At Appian World in Denver, Colorado, the company stepped up its approach to developers with its first-ever DevCon. It gave the company an opportunity to focus on all its new products coming up. Some of those will be GA in 25.2, which will be available in June, and others are entering open beta. There were plenty of QR codes for people to click on to get on those beta programmes.
Opening the event, Gregg Aldana, VP Global Solutions Consulting, Appian, said, “I want to personally thank the more than 200,000 community members that we have globally. And I also want to thank the more than 9000 certified Appian practitioners.”
Those numbers are important because Appian doesn’t often talk about the size of its developer community or the number of certified Appian practitioners. It gave an interesting insight into the growth of the company, especially over the past few years.
Aldana told the audience that Appian is a development platform for the 21st Century. He told them, “Developers on this platform will be driving innovation and efficiencies on a scale the businesses have never seen.
“You will be driving transformation, orchestration and intelligence like no other development platform can in a time frame that will stun other developers. You’re going to be activating AI in a capacity and an impact never seen before.”
It’s all about the developer platform
To back up that dose of hyperbole, Aldana rolled out multiple clients and projects, all of whom appeared in other keynotes and sessions throughout the conference. This is a change at Appian World. Bringing in clients who have been working with new features in beta and having them tell their story acts as a proof point. It also got the attention of a lot of the attendees, creating a buzz around the room.
Aldana believes that the key to enabling developers is the Appian Platform. To improve the current platform, the company has engaged with more developers than ever with its developer survey. This year’s survey saw a 53% increase in participation from developers. Aldana highlighted two key findings from the survey.
- 97% say that Appian is as easy or easier than any other development platform. It’s about the usability, low code and the development tools.
- 80% say that they are building their career on Appian. That is a significant success point for the company, given the number of developer platforms. Aldana, however, wants that number as close to 100% as possible.
It’s easy to dismiss those numbers as typical of developer surveys carried out by vendors. However, the increase in respondents shows that developers are more engaged than ever before. It also shows that even before Aldana begins to remake the developer programme, there is a serious level of interest from the community.
The survey also asked what developers want Appian to improve. Appian has taken those responses and used them to define the direction of the next wave of updates and product improvements.
Four new innovations
Aldana chose to unveil four new innovations that developers can look forward to this year. These are all likely to appear as either beta or fully fledged solutions in the next release of the Appian Platform, 25.2.
AI Innovations
This was the area that attracted the most interest from developers. Rather than just pushing AI for the sake of it, the company has embedded AI into the business process. It doesn’t need tooling or extra overhead, it is just part of the process. That approach also delivers a new security approach by delivering guardrails for how AI agents access data and tools.
There is a new agentic AI RPA. Using plain language, the user is able to tell the agent what they want and the AI will go and work out how to do it. That is now in beta, and developers can sign up to be part of that beta
The Appian AI Agentic Agent Studio is also new and available as a beta. It will appear as a product later this year in release 25.3. Agent Studio allows users to orchestrate business activities through AI agents.
Aldana said, “Agent Studio delivers a new way to automate dynamic, open ended tasks don’t really fit neatly into a process model. You give the agent a goal in plain language, it gets access to all the tools, all the records, all the rules, all the documents you can feed it, and then it determines the best path forward to achieve that goal.”
The Appian AI Composer is a new developer planning tool that Aldana claims will take users from idea to app in minutes. The requirements, data, UI, and application objects are all handled by AI. It is also expected to go GA in 25.3.
Appian Copilot for Developers is designed to handle all the mundane developer work. The claim is that developers will be freed too focus on the impact and the meaningful part of development. It is described as providing developers with an AI-powered peer programmer.
Data Fabric Enhancements
One of the key underlying technologies for the Appian Platform is the Appian Data Fabric. It has seen a lot of updates over the last few release cycles and this cycle is no exception.
Underpinning how critical the Data Fabric is, Aldana commented, “I know there’s a lot of companies out there saying they have a data fabric. It’s a bunch of PR This is the real patented data fabric.”
