Appian Corporation (APPN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Appian here at Goldman Sachs, and we're very pleased to be joined this afternoon by Michael Beckley, the Co-Founder and CTO of Appian; as well as Scott Walker, Director of IR. Thank you both so much for being here. We appreciate it.

Yes. Hello, Chris. Good afternoon.

Thanks for having us.

Of course. Of course. Well, to start off, I think most people are pretty well familiar with Appian, but just for those who are new to the story and especially Michael as a Co-Founder, can you talk to us a little bit about some of the major pain points you're trying to solve for customers as a leading low-code platform?

Yes, of course. So as you say, Appian is an enterprise low-code platform, and we're used to build applications and automate work in financial services, in government, in health care and life sciences and in manufacturing. We help break down data silos, help teams align all their resources towards a common goal. We help modernize legacy systems. We help bear pharmaceuticals, for example, tank site inspections, the reports associated with them down from hours to minutes. We help automate tens of thousands of manual labor out of processing, value-added tax claims for Deloitte robotics in Spain. We help launch new digital banks and services. We provide case management that allows you to connect your customer requests directly to your back-office systems without having to have that kind of manual labor that held you back from launching new products before.

Perfect. So even before the pandemic, it seemed like there was a shift where adoption of low code was really starting to pick up. And then, of course, we get into the pandemic, and there's -- we see this big pull forward of digital transformations. So curious if you could talk a bit about both. What was causing the structural shift in adoption of low code? And how has the pandemic actually accelerated adoption?

Yes, we used to talk about this generational shift that was happening already to the cloud to really modernizing systems with digital transformation, to allowing for more self-service. Customers don't necessarily want to talk to people. They want to be able to directly interact with your systems to get what they need. And that's true for your employees, it's true for your customers, it's true for your business partners. And so all of this was happening. And then along comes to pandemic, and suddenly, those time lines will compressed from years to weeks and days. And so it really gave a huge tailwind to low code. It really put us on the top priority list for people who are trying to bring a new product to market or just be able to continue serving their clients in new ways.

Great. And so in terms of use cases, you touched on this a little bit. But obviously, for many digital transformation needs, there's horizontal SaaS vendors out there that can satisfy some of those needs, but certainly not all. So where you all come in and when it comes to building discrete, powerful, mission-critical applications, where are some of those major gaps? I know there's many, many use cases. But just how do we think about the type of apps that need to be custom-built through a low-code platform and those that obviously can be taken out of the box by any horizontal as vendor?

Yes. So if you think about any business, and let's take a banking business, you're going to have a core banking system somewhere that's managing the accounts. But your products are different, and therefore, your customer service process and your case management of how you resolve those incidents and how you track fraud and abuse and how you just make customers happy is different because your product is different. And therefore, the workflow associated with it is going to be unique to you. And that's where Appian comes to the fore. It's so important in helping you not customize your core systems, which is expensive, costly and then prevents you from upgrading them easily, and allows you instead to create systems of innovation that work harmoniously with your underlying architecture. So in an insurance business, if you have a property and casualty insurance business, you probably have underwriting from Guidewire or Duck Creek. And yet, Appian allows you to connect all of the different business processes from first notice of loss all the way through claims processing, payments, financial systems, subrogation, all through a shared view of the data. And it doesn't matter where it lives. That's what Appian's value is, that we can connect your systems breakdown, those silos and allow you to launch a new insurance product even though you're not going to have to customize your underwriting system to do it.

Perfect. Then in terms of your vertical fit, I mean, historically, you have a ton of customers in government, ton in financial services, health care, other verticals may be relatively fewer than those big verticals. But can you talk a bit about why you've been so successful in those verticals and also the opportunity you see in some of those other verticals where it's still earlier in terms of customer count?

