Appian Corporation (APPN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

And those of you joining over the webcast. I am super excited about the content that we have in store for you guys today. But before we get started, I have a couple of housekeeping items I need to go through. First, the disclaimer. You'll also find non-GAAP reconciliations for the financial information that we present here posted on Appian Relations website. With that out of the way, here is the agenda. We have a lot of content to cover. I'm personally excited, a lot of the stuff that we're going to cover here. As you can see, the first half is focused on technology and go-to-marketing, the second half, we have a customer panel, partner panel and a financial update. With respect to Q&A, I would request you all to save your questions towards the end when Matt Calkins will join us. For those on the webcast, you can submit your questions in the Q&A feed of the webcast link. With that out of the way, it's my pleasure to introduce Michael Beckley. As you all know, Michael Beckley is the founder, and he wears multiple hats at Appian. He's our Chief Technology Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. I've learned personally a lot of him -- a lot from him to talking about the technology. So with that, over to you, Michael.

Thank you. As you know, many of you have met before and the guys of Chief Technology Officer. About 6 months ago, Matt asked me to step in as Chief Marketing Officer. And that's probably not a normal thing you see, but it's actually the third time I've run marketing in Appian history. So it's not abnormal for us. And what I want to talk about is what plans I had, what we've executed, what we have to do for the rest of the year. Our clear urgent priority is always pipeline. And so that's been my mandate to double the pipeline. And the way I said about doing that was, first and foremost, to differentiate our messaging in an increasingly crowded low-code market. And so we did that, and I'll talk a little bit more about this later, but primarily by shifting from leading with low code to leading with process automation, powered by low code in our new Data Fabric. And that's been very effective already. And of course, to increase our market awareness. Appian has been really a quiet company for a long time. We haven't run massive brand marketing campaigns in our history, the way you expect tech companies to do. And yet, we've somehow built some significant scale and nearly $0.5 billion in revenue. And so -- now I think it's time when we have the ability to invest in building our brand, and now it's the right time to do it. So how do we go about doubling the quality pipeline? Well, first off is that targeted segmented messaging. And you can imagine as CTO, the first thing I did when I took over was a data-driven analysis of who buys Appian and why they buy it. And not surprisingly, I found that they were buying us to automate their complex processes to modernize their case management systems for digital transformation of mission systems. And so the natural conclusion was to think like an investor, like if I was a private equity firm that had just bought me, what to do is to focus on those high proclivity buyers. And so leading with process automation use cases for low code was the obvious answer, and it's been very effective. And the pipeline is already up about 44%. So that's the main initial cut. The second thing is to revisit our content and our website and our engagement with our buyers and their entire buyer journey, how recognizing that today's buyers are far more sophisticated and they have a lot more information than they've ever had before. And therefore, you need to speak to them more specifically about exactly what problems they have and how we solve them. And so the old marketing department was great at creating content. The new marketing department is creating technical content that exactly answers questions that a buyer will have about what's Appian's architecture and what is Appian good for and what distinguishes Appian's feature set from our competitors. And that is something that I was uniquely positioned to execute. You see that evolution on the website, and this is actually not even up to date. The website on the left was what we inherited, where it was all about people and more abstract. Now we're actually -- and we focused from low code to and work to end-to-end process automation. If you go to appian.com, you won't see these happy people anymore, you'll see actual images of the product because it seems obvious that we should be as software company showing you what we are and what we do. And so I would invite you to go to appian.com to take a look for yourself. The other major thing I did was take our biggest R&D investment and make it marketable. And that's the data fabric that you all know. But we've been working on this for over 4 years. This is a massive, massive R&D investment, our biggest ever and creating this virtual database that you heard Matt Calkins talk about this morning. And it's patented technology. And for years, we just called it low-code data features. And it was not having the kind of market impact and not driving the awareness and not driving the segmentation that we expected or needed. And so last year, I took advantage of the latest release, a bunch of new functionality to package all of those low-code data features up into what they really were, which is this differentiated data fabric and launch a new brand and do what people said we couldn't do, which was to get people excited about technology. In fact, our PR agency at the time told me that no one would care. No one would write about a technology without talking about it in terms of human interest or a customer story. That -- all they cared about was what's Appian's culture like and what are our DEI initiatives. They just did not want to write about technology. So I fired the PR agency, created this brand and next thing you know we have incredible coverage and data fabric and uptake in it. We've written about it in Forbes and all the tech press and it's now a whole category that's widely copied and emulated, you see. Companies like IBM running a nationwide ad campaign, claiming that you should build data fabrics, which is great because they don't even have one. But certainly, this is effective, and it's what's driving our lead gen. And people are clearly understanding how Appian's approach to low-code is widely different from the big tech. This is the complete suite, anchored by the data fabric, highly differentiated from other participants in the low-code market like the companies like OutSystems and Mendix that have nothing to say about process optimization, process mining and certainly don't have anything like a data fabric. They have an integration library, and that's about it. And so this is a highly differentiated approach for those most valuable low-code scenarios where you're actually automating a business process, not just building a simple app. And I've also refocused our marketing on our top-performing segments. So that we can more efficiently scale the business and develop integrated marketing teams that are combining our industry expertise, our customer stories, our PR, our analyst relations, around our clearly differentiated features for there are design for the needs of each of these different segments. So in financial services, we're talking about risk management, regulation, compliance, and customer onboarding, KYC. In public sector, you see our contract writing solutions and case management. In insurance, we have our connected underwriting solutions and our strategic partnership with Guidewire in life sciences. We've made great strides in specifically helping with pharmacovigilance, clinical trials, clinical trial startup and of course, deviation management. When there's manufacturing deviations, clients like Merck have saved themselves close to $100 million by being able to get back into production faster when there's a quality problem on the production line. So this is the kind of direct story-based marketing to specific buying personas that is working. And the next level of this is account-based marketing, taking those relevant powerful stories and tailoring them to the unique needs of each of our high-value customers. And what is unique about our approach to ABM is now, of course, we've injected a whole new technology stack into this so that we're using machine learning models to accurately score and predict the buying patterns and stages of our prospects. And we're working with our partner community to engage them. So for example, with a very large global bank, I'm not sure if I can use their name in front of this audience, so I won't, but 1 of the top 3 banks in the world, we've been working with for many years. In our ABM strategy, we involved a partner, and they were able to introduce us into another segment, the wealth management part of that business, something we've not been able to get into alone. So we're coming to our partners with a powerful value proposition. It's technology, it's dollars, it's the credibility of our past work in that client and differentiated technology, and they are just bringing us in and making that introduction. And so that is efficient ABM. Product led growth is another part of our strategy that matters, and that's driven by our Appian community addition. So we released this a couple of years ago, about 1.5 years ago, free unlimited access to Appian's base-level product. And sure enough, it's driven rapid growth in the community, over 200,000 developers and it allows for those highly qualified prospects to those developers to build solutions, prototype them, show them to their bosses, get budget approval and then come to us for a quote. And so when we see leads coming out of this system and directly into our new automated pipeline, we see fantastic conversion. So it's still another strong part of our strategy. And then yesterday, we had Partner Day here with hundreds and hundreds of partners. I don't know if any of you were able to see that. We are spilling out of the room. We couldn't even hold them all. And that's partially because of this new strategy we've been executing that, our go-to-market leaders call One Appian and driven by our new partner leader, Merck. And what I have done to support that in marketing is make it clear to all of the integrated campaign teams that whatever we do in marketing, whether it's a webinar or a physical event, a happy hour, a Tech Taco Tuesday or it's a white paper we write or an interview we're doing with the journalist that we engage partners wherever possible. And all this content you see is what's been created in the last few months in support of this strategy. So before we begin doing anything and spending any money in marketing, we think about who will sponsor it, who will bring their customers to this, who will bring their prospects, how do we co-brand it, and the results are starting to pay off. That's the marketing strategy. And I don't know if we want to take a few questions now, if we want to save them to the end. I'll leave that to the...

