Pat Steinmann and Dion Beuckman of Enterprise Rent-A-Car presented on their Appian implementation; I didn’t realize that not only are they the largest rental car company in North America, but are family-owned. Steinmann is from corporate IT, and Beuckman is with an operating unit in southern California, and they talked about two independent implementations of [...]
The next presentation was from David Carpenter, Director of BPM at Archstone, a residential apartment investor and operator with about 2,600 employees. One of their main challenges was a high employee turnover rate, and the necessity to reduce the learning curve for new people. They wanted to move away from paper-based forms and manual workflow [...]
Malcolm Ross, Director of Product Management and someone who I once referred to as an über demo god, gave us an update on the Appian product. He started with their product development philosophy: flexibility ease of use comprehensive build for the future, which is how they position their web-based AJAX process modeler, in contrast with [...]
Nick Deacon, Global Head of BPM for consulting and systems integration within Nokia Siemens Networks, a global network communications services firm. The consulting and systems integration group, with a staff of 3,500-4000 and annual sales of 400M Euro, has the usual problems of managing a workforce of service providers, and were looking for a BPM [...]
Appian’s CEO was up for the only vendor executive presentation of the conference, to discuss Appian and its community of customers and partners. As a somewhat late entrant to the BPM market, they had only about 15 customers in 2004 growing to almost 80 (active) customers in 2007, and expanded from a primarily government focus [...]
Three days ago, I was in Rome — original home of the Roman Forum and the Appian Way — and now I’m at Appian Forum: Appian‘s first user conference. Samir Gulati, VP of Marketing, delivered some short opening remarks including the “Sandy Kemsley Conference Checklist”, showing how they measured up on my basic requirements for [...]
Last week and this week saw some very difficult choices for conference attending: I went to the International BPM conference in Milan last week, but missed Office 2.0; this week, I’m attending Appian’s user conference and Gartner’s BPM summit in Washington DC, but missing SAP’s TechEd and all my Enterprise Irregulars peeps (although I won’t [...]
I’ve been sticking close to home for the summer, but my fall lineup is about to begin. So far, I’m definitely attending the following: Business Objects Influencer Summit and SAP SME Day, August 12-13, Boston. This is an analyst/press event, not a public conference, but I’ll be blogging from there. International Conference on BPM, September [...]