Yes, certainly. So your point is exactly right. Financial services, public sector and life sciences pharmaceuticals are our 3 biggest markets today. And I would say manufacturing is rising quickly. Other industries will rise quickly once the pandemic is behind us as we see more widespread demand for low code. In fact, we've built a workforce safety solution in the first days of the shutdown back in March, and that has allowed us to get into a lot of new markets with that rapid low-code solution that they can set up in days, and it's driving some of that interest in exposing us to new opportunities. But why are banks so ripe for low-code disruption? Well, I think there's a couple of reasons for that. The first is that when you're dealing with money, the processes that manage money are all high value. They have to have transparency, visibility and control. And you need agility to reflect the competitive landscape, where if you don't have a new financial product that your customers want, they'll move their banking somewhere else. And so Appian is ideal. We're not just building an app quickly, but we're building an automated business process quickly that leaves the executives in control of the strategy. While not having your business logic tied up in code, now it's low code, it's something that the business can control. You can change the rules that you have to our eligibility and enrollment for a new financial product. You can distribute someone else's financial product and put your label on it. You can do that all without being held back by your systems. You can compete, your business can innovate, and low code can make it possible. The other word I would use is compliance. It's very easy to change quickly and break a lot of things. Appian low code allows you to do it to change, to innovate in a compliant fashion. And so the stress tests on your bank are frequently done with Appian. The -- all the different financial regulators actually use Appian to regulate you, the banks and financial services institutions and all the leading regulators, and we're working on the rest. But it's a very common pattern when you have a high-value process that you would use low code for it.

Got it. You mentioned changing rules easily. So when I think about someone who's built a custom application, one thing we said in terms here about little code is you build this huge application and you want to change something very specific in an application. Sometimes, it might be easier to do through -- to regular build of an app through a programming language. But can you talk about what Appian has done to make it easier to go back retroactively and make those small adjustments even through a low-code platform?

Yes, there's something -- there's a lot of work that goes into making something that sounds so simple, actually simple for an enterprise acquisition, but the first is that the way we build apps is by composing them out of reusable objects. And so you could change one object, and it can be then inherited in many different applications that share that same common definition or that same eligibility rule, that same subprocess for credit risk analysis, and so that's a big part of it. The second thing is, we've automated the DevOps that take you from change to testing and validating the change and then the oversight and approval before that change gets rolled out in production and gives you the confidence that if you have to make -- or to roll something back that you can do that with confidence. And so to deliver more frequently, that's what Appian's automated DevOps provides you as well.

Makes sense. And so in terms of the value proposition that you're selling here, obviously, a company that -- everyone really needs more developers these days. So to the extent that you can take their developer community and give them a high-power platform like Appian, they can probably -- they can do more with less. So just -- I mean from a -- in terms of the value proposition, can you talk a bit about how that is resonating with customers? Obviously, pretty well. But at the same time, we still have sales cycles that are pretty long. So there's an element of education of the customer, I guess. So maybe you can just talk about those 2 things.

Well, it's a new approach to building applications. And I would say sales cycles, as we saw, go down. Scott can provide the data substantiation for that. But from my standpoint, what we're doing is not just making your traditional developers much more productive by eliminating a lot of the mundane work that they used to have to do and providing you with a lot of reusability. There's such commonality in what business applications do. They access data from different places. They present it in grids and screens, and they automate that processing of the work. And we're able to take a lot of that off of the shoulders of your developers and allow them to focus on value-added differentiated work. And as well, we're able to do something that has been really challenging in the past, and that's connect your data science teams who are fantastic at coming up with some machine learning algorithm directly to your application teams and inject that insight directly into your applications to do work better and more intelligently. And the last thing I'll say is when you think about low code, we're thinking about that opportunity to tap into the millions of nontraditional developers out there. So I think of the example of Health Canada. They presented at our government forum in December, and they were talking about how they built a COVID application, a mobile app for doctors in the field to be able to get emergency requested for non-approved medications to treat their patients where minutes matter. And that app was built incredibly rapidly, and it was built largely with first year apprentices. That speaks to how low code is allowing more people who are closer to the problem to be involved in the solution.