Save it to the end.

Save it to the end. Great. So I look forward to your questions, but it's been an exciting ride, and really happy to see what we've accomplished. And now for the CTO priorities, I'm going to turn it over to Malcolm. Here? Just getting mic where you are, in the back. I can't see with the lights. So our Deputy CTO, Malcolm Ross is going to take you through our AI investments. And of course, we'll talk a little bit about generative AI and ChatGPT and whether or not it can write Appian [ same ] code. And if we can teach ChatGPT to speak Appian. So -- and I hate suspense, so I'll tell you, yes, we did it. We thought it. So -- it's -- and it's pretty mind-blowing. It's pretty cool. What we can do now to make developers maybe 2 to 10x as productive as they were before. But that's just one type of AI. And I think what we've done with low-code AI that Malcolm's going to take us through is even more interesting. So got a clicker for you and it's your show.

So to talk a little bit about where Appian's focused on artificial intelligence. I trust a lot of you saw the keynote this morning, and it's all a variety of areas inside the product. One of the main focus areas that we talked about in the AI skilled design here is the intelligent document processing use case. So IDP is a very common use case that we expect a lot of our customers be asking for. This is basically the automatic processing of communications, documents and extraction of content across a number of large enterprises. The second area is AI for low-code. From this perspective, we saw a little bit of a taste, I'm going to go a bit more here on how we're applying it for accelerating the next level of low-code development. As we shared, we unveiled low-code really in our IPO back in 2017. And what we see with AI technologies, it's going to take it to a next level to break down the communications of how humans express their intent to build applications and software. AI for process mining, you saw our vision for Process HQ and [ Adam Glaser ] will be covering that in more detail in the keynote as well. And then AI integration. We also recognize that our customers will want to integrate to open AI into other AI services so having package connectors to it. At the top level, Appian maintains orchestration layer of all these, how do we unify these different AI services and in processes. So our OpenAI plug-in, as mentioned before, is available today. We announced this at the keynote to allow you to easily connect to these generative AI services and combine them inside the overall environment. And we lead this also by technology partnerships. So we want to remain an open platform that allows our customers to not have to be locked into whatever Appian provides, but orchestrate services from Box, Google, AWS, Azure, partners like Guidewire to have a layer that sits over all these different environments. On the case study, a Guidewire perspective, this is a very important go-to-market for us in the insurance space. Guidewire, as you may know, is a leading insurance provider. We have a strong relationship with them. We were at their event last October, where the CEO was talking about this to allow us to amplify our insurance go-to-market models with the integration to the Guidewire platform. It's a high-demand asset we see from a number of our customers in the insurance space. And going on, of course, I'm going to dive into a little bit more detail on our AI strategy and show off some specific areas. Where we see our market advantage and specifically the AI skill designer, a little bit more depth on where we're going there and also the generative AI features that we're going to be -- give you a preview of what Mike is going to actually show stealing your thunder, I get a mic here. But where we see our AI advantages is first going to a Gartner report. As a lot of you know, maybe Appian has been using that low-code [indiscernible] for many years. It has been a great amplification for us. But the low-code phrase, it's safe to say it's commoditized. I don't know of any enterprise vendor who I think is relevant if they don't have a low-code facade on their product. To me low-code is like cloud. Where -- when cloud was launching in the 2000s, it just made sense economically for our customers. You can have a great amplification effect of adopting cloud services and not spinning building your own data centers. Back in the day I work at, Marriott Corporation as a consultant. And I remember, we had a huge data center in Rockville, Maryland that through great cost they invested and built in. And now, of course, they're all running inside cloud operations. Low-code in that same sense is about customer value. How can I get customers to adopt the software as easy as possible to gain value. A high code experience just sits in the way of customer value. Now where we've been in low-code is we're right emerging from as Gartner says this period of low-code for IT democratization. That simply means that low code is a tool that's being adopted by almost every single enterprise. The focus of low-code, as Gartner says, is moving towards what they call hyperautomation. That's a proprietary Gartner turn. But what they're talking about is specifically the unification of automation technologies and a holistic process, that's hyperautomation, which I see we're right here right now. This to Gartner is mainstream adoption. So I think we're at the cusp of capturing that market interest in hyperautomation as we plan our product. As Matt said, we imbue AI in all aspects of our entire platform, from our AI Copilot for design time guidance to back in AI services, which are unknown to our customers, they just automatically tune things behind the scenes in our new AI skill designer. And then we allow them to build applications that imbue AI across their automations, taking in Appian's native AI services for claims, for contract writing, for customer communications and accelerating those through automations. We also feel that we have a distinct advantage in our data architecture. Matt got into this in the keynote session this morning. And our competitors are basically trying to push customers towards this. They're saying, please move your data into our cloud, and then you can build applications around it. Our opinion is that, that's just an impractical request by customers. They're going to have Workday. They're going to have NetSuite. They're going to have custom-built systems. They're not going to be able to replace them with a platform or platforms. They need to be able to connect those systems. So we feel like we're on top of this market with a data fabric architecture that connects that data and makes it a holistic model. Now this also gives us an AI advantage because this is what you need for AI. I need to be able to see that entire scope of enterprise data so I can use that to train AI models. So that's where we're going to be going with us is really using that data fabric as a competitive edge to really broaden the scope of how we can train the AI services to every single piece of data across the enterprise. And how this works, of course, as [ Anelise ] showed in the keynote is we connect data. So we don't force our customers to put data in the Appian database, which you do provide but they can simply connect to Salesforce. We have a low-code connection right there. They can connect to SharePoint, connect to Oracle, and now they manage this as one holistic data model. So it makes it amazingly easy now to just work with the entire enterprise data set without having to worry about costly API integrations between systems. And something unique that also Matt highlighted here is that security and optimization layer inside the system. The security layer I've had many conversations with CIOs about this. I always challenge them to like tell me the product that you can do this in without our data fabric. And the use case here specifically is -- I'll take an example where I have maybe a customer information, customer tiers, regions and sales force. I have order information over here inside the SAP environment. And I have employee information in maybe active directory or some employee database like Workday. I want to take employee information and say, well, I only want the employees in the United Kingdom to be able to see customer orders that are in the United Kingdom as well. So that requires them to say, well, I need to take regional information about an employee, map that into metadata over inside the customer information, inside Salesforce, then also map that over into the Oracle system and creates a security model that bridges that data fabric. So I can restrict the data inside the system to make sure people only see the data they need to see. This also is important things like GDPR compliance, other areas where you need to create the secure data layer across that composite data. Appian, I think, has a distinct and unique advantage here. And then behind the scenes, what we're doing with our AI data model is we're optimizing it continuously. When you build an application in Appian, you might build it one way the first day. So for example, I might build a pie chart. That pie chart aggregates data on a specific metric or column. Now in the old days before a platform like this that did a Data Fabric, if I was a developer, I would need to say I want to build that pie chart. And now I want to make sure that pie chart doesn't take 10 seconds to render. Well, I need to go talk to a DBA, that DBA then team to sell them, "Hey, can you tune this data model, apply index or review or things that DBAs do to tune the data model." Three days later, they get back to the developer and say, "Hey, I improved the data model. Can you tell me how that's working for you?" That slow cycle just delays that entire process. What we've done in this layer is provide automation, artificial intelligence to intelligently detect how the developers are building software in the Appian platform. We know how they're manipulating data in the data fabric. We automatically reshape that data inside the back-end system, completely eliminating the need for DBA. There are no views. There are new indices. The database is now connected to the intent and now it automatically changes the data model based on the intent. So diving to AI skill designer. We also have a big bet that while public AI is getting a lot of the attention in the marketplace, the challenges enterprises will face is how do they distinguish their business using artificial intelligence. Whether they're financial services, insurance, trucking company, AI needs to be imbued into every single business. And if they're using a public AI service that everyone else has access to, how are they going to distinguish themselves from a competitor? So there's going to be a pressure for all those different businesses to become AI-led businesses as well. To figure out the best routes for trucking, to figure out the best way to process claims that actuarian maybe was doing before, the best way to onboard a customer and financial services using AI models. So we believe there's going to be a focus really on private AI that allows them to easily train on their data sets and build AI models that are unique and never share to their enterprise. And they're going to need a platform that satisfies that. That allows them to securely develop those AI models. And that's why we launched the AI skill designer. So as we said, the AI skill designer, right now is focused on the use case of intelligent document processing for e-mail classification, document extraction and document classification. This is the first iteration of it. We intend to continue to develop on this to build this out even further. What we've done in the first use case here is so remove the need for data scientists, I know the differences in AI algorithms. So instead of having to know what AI algorithm is best for what use case, we focus just on the use cases. We know those AI algorithms already and we make it easy and intuitive for our customers to simply choose the use case they want to apply the right algorithm too. Behind the scenes, we have a net [ neurograpengine ] that's automatically trained for that specific use case. Next, they're going to basically train the information through intuitive screens. All they do is upload their data sets. Now for training e-mail, they simply upload all the e-mails. This is a specific type of e-mail, maybe it's customer onboarding. Maybe I have another type of e-mail, which is going to be multiple types like federal contracts, analyst e-mails. I can set all the different types of e-mails I have. We will use natural language understanding to look at those e-mail content and identify which e-mail was the intent of which one. Why do you do this? Well, through artificial intelligence, we can automate the routing of communications. If you're a business dealing with hundreds of thousands or millions of customer communications every single year, you can use artificial intelligence to triage those and route them instantaneously using AI models. And of course, how you do this is simply drag and drop and place those inside the overall flow. So it's a low-code experience. We're basically saying, well, here's my process for ingesting an e-mail. And then I want to classify the e-mail. They want to take the documents, figure out what they are and extract the content from it and load it inside the system, all automatically inside the system. And of course, as well, you can go back and measure the performance of those AI models over time to see how effective were they, what was the percentage gain inside the system. Now all the talk also is about generative AI and the close out of this section, generative AI is really interesting. I'm sure -- has everyone played with ChatGPT already, right? I still find people who haven't heard about it yet, so it's kind of odd. But what we've been doing behind the scenes is teaching these large language models through some custom access we have, the nature of Appian's sale. So what you're looking at right here is the declarative expression language that back ends the Appian low-code experience. So when our customers are dragging and dropping and building UX, the machine behind the scenes understands it as this expression language. And this is what we use as a single point for training AI models. So what we've been doing is -- this is all, again, experimental prototype work that we're working right now is how do we maybe extract these sales expressions and teach the large language model how to properly understand the low-code experience as well as create embedding vectors that numerically describe and represents sale expressions. Now this is the machine translation that occurs in the AI model. It creates numerical probability vectors that are going to basically say, what's the probability of the name of this function being this and its correlation to other functions with a specific intent. So this is kind of the machine representation of artificial intelligence. What does this look like? Well, we take these features and the AI structure and then manifest them in productivity tools in the low-code design experience. So here, we see, well, if I just want to search for information, I can type a natural language search and using artificial intelligence, it automatically finds all the design objects in the IDE that correlate to that natural language. Before, if you know search, oftentimes a keyword base and said using key words, I just type whatever, hey, can you find all the things that are about this, and it goes ahead and finds those. Simple tool. Another example inside of here, let's go ahead and copy some sale code, what we call here, this is expression language and then ask it to generate natural language descriptions. Another example. This is often called documenting an application, how do I create documentation and natural language that describes what the software does. Again, achievable by having this training model on Appian's design framework and then having it naturally describe that context. Let's do a little bit more. Maybe we want to have an AI Copilot inside the interface designer. And this interface designer, we want to -- instead of having to prescriptively write a rule, we just want to have it tell us what you want to do. You want to calculate something, please give me a tax calculation for the state of California. But in this case, let's just go ahead and type and say, please give me the list of all service requests, which refer to equipment installations of a sub-location of warehouse. So it's a complex query and then it just automatically generates the proper code for you based on that query. And again, this is the machine representation, the expression language, but all of this is represented in the Appian product from our end customers as a low-code design facade that we see right here. So automatically, during what I would normally do as a low-code developer is point and click and select all the data I want to filter, instead, I just naturally -- natural language [indiscernible]. Cool stuff, but let's maybe combine it a little bit more. So then we are having some fun in our experimenting engineering side. How can we maybe combine large language models with other things we do, like AI document understanding that we just talked about. Well, Appian knows what documents are, we can extract the content from it. And then also a unique feature of Appian is that we can do real-time code validation. So we can tell you whether a software application is going to run or not and tell you all the errors in it. Well, if we don't -- instead of telling us human, what if we created a loop here, that automatically told the large language model, hey, correct yourself. Hey, this is wrong. This is wrong, And then combine it with a document understanding. Now let's see this at an end-user experience. So I might want to say, maybe I work for this company called Moller, and I want to build a new digital form. I have my branding here, but I need to fill in all this content. And the content I want is a warranty claims information. So they have this complex PDF form. So through document understanding and natural language where I give a description of make all the section headers title green, it automatically scans the entire document and build the entire experience for you. So it's digitizing this PDF into an application that can be used right away. We're also writing the sale code dynamically and then automatically structuring it properly. So it's validated in real time, you never see a air message. So very cool stuff. And another final kind of demo here. Another exploration of some of the other things, actually some more tomorrow. But we've been working on a predictive core restructuring algorithm that we can also combine with the data fabric. This is just going to try to make it easier to query the data. So we'll see a demo here first and then combine it with a large language model to introduce a business intelligence capability across the data fabric. So imagine, again, they have a data fabric, it rolls up all the data in enterprise and this one object I can then query, and then as I want to query it, this predictive querying language predicts kind of what the next object is you want. It's a bit prescriptive, but it makes it very intuitive for basically a nonskilled user to structure the query and then Appian uses intelligence to automatically know the best way to represent that data, whether it's a single value, a pie chart, a bar chart. And then they have a low-code design experience a point-and-click configure to fine-tune that right here. Kind of nice. It's predictive. It's not natural language yet. But what if we then talk to the natural language system, how to basically understand this query. So one of the challenges is, if I say some of. Well, how many different ways can I say some of? Please tell me how many, how many are there? What's the count of? Can you just tell me what -- how many customers I have. So there's lots of different ways through natural language to express that. So then we can correlate natural language to these key objects inside of here. And look, sorry, I actually didn't have that one. You'll see that one at a keynote tomorrow. So what that's going to do is essentially is allow you to automatically, these natural language that correlates this to calculate all these individual elements and generate this. So this is all, again, to probably summarize prototype work that we're working on around generative which is going to have an amplification effect of the speed to value for building applications in AI. And then also as we sell the AI skill designer using AI inside the applications to automate more routine from our customers. So with that, questions? Or pass it off to Suvajit as our next presenter.

