What is our primary use case?
The use cases are for complex business-process oriented applications. This is the main use for large customers.
How has it helped my organization?
We're not using it ourselves. We're selling it and we are implementing services and projects for other customers.
What is most valuable?
The low-code capabilities and, of course, the business process management features are the most valuable aspects of the solution.
It has a very easy setup.
The technical support is excellent.
It's scalable.
The stability is good.
What needs improvement?
I cannot speak to any missing features.
The UI of Appian is more internal. Recently, there has been an addition of an external user portal for the customer-facing stuff. It's still coming out. There will be more features for external users.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Appian for about a year and a half.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Appian is very, very stable. Thousands of organizations use it. It's got 99.99% uptime in AWS. It's very robust. I didn't encounter any problems with it.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's scalable. It can scale horizontally and vertically. Some features like the portals can be implemented on Kubernetes, which means that they are scalable to implement.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is great. Every service request is answered within the hour. It's very, very exceptional.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I was an integrator for IBM BAW, Business Automation Workflow. And afterward, Pega, and then Appian. My experience with the other platforms was somehow not very good. With IBM, it's very complex. The product is very, very complex, and you need a lot of higher-skilled people to do a lot of stuff. Also, maintenance and management are very difficult. When you can go into Pega, the low-code stuff of Pega is a bit trickier to acquire. It is more complex to develop solutions with it. Also, the business part of Pega is less advanced and is more limited. You can't do everything you want there.
How was the initial setup?
The initial implementation is very straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex or difficult. It's a five out of five in terms of the ease of setup.
The implementation strategy is the Appian standard implementation strategy, as it is a SaaS.
The time it takes to set up varies. For small features, it can take up to two weeks, and larger ones can take months. Usually, it's a fifth or tenth of that time if a company is doing a standard setup.
The amount of maintenance depends on what your strategy is for deployment. If you're going into transformation and you're going to migrate a lot of business processes in the organization, you need to do it in parallel so, you'll have to employ enough personnel to do it. For a simple solution, two, three, or four people will suffice.
What was our ROI?
In one case it has been known to reduce process time by about 85%.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's a SaaS solution. The solution is moderately priced. I'd rate it a three out of five in terms of affordability.
Appian being a complete automation platform, the initial amount covers everything. You then have to pay for specific capabilities separately.
What other advice do I have?
We are using the latest version of the solution.
I'm a business partner with Appian. I'm an integrator.
If a potential new user is going to evaluate it, they should look at the whole picture, not at the specific features. All in all, Appian gives the best coverage of all the features needed for an automation platform. It comes bundled with RPA and VPN and low-code and process-mining discovery and document intelligence and portal for external users and the data capabilities, data visualization capabilities, which no other tool gives, gives them in one package.
They should look for and interview users of Appian to understand the product as well. There are a lot of different ideas in the market. The reason I chose to go with the Appian is the reason that it best suits businesses that wants to jump to the next era to perform the digital transformation in the smoothest way, in the most complete way. This is the benefit of Appian.
I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner