Appian Upgrades BPM Suite

Appian has introduced an upgrade of its business process management suite, adding tools that make it easier to build, deploy, use and maintain process applications.

Among the ease-of-use features in Appian 6 is one-click import, export and publishing of models, rules, expressions, forms and all other components of a process application. In addition, the upgrade offers application-centric portal views for end users.

Appian's software is a Web-based, integrated suite of components that include process, business rules, forms, content management, reporting, identity management, integration and collaboration. In addition, the company offers customers a repository that includes process models, services, form libraries, rules, and other extensions contributed by customers, partners and Appian staff. The ShareBase repository is available at no charge with a product license.

Appian 6's features for building collaborative, end-user portals include tools for creating interfaces that deliver personalized content, shared work queues and aggregated content from related systems. The design platform is built for creating composite and mash-up application interfaces.

For application development, the upgrade includes the one-click deployment mentioned above and the ability to scale for complex processes. In addition, the software delivers streaming data to dashboards and offers process rules that monitor all aspects of a process.

Appian 6, unveiled this week, is available for on-premise deployment or via Appian Anywhere, the company's software-as-a-service offering, which is meant as a low-cost entry to BPM with migration to behind-the-firewall deployment as desired.

Appian has a number of competitors in BPM market. Other vendors include Lombardi, Metastorm, Pegasystems, Savvion and Tibco.