Yes. I mean that's all. That's a pretty deep technology road map around AI. Just curious it's all very new, but especially when it comes to generative AI, but how are you guys thinking about monetization? Is this going to be kind of table stakes for a lot of companies to embed or just...?

Well, I mean, going back to those AI advantages stuff, I think in the long term, we offer our software as a platform, a platform for our customers to build innovations on. So it's a matter of how well does that platform satisfy their needs, prepare them to create AI innovations. So the first thing really is around the data fabric. That's a distinguishing quality because data is the lifeblood of AI. If you don't have a good wrangle of your data, you can't create good AI models. And we believe that data fabric is going to be distinguishing element. The other side is, we are the owner of our own low-code framework. So we have a lot of -- if I go back to the sale areas like here, for example, this declarative language is unique to Appian. It's not only our own language, which allows us to manipulate it and then create AI innovations on top of it, but also as a source of many of our patents around the overall low-code product. Almost all of our other competitors are using things where they're just using JavaScript, HTML, public source. I would say this is going to be very hard for them to distinguish competitively using a platform of logic expression that they don't really own specifically. So I think this is also part of our secret sauce that's going to give us that competitive edge. And then, of course, finally, Appian is known as a low-code vendor right now. we're known as automation vendor. We have that market brand cachet that I think will be very attractive to customers as far as their correlation of expectation of these skills to what we're providing as well. If that makes sense to question.

This is Jacob Roberge with William Blair. You talked about this morning during the keynote, a lot about private AI, and you mentioned it a few times here. What's differentiated about that? And is the data set that your clients are giving you large enough to really train these models off of when you're going up against those public AI models that might have a much, much larger data set because the data is endless versus your private AI model.

Well, the -- it's not -- to understand private AI, it's not our private AI model. It's the expectation that customers are going to want private AI. So the difference between a public AI service, which exactly as you say, has a huge data model is that it also is a huge generic AI model. It's not representative of that company's unique business. So that company's unique business, they might have millions of customer communications every single year, which never go into that private AI model because of there private communications with their customers. So how can they create trained models on their private data such as e-mail communications, while making sure that they're not just sharing that with a public service. So our anticipation is really that while these public AI services do become useful at a generic sense, a great example is natural language understanding because we all hear, I think, speak English. So having an AI model that also understands English is useful for everyone. But how many of you are medical experts? That's proprietary knowledge in a specific person. So that's kind of an equivalent of unique knowledge that enterprise has and how can they create those custom AI models on their specific knowledge, which is what we call private AI. And so private AI is really a motivation by customers to be able to differentiate using AI but not relying on public services by having low-code tools to build those proprietary AI models. Does that make sense? So other questions? To you, Suvajit.

All right. For the next 20 minutes or so, I'll talk about our platform and some of the unique differentiators. So first, just a few simple contextual things. You hear all these phrases, high code, low code, no code, what does all that mean? So Appian actually does all 3. So we are a low-code platform in the sense that almost everything in Appian is done by drag and drop, point and click, no computer science is really required. And with our solutions, which I'll talk about in the end, it's no code. You don't even have to use the platform. You basically get a solution and install it and configure it. And we do have ways to extend Appian to do high code. If necessary, if you need a specific interface component that we don't have, you can write it to yourself, you have an SDK, so it allows that escape hatch. Same thing on the server side, we have plug-ins, and that will allow you to write, say, some Java code that you need to access some legacy system. So we kind of have that as well. But we allow you to integrate all 3 of these, but it's primarily a low-code experience. So if I had to summarize, so first of all, I've been at Appian for 10 years. And as I talk to customers and I met a prospect earlier today, the simplest way I found to explain what Appian does is that we allow people and data and processes to work seamlessly together on this unified platform. And there are 3 sets of people that touch Appian. First at the bottom left are the users of Appian apps. So once you build an Appian app, whether you do it a partner does it or our services team does it, people come in and use those apps many hours a day. And we hope that they find Appian apps to be -- help them. They'll say that it's easy, it makes to be productive. That's what we love to hear. Those apps are built by Appian developers. They do require training and we prefer certification. And we hope that Appian developers, if you ask them, and there are many of the conference. Hopefully, they'll say that Appian is both fast and powerful. It's actually hard to be both. Some of our smaller competitors, they might even be faster. Some of our bigger competitors might even be more powerful. We really feel that we're right down the middle, like we are very powerful, big customers can build whatever they want. And we have this like the Appian guarantee that we put our money where our money is with speed. We say that in 2 months, 8 weeks, we will build you an enterprise app and deliver it to you. So we're doing that. And then another thing that happens with Appian is that once you build the first app, people usually are suspicious. Like you're telling me in 2 months, you'll give me an app because their experience is that every IT project, they'll go and ask about, hey, how long does it take? The answer is almost doesn't matter what the project is 3 to 4 years, and I can start for another year. And by then, you'll probably be on the next job, but it doesn't matter. So we -- they don't actually believe that in 2 months, they'll get an app. And once they see that, they go, "Oh my God." And then that's why our retention radiation is as high as it is. people start building more and more apps on Appian. And these are not distinct sideload apps. They're all connected at the platform. And then administrators basically upgrade Appian, hopefully once a quarter, if you're on cloud or maybe twice a year if you're self-managed. But they stay current with Appian and all these apps continue to work well together. So this is a busy chart that just shows that we have millions of lines of code inside of Appian. It's a 20-year-old technology that's matured with almost 1,000 customers, but these are the 4 pillars that I'd like to explain what does Appian provide. You've heard about the data fabric. So that's the starting point often, that we will layer on to your enterprise a set of what we call records and they allow you to bidirectionally get data into Appian, where you can do things to it and then you can write it back to where it came from. We have a lot of automation technologies. You've heard about the document processing for e-mails and paper. You heard about RPA. When you don't have APIs, it allows you to [ bot screen scrape ] those screens. And then we also have a lot of integration technology on the server side. And we actually prefer that to bot. So I don't use a bot when there's an API, and we have 15 years' worth of technology that allows you to integrate with whatever is out in the enterprise. And then the total experience is about building an app in Appian, and I'll go into a little bit more detail about how you can build it once in Appian and through our patented technology, it runs everywhere. It runs on all browsers, smartphones, tablets, Android, iOS, whatever users prefer. And the latest addition to our portfolio has been the mining technology. So mining is, again, not new. It's kind of like RPA. RPA used to be called screen scraping, and then it