And Mike was exactly right. Our sales cycles in 2020 have been shorter in the sales cycles in 2019, and that's through even a global pandemic. So there's for a few different reasons. A couple of years ago, we really tried to make investments in sales enablement. We think that's been paying off. I think also as you kind of started the fireside chat with it is that low code is becoming more of a mainstream thing. We used to have to go in and you have to sell to a customer on why low code is right for this problem and then sell them on Appian. And we don't have to make that first sale quite as much, and we receive RFPs directly for a low-code platform now. All that being said, we're still working -- I think where our sales cycles used to be longer than a year, they're probably 9 to 12 months now. So there's still work to go. And we've hired a new Chief Revenue Officer, Eric Cross, in May. We just hired a new Chief Marketing Officer, Denise Broady, in December. So those are some definite focuses on them, clarifying the message, trying to cut through some of the noise in the low-code space and hopefully continue to reduce sales cycles.

Got it. So in terms of the internal champions of the platform at customers, for some developers, they say, "I'm a traditionalist, I want to build everything, bottoms-up, and I want to do exactly how I want to do it." But then maybe a CIO will say, "Wait a second, we can -- the output could increase dramatically if we get more if you're using this platform." Is that a fair characterization, sometimes the push and pull you see in customers? I guess why or why not? And just curious how some of the internal stakeholders are evolving of your platform at customers.

Yes, I think that's exactly right. I think that custom development by professional developers who just want the total freedom to write code from the bottom up is a big competitor to low code. And I think that it's just a matter of time before people realize that we're not trying to put professional developers out of business, we're trying to make them more productive and allow them to focus on differentiated code and giving you a managed -- a better way to manage that customer and limit where you're exposing that to the outside world. Because your low-code platform is a secure, managed environment that you can be confident in when people are using it, that it isn't going to be broken by some -- your least experienced, newest, least capable developer or a consultant that's on a project, and so you have the strength of the platform to keep your systems up and running.

Great. I wanted to touch on cloud for a second. I guess there's kind of 2 factors to this. Number one, you've got customers who are using your platform, and they can develop apps that can be run on-premise or the cloud. And I believe the architecture is flexible such that you can develop an app for on-prem, but that ultimately can be hosted in the cloud. So I guess the question would be, what percent of apps being built are actually for on-prem versus cloud? And then the second question is, can you give us a sense of what percentage of your customers are actually using your platform in the cloud as opposed to on-premise?

Yes. I mean the vast majority of our clients choose our managed cloud offering, and it is the same code base for both customer-managed and Appian-managed, and that means that customers can go in both directions for whatever business reason they might have. And that flexibility, I think, is a powerful differentiator, and it does allow us to tackle some of the most secure workloads where for their own unique reasons, they may want to stay off in the public cloud. But that is -- I think, Scott, you want to speak to more of the numbers that we disclosed in that domain. But...

Yes, absolutely. Year-to-date through Q3 2020, 80% of our new bookings were in the cloud. So that -- and actually, that's comparable with 2019. So that -- there's still going to be certain areas where people just aren't comfortable in the cloud. I think that it's financial services, maybe some in the Middle East. I think there's cracks starting there, I think we might see. But there are certain people who are just going to be more comfortable in their own cloud or on their own site behind their firewall.

Great. So shifting gears a bit to the product road map. You've got solution-based or applications now out of the market. Can you talk a bit about how those are addressing some of the more pressing needs for your customers?

Yes, certainly. So in our core markets, we have an opportunity to take what we've learned and translate that into solutions. I mean the most low code is to not have to code at all, right, to be able to take an off-the-shelf solution from Appian to quickly configure it. And we saw that demonstrated most of all with the COVID workforce safety solution we built, and that takes the sales cycle down. It takes days to configure, weeks at most and for the most customer applications of it. And so we're doing the same type of motion with our verticals that we're big in. So in financial services, with onboarding, of course. And once you've got the onboarding built out, you've built some core records about the customer and the products they're involved in, and then it becomes a natural element to move on to things like KYC, AML, more compliance, more customer servicing models. In insurance, we launched a connected claims solution that I mentioned before for everything from first notice of loss to subrogation and everything in between, and that's brand-new in the market. And in federal, we have a really great business in acquisition and procurement, contract writing modernization. So we have package solutions there for basically every stage of the acquisition life cycle. And so that's where we stand today. We have a vibrant road map of solutions to come, and I've probably left out a few solutions as well that we've already built over the past few years like case management for the contact center.

