our customers. This is now your silver bullet.
Thanks, Hugh.
Thank you.