was an amazing marketing gig. They pulled it off. They call it bots and became worth billions of dollars. With mining, again, it's a 20-year-old technology, but now we believe that it's ready for transformation. So instead of having a mining vendor such as Celona, they'll come in and spend months, if not a year, looking at your enterprise, interviewing people, sucking in data, then they'll show a crazy picture, nobody can comprehend and they'll leave you with a report to tell you all your problems. And then it's up to you to figure out what to do with them. And then you might hire an Appian or ServiceNow or Salesforce to try to implement some of those issues, whereas our vision is not that at all. We believe that having the sum of the same umbrella, we almost want to start you off with an Appian app, and I'll tell you how then that can get mined, and you can see it's doing what you're supposed to be doing. And you can iterate in under one umbrella very rapidly. And that's actually quite transformational. I'll show you some examples. But mining will be deeply integrated with our platform, and it starts with our Appian world release that is shipping soon. The 3 things at the bottom, those are notable. Those are the 3 ways, and I'd like to distinguish Appian. Some of our bigger competitors, they've acquired some of these pieces and they've strung them together. But we spend a lot of time making sure that these 3 things are there for every piece of Appian, that is, first and foremost, low-code that you don't have to program, you're going to be able to drag and drop, point and click that allows us to allow customers to learn Appian in 2 weeks. And they can join the team in 2 months. They're a productive member of the team. Later that year, they're hopefully leading that team. So low-code everywhere. The second thing is everything in Appian is unified. These aren't acquisitions thrown together and leave you to figure how to make them work. We spend a lot of time making sure that every part of Appian, if a bot crashes an Appian, a human can pick it up and finish the work. If the bot got refused because the user experience change, the user can -- the developer are going to be program the bot. These aren't handoffs between different vendors. And so that's something we take extremely seriously. And during my time here, when I started, we used to say that, oh, we're not going to acquire companies, and that's what the big boys do. And then, of course, as we grow up, we did acquire 2 companies. But my team has made those 2 acquisitions disappear into the fabric of engineering. You cannot now tell whether it was an acquisition or built my team, now they're part of our team now. But that unification with RPA, with AI, with IDP, all of that you'll see in our platform, it really just works seamlessly. And that's one of our strengths. The last is that our customers are the biggest companies on the planet. They are running their business on Appian. So we take that seriously to gain and retain their business, we have to be enterprise-grade. So that means reliable, scalable, secure, performant, internationalized, accessible, I can keep talking. There's a lot of reasons why [indiscernible] costs what it does because the value is tremendous once you implement on Appian. All right. So I wanted to just spend a few more minutes explaining if a few people in a garage wanted to do what we do, why would it take them a while because I want to show you why Appian is different and distinct. The first is, even before I joined, Appian spent 10 years basically eliminating Java coding, right? You had a process model, you had rules where you could define your business logic without coding. And it took them a long time to build that. I joined 10 years into the company's life cycle. So that eliminates an entire layer of app servers and high coding. So that was the first thing that we did. The next thing we did for the next 10 years during my time here is that we've entered this technology called SAL, which has eliminated all the high coding from a JavaScript, HTML, CSS. First of all, you have to learn and master 3 distinct languages, if you will, to build a web app. And we've made that all go away. You saw some of the screenshots from Malcolm where it's something you just do in our designer. You just take a pattern and change it connect to the back end and you're done. So that was the big thing. And all of these, by the way, are patented technologies. And this is why I'm saying that it took us a long time to build SAIL, and we have 3 patents on it already. We have patents on the build one runs everywhere. We have a patent on automatically, we parallelize the query, not paralyze, parallelize, right? We can find out that your UI is calling SAP, Salesforce and PeopleSoft. And we can farm out the queries to all of those things without having you to do anything. I have a masters in software engineering, and I'll tell you that parallel program is one of the hardest things. I've heard somewhere like 2% of developers can do parallel programming. So you don't need to do that stuff. We'll take care before you. So a lot of great technology there. And the last thing we've done in the last 5 years or so is what we call a data fabric. And I've been in software for about 35 years now. This is my ninth job and third IPO. And I'll tell you, I've filed a lot of patents. When we filed the SAIL patents, it took the traditional multiyears to get approval. You filed with the patent office, there's an almost immediate rejection because a patent is a novel solution to a unique problem. And of course, they first don't believe it. And over the years, we actually built an Appian app to track our patent filing because it takes that long. And when we submitted the data fabric, we unified basically a transactional database with an analytical database. Those have always been separate worlds, and we pulled them together into a patented technology, and they gave us a patent in 2 months. It was amazing. I thought it was a rejection. They had never seen anything like this approved, right? Pretty incredible stuff with clients may say so. So let me dig into a little bit of the big picture of Appian because at the conference today and some of you, I know you've been around Appian for a while, but we have so many piece parts now that I think it's worth a picture. It's worth a thousand words. So first of all, going way back when, we are a great BPM tool, business process management. So users down there can submit forms and interact with the system through workflows. Those workflows are powered by rules, decisions, process models, and those are all things that we have built into Appian. Then of course, it's not all about the workflow, it's about data. A lot of the data comes from these external systems I talked about and with our data fabric, can integrate to anything in your enterprise. And I talked about the total experience. Now with the data and the workflow, we surface those up as applications. If you're doing field service work, you can use our mobile apps. If you're in a federal basement where there's no Internet, you can use us offline. If you're a financial adviser with 2 big monitors, you can use it at your desktop, right? You pick what you would like to use. So total experience is about that build one runs everywhere. We've extended our data fabric through a lot of integrations. We're an open system. So we love, rest and soap and open -- all the open standards, we follow that closely and make sure that we continue to integrate with the latest greatest. When there are no APIs, that's when RPA is useful. And I think what I've seen over the last 5 years with RPA vendors coming online to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So they actually oversold RPA. You should use bots only when you must. It's not good to run bots because bots are running on unmanaged environments. They -- dirty secret, they crash a lot. And they're not always precise because the UI changes, the bot gets confused. So we basically recommend using RPA, when you must. And in all other cases, we prefer server-based integration. It's running on a hostile environment. It's stable. It works and it scales. So we have all of that. If you need RPA, we have it built into Appian. We have intelligent document processing. Malcolm talked a lot about all the AI we use. But over the last few years, we've really specialized in using AI for document extraction and classification. And first, when you get lots of paper or e-mails, we need to use classification to send it to the right department. Is it a customer complaint? Is it a lawsuit? Is it an invoice, right? If it is an invoice send to the finance department and then they can extract the billing address the payment amount and the due date and send them