And for the most part, are these prebuilt, prepackaged solutions? Are they going to address a net new workflow that isn't being addressed by a horizontal vendor? Or in some cases, are you trying to create a better version through your platform that's competitive with what maybe some larger horizontal vendors are offering?

I would say it's directly competitive, and it's highly differentiated because what we do is so much better when you think about -- you don't have to migrate all that data into some single source of truth before you can get the value of the process. So if you're trying to modernize your bank and you have to first get all the data into that new cloud before you can get compliant and get automation, well, then you're looking at a long road. And with Appian, obviously, in 8 weeks, we can get you live with the Appian Guarantee. So it's definitely a different value proposition. As well, these vertical solutions, they don't have anywhere near the commitment and investment in making it possible to build these apps twice as fast every year that we do. And therefore, in the long run, you're going to end up relying more on costly customization to their code base that will make it harder to upgrade those systems. We're like our clients. We are a relatively big company now. We have sales force. We have an ERP system in our business. We have financial systems. We have recruiting systems, and we wrap those with Appian so that we don't have to customize them for our unique products and customers and business processes. And I don't have to access them directly, I access them through Appian.

Makes sense. So one other area I thought was worth touching on was RPA, and you all actually bought an RPA company. You have a partnership with UiPath, one of the leading RPA vendors. Can you talk a little bit about how these technologies come together, where they intersect? Again, I know they're addressed slightly different things, but just curious how you think of them working together.

Yes, we think they're highly complementary, and our customers were asking us to get more deeply involved in the RPA market. But to your point, we partner -- we still partner with the leading RPA vendors. We still integrate with them. And that's because to us, remember Appian's mission is to be able to combine all of your technologies into a single workflow. And so we have a database, we have document management, we have RPA, we have AI, but we also work with best-of-breed vendors from each of these different categories. We want you to be able to choose the right product and the right automation technique for the problem and to evolve that over time. RPA is a great, quick way in many circumstances to connect 2 systems through an interface, but it isn't necessarily the right approach forever. If you end up using that integration a lot, well, then it might be more expensive to use a bot in the long run because maintaining that interface integration, we change human interfaces all the time. But if we use an API integration and we connect at the data layer, then we can build a much more resilient, more cost effective, more efficient way of connecting those systems. It's the ability to choose on your own schedule, your own budget, your own priority by unifying them that is so powerful. And so when we bring an Appian, if you've got a UIPath bot, we can leverage that, we can help you discover automatically new ways to use it, we can track its end-to-end contribution in cost and value and return on investment to an overall process that RPA bot from UIPath is working on one element of a task in an overall goal, and we're able to see that whole picture and give you the true cost of work and the true value. And so it's really important to say unify RPA with human workflow that way.

Got it. So going back to one thing you said earlier, Appian helps to connect applications, right? And as you said, with RPA, with 2 on-premise systems, where there is no API written, you can use that technology to connect those applications. So how do we think about Appian as the glue for all these different applications while at the same time, in some cases, you're using RPA? Is it a -- it's like an orchestration layer? I mean just trying to understand, I take it from concept to kind of like the technology of how that works with other technologies that, I guess, nominally do something similar.

So with Appian, we give you a control tower in which you can crowdsource new ideas for automation. You can get people to contribute tasks that they are seeing right for building a bot to solve. You can input recordings of what people are doing from the desktop and to automatically create bots. You can document and register bots from any vendor into Appian so from any of our integrated partners. So you can then also register in the systems those bots talk to. From a CIO perspective, before you upgrade a system, you can see the dependency of what bots rely on the stability of that system, and therefore, make sure they're tested before you roll out and don't break a whole bunch of bots and workflows, and it's that end-to-end process visibility. Because to us, bots are just new workers inside of a workflow. That could be delegating tasks to APIs to sell processes, to humans and keep working that way. Give you a perfect example. This past year, when the small business administration launched the PPP program, the Paycheck Protection Program, they stopped taking requests from bots because bots are more taxing, they're more inefficient to integrate with, and APIs are much more lightweight ways to pass data between systems. And so they were -- RPA bots were overwhelming their SBA servers. And they said, "You've got -- we only accept applications through our APIs or through our human workflow." Well, banks that were working with Appian had no problem here because, of course, switching to Appian's API integration or human workflow was transparent, it was easy. But if you start from the perspective of everything is a bot, then you're in a world of hurt when there's a reason why the bot doesn't work or doesn't work as well.

