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Appian taking partners into higher-margin opportunities
The business process automation player has refreshed its platform as it helps the channel navigate a changing market
Appian has updated its business process platform with more artificial intelligence (AI) use cases and compliance support, as the vendor continues to arm partners with the tools to go after higher-margin opportunities.
The firm has been charting the impact of generative AI (GenAI) to make sure its channel base is able to tap into emerging opportunities, and has also included more features in its latest incarnation of the Appian Platform.
It has added more Copilot support and provided users with the ability to gain more insights from data across their networks.
Sanat Joshi, executive vice-president of product and solutions at Appian, said it was using AI to improve the platform. “Appian AI Copilot empowers users to explore and understand their enterprise data more effectively, using natural language and fewer steps,” he said.
The latest launch of the firm’s platform comes against a background of an evolving low-code market.
Jon Lingard, regional vice-president of EMEA partners at Appian, said it had identified changes and reacted to ensure it was still best placed to support its channel.
“At the start of 2024, we anticipated a trend where our most strategic and global partners would start moving away from the lower end of the low-code market and moving up into the more complex business orchestration world with process automation,” he said. “After all, this low-code market is arguably the most prone to disruption with generative AI, whereby in a couple of years, AI will build the world’s basic low-code applications and processes.”
Partner support
Lingard said that as well as enhancing its platform, the firm was also making sure it was adding more support for partners.
“Many of our partners can see this and are moving to differentiate with Appian for wholesale process orchestration,” he said. “With this shift, we streamlined our partner resources and incentives to support this ‘up-market’ motion and focus on fewer partners.
“This consolidation is driving deeper and broader penetration into our Focus Partners to develop industry-specific solutions on the Appian Platform, repeatable sales plays and new revenue streams such as Managed Services, rather than spreading ourselves too thin and being ‘all things to all partners’.”
Lingard said the market changes it expected to emerge, and has reacted to with product investment, are being experienced by its channel.
“As anticipated, channel partners are now reporting difficulties at the lower end of the low-code market, which is extremely competitive and price-driven, compared to focusing on business value and delivering outcomes,” he said. “As a result of this, we’re starting to see much stronger qualification and business value alignment to minimise our mutual cost-of-sale, which drives a higher-quality mutual pipeline and less slippage.
“Our channel partners are more prepared than ever to walk away from bad business,” said Lingard. “It’s also clear from global macro events and local forces, such as a new UK government, that our partners are more cautious than ever about investing in new business development.
“They would rather focus on ‘protecting the base’ from churn and diversifying revenue streams. At Appian, we also intend to invest in more automation to continue growing our partner operations and go-to-market strategy, as we also strive to lower sales costs whilst maintaining great experiences, such as leveraging AWS Marketplace globally.”