a check, right? So again, all done through AI and customers that have been using some of this automation, they report 85% straight-through processing. So the other 15% is there when they can't figure out somebody's bad handwriting and humans are still smarter than bots at least. I don't know about the AI. So portals, people ask me throughout this conference, what is the feature that I'm most excited about. And this year, I have to say portal. So for the first 9 years of my decade at Appian, we were relegated behind the corporate firewall. We could only run business to employee apps, because Appian couldn't be put outside the firewall. Last year, we shipped portals, and it's off to a fantastic start. We actually announced it at last Appian World, and we had 10 seats for beta customers that would help us mature the technology. We had 60 people in line. So of course, we took 10 and they're all happy customers, companies like Netflix and Victoria Secret. They've adopted portals and are building several of them. So what is the portal? A portal allows you to essentially put an Appian interface in front at a very high scale and with a very high user experience fidelity. And I'll talk a little bit more, show you some screenshots, but Portals is amazing stuff. Now you take the same Appian that you always loved and you can use it for your vendors, for your customers, for your partners and put it outside the firewall. Almost there with the picture. Everything I talked about again, low-code, drag-and-drop, point-and-click. Mining essentially is now built into our fabric, so that any app you build in Appian. I'll talk about how that's automatically mined and gives you some great insights. You've seen some screenshots, but I'll show you 1 more in my presentation. We are always in the process of modernizing our technology. So a few years ago, we moved away from Google Web toolkit, which powers a Google Mail to react and react native that powers Facebook. It was better technology. So we shifted our entire tech stack from one to the other, and our customers didn't even notice. Okay, there were a couple of bucks, but we have fixed them, right? We basically got your entire applications to -- like we lifted and shifted to better technology. We're doing that on the server now. So every Appian app written since the company started, still runs on Appian and now it will be run on top of Kubernetes and Docker, which is going to have a lot of benefits, and I'll talk about that. Our customers often to build internationalized apps, localized to different currencies and daytime formats. We allowed that to be done very seamlessly now because many of our customers are Fortune 100 organizations, they have global reach. And last but not least, if none of this impressed you because we've taken 3 to 4-year IT projects, made them 2 to 3 months. How about 2 to 3 weeks or 2 to 3 days, right? That's what our solutions provide. So during the pandemic as one example, we built a solution called Workforce Safety that allowed people to come back safely and work through the pandemic. I got the Pfizer Shot. Pfizer is a customer true story, they used us to survive the pandemic and build a vaccine. So pretty cool stuff. So solutions are basically our no-code approach and hopefully, it will continue to grow as a significant part of our business in the coming years. All right. So process mining. So what -- what is the big idea. So this slide shows you an example from Appian. So like any company, we sell stuff. And when a salesperson needs a price quote, they come back to Appian, and it involves a lot of people across multiple teams probably using NetSuite and Workday and Salesforce and I might missed a couple. If you, as a business owner, if our CRO wants to know, why is it taking so long to get a price quote and Chris is nodding back there, as the business owner, he may be interested in reducing cycle time. He wants to make his quarterly numbers, right? So maybe our cycle time is 35 days, but it should be 7, right? You would not even know that. And so as a business user, you want to know about business impacts, right, cycle time. How about cost to generate a price goal? How about your carbon footprint, if you're -- if you have the ESG guys after you, right? So these are business metrics. And with our process HQ that Matt announced, you're going to see these in a UI that anybody in this room or even your bosses can understand. It's very simple. If you see that the cycle time is not what it is, Chris can double click and find out what's up, right? Oh my god, legal approval is taking too long, right? Maybe we need to hire some more lawyers or so you can find out and fix part or maybe it's an opportunity for automation. Maybe there's a whole part of Appian that's not being leveraged and you can further automate. So how do we do all this magical stuff? So within Appian, we believe the best kind of mining is when you don't have to mine. Every app built in Appian going forward will be automagically mined for you, right? And I'll tell you how that works. So on the Appian side, you got it, you are covered, we mined it for you. If it's an external system, you have a couple of choices. You can either use our data fabric to send events on when stuff is happening, say, on top of SAP or people software NetSuite or you can basically load that data into Appian because these are log files and you can ingest them and then you diagram it. And then with that picture of mining, you can zoom into, where the problems or opportunities are. So typically, has anybody seen a mining model diagram, anybody have seen [ slowness ], mining diagrams, yes, they're all pretty crazy, right? You look at it, it's like, well, this is a lot of stuff. So there's a dial and you can zoom into the areas that matter to you. And you can actually look at what they call the variance. Now that wasn't a very good term in the last 2 years. But once you find a variant that's off track, you can go fix it and improve it. And how do we do that? So we have events that are tied to our Data Fabric. So say after Appian World, I'll go in and submit my expense report. So that's a business event. I submitted it. My boss Matt Calkins will hopefully approve it, and then it will go to Mark Matheos, who will probably reject it. And so it will come back to me. I'll attach the receipt and resubmit it, and then I'll get paid, right? All of these are the business events. What's not interesting, that I call the wave API, wrote to Oracle. That's technical details. Nobody cares, right? Our mining technology is being given these business events, which are essentially in English, and then it can know how to tell you what's going on. And then with that picture, we go into the data fabric. So this is what a data fabric looks like you've probably seen this picture a few times. So the middle piece, let's say, is an Appian app in pink. And that's where we have a lot of our what we call records. Records are essentially the nouns of your system, the customer, the order. A customer has many orders. So it shows the relationships, the one-to-one, one-to-many. And then what's all this other stuff, right? Typically, if you're building an app, say, order fulfillment, you're probably talking to the CRM, the ERP, the finance apps, and we can layer on with our data fabric things that you never have to look at SAP again, right? It's there whatever, you just cover it up with Appian and use it effectively. And then with that data fabric, there are 3 massive benefits you get with this, again, patented technology. You get to build these kinds of reports. And I mean you, all of you can build these reports now because even a few years ago, our best partners would take probably 2 or 3 weeks to build a complex information dense report like this. This was built on Appian World stage last year in a matter of minutes because you can basically pick a record and we'll create the report for you and then you can drag it around a little bit and make it what you want. So incredible reporting, much faster to build, no SEQUEL involved. We're probably getting a lot of DBAs angry because their jobs are going away. And so that's the first benefit. So fast to build and fast to run because, again, I talked about how I'm a programmer. Well, don't hire me from my SEQUEL skills because what I write will probably not work very well. So here, no SQL involved. Number two, security. You heard Matt talk about the security. Our security is not declarative. If I want to say that an account executive can look at his or her orders, the Regional Vice President can look at the few salespeople under him or her, and then the CRO can see all orders. Well, if you had tried to build that security in Appian even a year ago, it would have been a multi-week project. And if you screw