Makes perfect sense. So when we think about customer journeys here, oftentimes, you can start with, you get the platform, you have the Appian guarantee, you get your first app up and running in 2 weeks, right? And then you -- okay. Fair enough. And then you've got customers who have dramatically expanded their uses of Appian probably to become more of this orchestration layer, which you're describing here. Can you give us a sense of what that expansion motion looks like today and perhaps also how it's involved, I mean both from a use case perspective and then from a financial perspective?

Yes. Well, I mean the point of the Appian Guarantee is to demonstrate that low code is a very efficient way to solve your problems, and so the expansion motion is both in terms of users and new apps and what I was describing with our solutions business. With Appian, we're breaking down the data silos and creating a virtual view of the key topics of your business: the customers, the products, the locations, the employees, the teams and the main business events. And once we've laid that foundation in the Appian Guarantee, it becomes that much easier to see how you're going to build onto the next process. So for example, we work with a lot of deal teams in private equity, and so we start with a deal record. And once you've done that, it's a natural motion to start building on more and more business processes to expand and grow from there as to how you're going to do, say, payouts when you liquidate a deal or recruiting new subsidiaries into an organization or how do you chase a new deal, how do you have that new deal start-up process and what's the intake flow for that. So it's -- that's the way we would organically grow. Of course, with business partners bringing us in, it's a very different sales motion sometimes because they have been working with partners on -- working with our clients on digital transformation projects for a long time. And so they will come in frequently and say, "All right, we're going to replace core systems with low code as our way to do it." And so if you're doing an SAP migration or you are retiring a mainframe, they'll come in and we'll start big and we can just go bigger from there.

Got it. Got it. So I wanted to touch on the competitive landscape a bit. I think oftentimes, sometimes the players get conflated. So it'd be great to hear from you, who do you see most in competition? Historically, you said it's been Pegasystems? I know there's other private low-code vendors. You have the whole no-code group, right, which I know you don't compete with. But then you have very large SaaS vendors that build low-code platforms tied to their core applications, whether that be Salesforce or Microsoft or ServiceNow, et cetera. So can you help, I guess, delineate for folks who you compete with? And why, say, what ServiceNow or Salesforce is offering, is not competitive with Appian?

Yes. Okay. A lot to unpack there, but I'll try to make it simple. If you go back in time, say, 2017 when we're the first company to go public as a low-code platform, we were seeing more of our traditional historical competition like Pega. Today, as low code has gone mainstream, we're seeing a whole new set of competitors as well, and that's all for the good. You see, to your point, Salesforce and ServiceNow as leading cloud providers in general that are in a lot of our accounts, therefore, they're likely to be putting themselves forward as able to do anything and try to expand, right, beyond their core strengths. And what they have are lightweight workflow tools that don't scale well to complex use cases, and they have a high-code approach to actually building things. They encourage developers to write code, whether it's in Heroku with Salesforce or you think about ServiceNow's core constituency is developers, and so they're constantly encouraging them to write custom Java script and customize the interfaces of the applications they build. Whereas we're speaking to the business saying, "No, you need a low-code approach," and we provide a lot more power in the platform itself to make it possible to do that without writing -- without falling back on high code that overrides and ignores all the value in low code and makes it harder later to upgrade, creates more security risks, slows you down, puts business less in control of the business process. And fundamentally, though, Salesforce and ServiceNow are victims of their own success. Their business model has gotten them so far by convincing clients to put all their data into their cloud. And remember, Appian's patented technology is in making it effective to link data from many different systems, and so we are fundamentally different. We don't need you to move and migrate your data to Appian to give you that value. And so for that reason, we'll be always differentiated from those types of solutions. And of course, you listed a longer list of other new entrants and competitors that are relevant in different submarkets but not nearly as important.