What makes Appian’s Data Fabric important to developers is its use of metadata to connect data, wherever it sits. Data is not moved, repurposed, there is no ETL. There is also no requirement on developers to learn the data layer. It allows them to write data driven applications without spending time on data management.
This next set of enhancements will allow it to scale from 10 million to 20 million rows per record. It will also connect seamlessly to a wider set of data sources including, Salesforce, SAP, legacy systems, spreadsheets and documents.
That latter enhancement also drives another new feature that will be introduced with 25.2 called Documents as Records. The idea is that documents will now be treated as first class data sources in the same was as database records. It opens up all the unstructured data in the organisation for the next generation of applications.
There are five things that Documents as Records brings:
- Storing and managing documents directly in Data Fabric
- Relating documents to other data
- Creating connections and relationships
- Displaying everything in one consolidated view
- Applying record-level security
Developer Plugins
One of the takeaways from this years developer survey is that the developers were interested in plugins. They don’t want to spend time building complex, custom code to deliver simple high-value features. As a result, Appian is introducing plug and play capabilities to, in Aldana’s words, allow the developers to solve problems, not plumbing.
He said, “We’re introducing a new era of developer empowerment, advanced plug ins created, supported and maintained by Appian. These are designed to tackle the common use cases, integrate advanced tech and expand what you can build without writing the integrations yourself.”
The plugins will be in the admin console for Appian Cloud and My Appian for self managed environments. In 25.2, the first two plugins will be available, grid plus and the Microsoft Document Editor. These will be followed in later releases by more and more plugins.
UX Design Improvements
Unsurprisingly, developers wanted more tools to help with building better UX. To meet their needs, four announcements to help with UX design have been made. They are:
- New interface designer with faster real-time interactions: One of the focal points has been to speed up improvements and make real-time interactions smooth. The loading of grids, charts and other elements is now immediate so the user doesn’t have to wait.
- Wizard layout for multi-step forms: This is a brand new component that will make it easier to design complex forms with new guides on how to do this. There is a new library of templates and components and greater assistance with building the navigation logic.
- More intuitive design controls: These will speed up the delivery of new UI by reducing the knowledge required by the developer to create screens and forms.
- Smoother, more responsive UI components: These are part of the real-time interaction benefits.
Recognising developers
What isn’t clear yet is how Appian will better recognise community developers. At present, it calls out those who make major contributions to the community and gives them small rewards. What it doesn’t have is a programme to make people developer advocates. With all the new tools and capabilities, such a move would reward those community members who advocate for the new technologies and capabilities.
It will also have to decide what recognition means. T-shirts, caps and swag are fairly low level items, but any change would have to be in line with the company’s approach to merchandise. Does it want to develop a wider merchandise line? Will it expand the number of trophies that it currently awards into more categories?
The company is already showcasing some new UX templates developed by the community on its YouTube Community channel. But could it go further? There is already an Appmarket where developers can showcase utilities that they have developed. Apps are awarded badges based on functionality and maturity. What would be interesting is a greater promotion of this to encourage more community apps.
But, expanding that comes with challenges. It requires greater moderation and deprecation of older apps and those that are no longer maintained. If those apps are used by customers, it also requires a process to help them move to an alternative solution. How will Aldana look to deal with this? Developers will be watching to see what opportunities he brings for them
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Aldana has taken on the role of revitalising and renewing Appian’s relationship with its developer community. Launching a DevCon alongside Appian World is a good first move. Engaging the community in the new features and widening the beta programmes is another. The question many want an answer to is will this be sustained?
There is no reason to think it won’t. His energy is infectious, and he is very committed to improving things for developers. He wants to shake things up, and that promises an interesting year as his plans come to fruition.
Enterprise Times was able to spend time with Aldana and record a podcast talking about developers. That will be published on May 13th and promises to be entertaining.