it up, you probably have a data breach, right, complicated stuff, SEQUEL views store procedures, triggers. I wouldn't wish it on you. Now you literally would enter that in Appian just as I said in English. AE gets to see their orders, our VP sees all the AE orders, Chris gets to see everything, right? That's the way it works. It's actually incredible. So that's number two benefit, fast security. And the third benefit is basically the fact that the data fabric allows you to connect with the mining and let you do the inspection as to what's going on. The -- this technology has been adopted a lot. You heard Matt talk about how it's already in a year, almost 8 or 9 of our customers are out of 10 are using it. So we are constantly improving the scale of this technology. We started with $0.5 million, doubled it to $1 million and at least we talked about $4 million. I'm already eyeing $10 million. So we're continuing to keep up with the pace of our customer adoption. All right. And then I mentioned integration earlier. Our data fabric is as good as the data in it. So we are constantly enhancing our reach to other standards, Open ID Connect, API gateways, whatever is happening in the world we have teams of people tracking that and making sure that the data fabric can stay connected to the rest of the enterprise. Process Automation, this is about RPA and IDP. I'm not going to talk about IDP because Malcolm spent a lot of time talking about AI. So what's up with Appian RPA. The main things are over the last few years after we did the acquisition, we made it into a very competent offering right now. So it does do all the standard things that you expect RPA to do. There's Excel everywhere, there's web browsers, there's Citrix. So we allow our developers to connect with all of those technologies and bring it into Appian and quickly build geobots. And because it's built in Appian, it's all running seamlessly in the same environment. It's the same design objects that you expect in Appian. So if you build a bot now, you can find out who else depends on this bot? How do I package this and deploy it from development to testing to staging to production, right? So it's just a natural part of Appian now. So -- and of course, our enterprise customers do understand that RPA is riddle technology so they can run it in high -- HA mode. You can assign to robot pool. So again, we're building out the things that our customers have been asking for and we have some fairly large deployments of this now working in production. Almost there, 2 more sections. The total experience, I talked about Portals. So I'm really excited that the same technology that people are using called SAIL, you were building sites, now you can build Portals because you already trained on that. And that's one of the benefits of Appian. When you learn a part of Appian, it's the same thing everywhere. So this portal was built in Appian. And because portals are typically customer-facing, when you have business-to-employee apps, you pay your employees, so I guess they don't have choice, they get to use apps, you give them, whereas not so much for your customers, the user experience that are much higher bar, right? It has to be pixel perfect, it has to be engaging. And now we allow you to build up to 10 pages on a portal. Each page can have 10 subpages so again, we can pack a lot of punch into these experiences. And then hopefully, it passes the muster of your UX teams, because they want to make sure it's branded and it's gorgeous, and we can build these in Appian right now. You may decide to put the navigation at the top or on the side, again, just giving you all the flexibility, you could do these with SAIL earlier, but now it's all done through low-code. You can literally sit down in 5 minutes. And nowadays, what I've noticed is that people are building these in meetings like this. If you want to sit down and say you're the business user, I'm going to talk to you about what you want, and we'll build it together. And by the time the meeting ends, we've done, we don't have to write documents. We can just capture the requirements inside of Appian. Another exciting thing we've added is that customers have asked for a long time that can you just give me a place, where I can put my standard component so that my rest of my developers can use it. So a large company might have a standard billboard with a certain branding color and a legal disclaimer. Well, now they can put this into Appian and then everybody else has to use it. And then if your branding color changes because marketing does that, then everybody gets that upgrade because it's in one spot. So really powerful stuff built in here. In closing, Cloud Native, this has been the transformation I talked about moving to Docker and Kubernetes. So why does that matter? It matters because now we're positioning you for a much higher availability of a piece of Appian crashes. Kubernetes will detect it and restart it, you would know it happened. If you need more scale, we have a process engine that starts with 16 engines, and you can double it to 32, but these are both magic numbers, right? The right answer is how much money do you have, right? So we'll allow you to scale it elastically. And so that's what we're working on right now. We have our technical work is done. About 1/3 of our customers are already on Kubernetes and the rest of them will be migrated over the next 12 to 14 months. And the reason for this sort of slow migration is that our cloud that we have is a decade old, it has all the compliance available on the planet all the way from SOC 2 to HIPAA, PCI to FedRAMP. And so we're regaining our certifications on the new tech stack. And as Appian's business expands, we're opening up regions in Japan as that market expands. And we've recently got the iRAP certification, which I just went to Sydney a few months ago, everybody is like where is iRAP because they want to sell Appian to the Australian government, and they need that certification. And we're working on FedRAMP that's coming on the new cloud, hopefully, by early next year. So we're putting in all these compliance framework so that we can sell at scale, wherever on the planet. [ T-Rex ] Solutions. So just briefly reminding a solution is kind of the middle ground. You can obviously buy Appian and build whatever you want, that's limited by your imagination or you can try to use a packaged application, you know what happens there, right? You buy an SAP and millions of dollars later, it's still not what you want. And so that's -- but solutions don't have to be like that. You can actually build -- get something from Appian or our partners more importantly, and if you buy any one of these solutions that we now sell, we have 3 suites of solutions right now. The biggest and most successful is in federal acquisition management. We have 2 decades of experience, domain knowledge of federal acquisitions. I heard something like about half of what the U.S. government buys goes through Appian. We're trying to get the other half now. And we are very excited about this government acquisitions management because it has a full suite from managing your requirements for what you're trying to procure to awarding that to a vendor to -- down to the causes of what you're arguing about to make sure that everybody can respond to that. So full comprehensive suite. Each of those purple boxes you can buy 1 at a time, and they just play well together. Same thing, our biggest verticals are financial services and insurance. So surprisingly, we have solutions in those 2 verticals. And if you're onboarding your customers in FS, if you're doing KYC for compliance, you can just buy the solution and hopefully, in weeks or months, you'll get off to the races with it, instead of spending multiple quarters building a custom one. So a really exciting change here. I'm hoping that in coming years, we're going to see solutions displace the platform as a growing part of our business. It's just a pointier at tip of the spear. You don't have to show up at the platform and say, "What do you want to build?" You can say, you want KYC, what do you want to change, right? So that's going to be the change there. All right. So in conclusion, second last slide, so what did I just cover, right? If you want to remember 3 things about why we believe Appian is different or better. We are the fastest platform on the planet. And I can say that with confidence. I once had a slide that when Usain Bolt runs, he's only competing with himself. That's how we feel about our speed. Like no one else can even come close to matching our 2-month guarantee on getting something done. So we're constantly -- and that's not just an idle brag. For the last 10 years, my boss Matt has said, in every 2 years, you have to cut in half