Got it. So is it fair to say in terms of RFP for larger deals that you win, that the competitive set is still mainly kind of get another dedicated vendors for the larger deals or actually through our -- is that component changing at all?

I think Pega, Salesforce, ServiceNow would be the top, yes.

Got it.

Maybe Microsoft more because they're a huge brand, but that's more low end.

Makes sense. Yes. So in terms of M&A, you've done a few acquisitions recently. I mean I could think about continuing to grow the platform, both organically and inorganically, maybe you can talk a bit about interesting areas from a technology perspective or even looking to grow the talent within your organization externally. Just curious how you think about it.

Well, I mean to be clear, Appian is an organic growth strategy. It has been forever. And last January, we made our first technology acquisition ever. So I think it was a complement that we're perceived that we're making a lot of acquisitions, that we thought it was important, actually, just on its own merits, to prove that we had this new capability to take advantage of our resources, to be able to seize an opportunity and make a strategic acquisition if the opportunity arose. And RPA provided that opportunity. We found a very complementary team, a very innovative technology, a very modern approach to RPA. So it allowed us to enter the RPA market a little late but come in with something CIOs needed, something that was scalable, secure, cloud-based. And what it was missing, of course, was our brand and sales force, right? But it was also a Java technology, and we're able to combine that with Appian low code going into 2021 now. So you have a really complete RPA story as part of the overall hyperautomation value of Appian, being able to quickly find automation opportunities and quickly solve that work with the right technology. And so future opportunities, I mean, obviously, not surprisingly, I'm still looking at AI technologies. I'm looking at ways to accelerate automation. I'm looking at ways to really complement the platform as it is. But whether we make an acquisition or not really comes down to, does it meet our criteria? Because software acquisitions are easy to talk about, but they're hard to execute. And we're interested in one thing, is does this help us, our clients deliver solutions faster? And so if I can find a team and a technology that helps me do that, then I'll be interested.

Perfect. I wanted to ask a bit about the partner ecosystem. I mean, clearly, this has been one of the, I think, drivers of the success you've seen more recently. They're influencing more and more deals, it's introducing your professional services mix. I mean so many benefits to the business from that. Can you just give us a sense of where you are in that journey in terms of adding PSIs globally? And again, as we see a little bit more competition come in, how important are those SI relationships to continue to show you new business and influence more wins?

If I can -- you want to catch your breath from those. Sure, you're exactly right. 2020 has been a really strong year for our partners. We have 4 strategic partners: KPMG; Accenture, which is one of our newest; PwC and Deloitte for the federal space. They've contributed 70% of our new logos through Q3 2020. The number of new logos contributed by partners is doubled that same time period in 2019. So we've worked really hard on partners, and we're starting to see it pay off. That being said, I think it's still early on. I think there's still work to be done there. And we're nearly not looking to add more partners. We think that we've got the right firms and those right SI. It's just now more about deepening the value within. As you well know, these partners -- partner firms are made up of [indiscernible] or more partners. And it's getting more partners to be willing to bet their careers on Appian and to continue to build those Appian practices, and that's really what we're working on. And of course, they're very helpful with -- as we see more competition or new entrants today. We're able -- when we're brought into a firm by a KPMG or something of an Accenture, we're brought in as a trusted adviser and a digital transformation project that they're working on, and they can put their hand up and say, "Oh, we know in a bank that Appian has done a great job of customer onboarding. Let's go talk to them." And that's been -- that's a huge...

You made the point earlier that sales cycles have been shortening. And so I guess has that been true to the same extent for brand-new customer wins as well as your expansion deals where they've seen the power of the platform and they want to expand? I mean -- or is there any sort of divergence in trend there?

