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Appian's Anywhere update
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by admin
Belatedly (actually about 6 weeks belatedly) I thought I’d post a quick analysis of Appian’s revised Anywhere offering, which was expanded on March 9th.
Appian has been offering a version of Appian Anywhere since February 2007, but availability was limited – in that you couldn’t just “sign up and go”.
The revised offering unlocks the availability of Appian Anywhere somewhat, and also provides an entry-level version for those without high-end requirements.
The Premium edition is technically the same as the Anywhere offering that was available previously; as before, the technology is hosted by Appian partner OpSource. Now, however, Premium offers a 99.5% availability level (with penalties) and is also SAS 70 Type 2 compliant (which is essential for those companies wanting to run financial management processes). Appian manages monitoring, maintenance, patching and upgrades on behalf of customers, and also offers each customer two Appian sites – one for “live” processes, and another for development/staging. Tools are provided to help customers quickly and easily from one site to the other.
The Standard edition is new, and is hosted on Amazon’s EC2 cloud and is positioned for less demanding workloads (there’s no availability guarantee and no SAS 70 Type 2 compliance). Unlike the Premium edition, the Standard edition incurs no up-front or monthly service fee – customers just pay based on usage. Customers can provision a new hosted server in 30 seconds, Appian claims; what’s interesting (and good) is that server provisioning is itself automated through an Appian process. The management tool that sits behind customers’ Appian Anywhere Standard edition instances monitors workloads, and can provision new server instances automatically.
In a conference call with Appian’s Malcolm Ross, I asked how the company managed to deliver both on-premise product and continuously updated hosted service offerings to the market, from one codebase. The answer is that since the initial release of Appian Anywhere, the company has moved its software development process completely to an Agile foundation – all Appian code delivery now drops complete packages of features monthly (using SCRUM). The difference now between Appian Enterprise and Appian Anywhere is that whereas Anywhere customers have new feature packages installed on their platform monthly, the Enterprise team bundles these packages up more occasionally into chunkier product updates that are shipped to customers to install.
Posted in BPM