BPM software has 'nowhere to go' - says leading BPM software company

Appian CEO Matt Calkins explains why business process management software has hit the end of the road, and how custom applications will replace it

"I don't even use the phrase BPM any more," says Appian CEO Matt Calkins. This might sound like an odd statement coming from the head of a company whose business process management (BPM) software has for many years featured in the top right quartile of Gartner's BPM Suites Magic Quadrant, along with rivals such as IBM, Pegasystems and Lombardi.

What he means is that in a world defined by cloud, mobility, social media and interconnectivity, simplicity and flexibility are now essential features of enterprise software, just as they are with consumer-oriented programs. Packaged BPM software and its supportive ecosystem of expert users has become limited and restrictive and needs a radical overhaul, he explains.

"It would be foolish to disown it, but in my opinion the market is now much greater than BPM itself," he states.

Instead of packaged software, Calkins argues, the future of the market lies in custom applications, with organisations developing their own solutions to solve their own very specific problems.

"BPM was about action, and application platforms are about action and state, i.e. about the process and also about the data that supports the process, and if you take data as seriously as you do process then you can build applications," Calkins explains.

However, he says, the difficulty and complexity of writing and deploying custom software has always been a barrier. As such companies only tend to take the custom route when packaged software fails to deliver what they need.

"In any organisation there's the good software and the custom software," he says, explaining that custom enterprise applications are typically slow to develop and difficult to integrate, modify, understand and use.

"Software must be simple, that's the new world. It has to work everywhere. Anything that doesn't work on your computer and mobile device in the same way is going to look archaic in a year or two."

Asserting that the custom software market "is worth as much as the whole packaged software industry put together", Calkins sees the development platform as the key to speeding up and simplifying the creation of custom enterprise software. For this reason Appian is undergoing a shift from BPM software to application platform provider, providing a drag-and-drop style development platform that's delivered largely as PaaS, hosted on Amazon EC2 and Rackspace.

"[The custom software] industry is much bigger than people think, but in our industry we've never made custom software a very valuable proposition. But I think BPM is strictly dominated in game theory terms by this new industry and has no place to go."

Appian is not the only software company moving in this direction of course. Vendors such as Tibco and Bizflow also offer BPM application development platforms with a focus on social and mobile.

Calkins singles out Salesforce1 as the main competition, however, not least because of Salesforce.com's enormous marketing budget. But he insists that his company's roots in BPM software, in contrast to Salesforce's CRM background, will give Appian the edge.

"Salesforce1 is not a model driven design, which is an enormous deficiency. BPM is model driven design. You're drawing a flowchart that depicts your application logically. We begin with a drawing that you can drag-and-drop on to a palette, boxes that perform jobs, arrows that route work. Salesforce begins with the code. They say ‘you learn our language, you write it, then we will publish it to different devices'," Calkin says.