Item: Appian
Rating: 7
Author: Alex Peker

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The custom application developed in Appian is used by the production group of our organization. It is used to maintain and run the processes that allow users to generate marketing lists based on a comprehensive set of multi-stage selection criteria and apply statistical models out of predefined consumer audience dataset. It involves building a complex UI and communication with various outside systems through the use of web services.

Pros and Cons

Ease of building modern uniformed and dynamic UI.
Web services support.
In-place testing.
Ability to extend application with usage of custom plug-ins.

Unstable and sometimes forgiving and/or implied behavior for various complex language constructs, especially involving collections processing.
Inability to customize UI only for a specific platform (e.g. Desktop) given priority to the notion of the universal platform support (desktop, tablet, mobile).
Run-time error descriptions are not really helpful in many circumstances.
The low-code environment is not low-code at all if you need to build UI of relatively medium complexity.

Return on Investment

Ability to process jobs end-to-end increased by about 200% after building a tool with Appian.
Jobs turnaround time improved from 1-2 days to 2-4 hours.
Automating complex production jobs allowed less people involvements and improved resource utilization.
Production jobs statistics collection allowed comprehensive reporting to the upper management.

Support Rating

Tutorials and examples are thorough, still not covering some specific cases and scenarios. It seems that the language capabilities are much more comprehensive than they described in tutorials. Appian's turnaround time for the issues/questions is pretty good but we did not use it too often. The support group's answers sometimes contain gems or are sometimes are totally useless—nothing unusual compared to the other products.

Usability

Learning curve to create something useful and relatively complex is much steeper then it is described by Appian's marketing materials.

Alternatives Considered

Evaluated Dell Boomi. Appian is a much more robust and mature product in a similar price range. Other commercial products in this arena are much more expensive.

Other Software Used

Oracle Java SE, Redpoint Customer Data Platform, Azure SQL Database, MySQL, MapR, Hadoop

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need to build simple workflow like approval process, for example, with e-mail notifications, rejections, etc., then Appian is great. Or, simple page-able and searchable lists to display data to the user, then it's great. If you need simple data entry screens, even supporting header/detail capabilities, then it's great as well. However, do not expect to have a no-code or even low-code development environment if you need to implement even not so complex validation business rules. The ability to communicate with outside systems is very well supported through the usage of web services and other integration tools. Complex UIs and complex screen navigation maps are not supported very well.

Building Complex UI and Business Engine Platform with Appian

Overall Satisfaction with Appian