No. They're also for new logos, for new customers, and a lot of that is because of partner sales. Partner sales cycles in 2020 have been 22% shorter than they were in 2019. So it's really those partners that are helping drive the shorter sales cycles, that and some of our solutions.

Perfect. I want to take one here from the audience, questions about some of your solution-based products that were launched to address specific needs related to COVID. And the question is, with the new customers that those wins have brought in, can you talk a bit about how they're expanding with you since? It's still pretty early, I guess, with COVID because we're still in it now, but just curious how those new relationships have grown.

Yes. Well, that's been fantastic, actually. First and foremost, the applications are built to be more than just about COVID, their crisis incidence response applications, and so they incorporate case management and much more than just the health screening and the specific COVID contact tracing that you'd expect. And so we expect many of them to be kept on by clients for that very specific application of just how do you respond to a crisis, how do you track the health and safety of your workforce, how do you stay open safely, how do you deal with incidents, how do you track facilities and their status. And so that, I think, will be a relatively stickier application than we would have expected when we first started building it. And I mentioned, of course, unfortunately, the pandemic is lingering, and we don't know, really no one knows, how long it's going to be relevant, but a lot longer than we had hoped. The second thing is because of the incredible visibility, these applications are sold right into the C-suite. The special committees were set up to deal with how to stay open safely or reopen safely. We have critical health care providers like Bexley Health in the U.K. using us. We had manufacturers who could never close using us. We had a whole variety of fascinating use cases including campuses, universities that stayed open. If you look at the University of South Florida, remarkable case study in the hot zone, managing to stay open safely, and Appian being a part of that, helping a decade of team of people not have to rely on heroics but having automation to address these cases. So that exposure means that people have seen how fast Appian was to implement, how fast it was to respond to their demands for new features. And it's opened up already new opportunities in many of these accounts to tackle new projects, especially once the pandemic does end.

I think one good use case example of the COVID app, one of my favorite is a top 15 global bank that they -- we closed the deal with them with the COVID app in just 8 days, which is unheard of to have a cloud MSA in 8 days, and then they were able to implement or to deploy and begin using the application in just 10 days, which really speaks to the speed of app on our low-code platform.

Great. Maybe one more from the audience here. Last quarter, you saw a really strong acceleration in cloud growth. Are you seeing faster expansion with cloud customers than on-premise? Is there anything different in the spending behavior of cloud customers versus on-prem?

No, I think there's not -- it's the same features. We haven't seen -- kind of as I pointed to earlier, the cloud customer, the cloud bookings have been the same in 2020 or 2019. Of course, I think the customer -- we prefer customers in the cloud. We're going to get the updates sooner. We're able to get -- we're able to support them a little more easily. I mean it is a nice differentiator to allow a customer that wants to be on-premise versus the cloud, but I don't think we see significant spend behavior changes one versus the other.

Got it. And so last question for me. Obviously, this was an incredible year despite all these challenges for Appian. And so as you think about keeping the momentum into 2021, how do you keep investing in the business, mainly organically as you alluded to, Michael. But what are your priorities to keep up this incredible pace of growth and momentum coming off 2020?

Well, it's, first and foremost, building on the places where we're strong, so in financial services and in public sector bringing to market our solutions, and that will allow us to really continue to shorten those sales cycles and reach our core audience, where we know they need Appian to help them be compliant and launch new products to be competitive, and in government to help them modernize their legacy systems for supervision and regulation. It's a huge opportunity in front of us, and I think we've got an incredibly motivated sales force. We've got great new energy and leadership in sales and marketing. And I think what's amazing is how we were able to pivot our sales and marketing so rapidly and effectively for what was a dramatically different sales motion and what is proving to be incredibly productive. So I think that we've got our table set well for 2021.

Fantastic. Well, I think that's a great place to close, but I just want to thank you both so much for being here this afternoon. Really great to get your thoughts and perspectives. I really enjoyed it and look forward to chat soon.

Yes. Thank you, Chris.

Thanks for having us.

And thank you for the investors and all the questions today. It's really been a fantastic set of sessions.

Great. Thank you, guys.