The Q2 earnings cycle is getting stronger, which means your humble exchange crew is working with many public-company executives on the phone to bring your trends and notes. To that end, today we are going to check in at Appian, Paycom, and BigCommerce. We’ll then peek into the fresh ingredients that will inspire our recent dives into the BNPL world and startup competition. So, a grab bag today, and hopefully full of goodies!
Let’s start with Apian. I learned about the company’s mild pandemic when many companies are building apps using its low-code technology. Appian value at that time was about half what it is today. (You can read the company’s Q2 report here.) Since then the company has continued to push its cloud, cutting service revenue in favor of high-margin SaaS revenue. It is not the only organization that performs a related conversion.
But for our purposes today I want to talk about what comes after the basic low-code work that we have spent for 2020 excavation. Appian announced that it was buying Lana Labs, a mining company, to match its second-quarter earnings. What is process mining? Thanks for asking. Process mining is a software strategy that finds processes within companies that can be automated.
Buying an RPA service for your company is all well and good, but if you don’t know what to do automatically, you may not get the full price. All of these things are important for Appian because the company now processes excavation, RPA, and low-code tooling to help companies build applications under a single roof. In practice the parts work together with automated processing excavation identities, a workflow that is then taken over by RPAs and other automation – AI, Human so that companies can better perform their functions.
I asked Appian CEO Matt Calkins about the difference between a workflow and an app. He said they were almost the same thing. This makes the low-code world a little more serious. I’ve always wondered how many apps corporations might really need.
The same question seems different about how many workflows companies may need to automate. Looks like a lot, a lot more possibilities. Updating my thinking about low-code, this dynamic makes me more excited about software methods if it helps companies digitize their operations and automate root tasks to create more apps.