the time it takes to build an app, and we've been at that, right? So that's a legitimate differentiator. Another one is, as I said, there are some -- every day, there's another 5 low-code companies out there, and you probably are looking at them. For them to be as reliable, scalable and enterprise grade, that took us at least 20 years. We're still working on it, so that's the hard stuff, right? That's what separates the big companies from the ones that are up starts. So you can ask any of our large corporations why Ryder runs their transportation business on us? Why Bank of America runs their organization on Appian? So these are companies that are bet on us. And lastly, because we're in so many industries, we have to be very flexible, right? We can't just do this or that. We're not specialized in one particular domain. Our platform can build almost any domain. We run airports, we run restaurants. We -- I mean there's just a variety of used cases that's quite staggering. So we have to be very flexible, customizable. And in closing -- sorry, I said I've been here for 10 years. And for the first many years, when I used to come to events and meet customers and partners, I used to hear like, it asked them, "Why did you buy Appian?". And that's how we operationalize our business on Appian. We on our processes on Appian. So that was cool. I mean, that's -- it's good business to take. But lately, I'm hearing something else that's much more exciting. And as I said, I've been in software for 35 years now and someone asked me why are you still here, right? Why Appian? Because I do think that low-code is transforming the business, right? It's literally putting people like me out of a job. I'm a high code developer, right? What would take months or years to even start getting -- now I tell people, if you have an idea in most big companies, if you have an idea, you know what happens, right? You call a meeting, somebody who writes a document, you talk to the IT guy and you're like okay, whatever, right? That's the end of that great idea. Nowadays, we challenge people just build it, just build the thing on Appian in a few days, maybe a couple of weeks, it's up and running. If you like it, build on it, if you don't like it, don't talk about it, right? It is still faster and cheaper to do something on Appian than to argue about it. I think that's a singularity for our industry. I honestly believe now that finally, I can say every one of my 9 jobs have always been like, why does it take so long in IT, right? I hope I can not have to basically hide anymore because now we can build that as quickly as we think of them. So with that, I'm done. Any questions?

Thank you, Suvajit. I think we're running a little bit late. So Christian. Maybe 1 question, I know if he have something to ask us.

Just 1 on the Kubernetes transition. I'm not sure if you talked about this before, but are you, I guess, taking on some incremental costs as you're doing this for the next 12, 18 months? And is there any tangible benefit once you complete that from a cost perspective?

Yes, very good. So these are big investments. So yes, pretty good incremental cost, because we had to take our existing code, chop it up into services and move it over to this new tech stack. So we've had a multi-year investment in making this technology transition. But it's one of those essentials, right? Like if -- if you need to move this building to a new foundation, I mean, you don't -- you have to do it, right? So we've taken this on all of these data fabrics, the Portals, all these big investments I talked about. They are all things that we put multiple years of investment into and continue to keep us viable as a leading platform. And what benefits do you get once you get to Kubernetes? So that's more of a nuance story. So what we are targeting right now is first we wanted to get over to this new tech stack and get customers over to it. Right now, we have 2 clouds. We have 70% of the customers on the current cloud and about 30% on the new cloud as we move them over, we want to get back to 1 cloud so that everybody is on the same system. So my team doesn't have to support both. But once they're on the same system, then you're going to start seeing a lot of these additional benefits. So for example, our iRAP certification came in a matter of days, like I was literally like surprised because it's on a new technology stack what would have taken much longer in the old technology, right? So there are benefits of how quickly we can get clearance and certifications. There's benefits of customers that I said once you're on the new stack, it's going to be more reliable, because Kubernetes is better at managing services than humans are. And longer term, 2 other big benefits, Elastic Scale is the other one I talked about. Now Appian has a lot of moving parts, right? So when you talk about elasticity? Is it our process engine? Is it our reporting? Is it our data? Is it our documentation document management system. So we are going to systematically over the years, start making every piece of Appian elastically scale, so that you don't have to worry about any of these limits, right? And the most forward-looking thing I'd say is once we're on Kubernetes, right now if you're a cloud customer, you get a choice of one, it's called Amazon. And in the future with Kubernetes now that we're on a new technology stack we are able to then say, "Hey, if you'd like to go with Microsoft and Azure, if you wanted to go to Google Cloud, those are also choices that we can offer", but that's a little bit further out. But it allows us to now do this fairly cheaply. All right. I think I'm over my time slot, so I will pass it on to Chris.

Good afternoon. I have the great privilege of talking about how we take all of these wonderful solutions that Suvajit is building and how we get them to our customers. So for the next break a few things I will cover market opportunity, which you've heard a lot about already, I'll take it to a perspective of what I see from our customers and partners, spend a little time talking about our sales strategy and how we do go to market, and then we'll wrap up with a couple of customer examples. Before I jump into that, I know I'm relatively new, I think, to most of the audience, a few familiar faces here. I joined Appian just under a year ago. I'm not going to take you through and bore you with my career history, but I will -- I'm not then I ask the question. Why did you come to Appian? And it really boils down to 3 fundamental things: the job, the company and the market. From a job perspective, I've been blessed throughout my career to lead and build high-performing sales teams, and that's my DNA. I saw a phenomenal opportunity here at the company. When I had an opportunity to meet the founders of the company, to meet Matt, understand the vision, understand where the company is going, the technology did some due diligence on my part in talking with some customers and partners out there. And if you're in sales, one thing that you want to have is knowing that you've got a foundation of rock-solid technologies that customers continue to buy and build [indiscernible] and I have had [indiscernible] the years spending in technology sales, software sales, SAP [indiscernible] sales you want to be in a market. [indiscernible] declining market where customers don't necessarily want to speak to you. We don't have that problem here. So when I look at all of those that came together with a company that's literally in my backyard, it was really the kind of the perfect trinity coming together, those 3 components. So -- that's why I'm here, thrilled to be here and just see a phenomenal opportunity moving ahead for us. Market opportunity. We talked a lot about this. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here. We've got just a phenomenally large TAM out there. When you take a look at analyst estimates, you look conservatively $60 billion market, when you talk about what's happening in workflow process automation, you start adding an RPA, you start talking about not only the low-code aspect, but the process mining component. We've got a massive market opportunity. The other really thing that was exciting and a key part of my decision in coming to Appian was there's no single market leader out there. There's not a Cisco out there that owns 2/3 of, let's say, a switching and routing type of market. So this really, to me, is a phenomenal opportunity to be the disruptor and being able to grab that share out there. Some of the mega trends that are happening out there, you hear this a lot from our customers, developer shortage, applications that are being demanded by the business at an increasing pace, accelerating pace those 2 converging are creating an opportunity that the market adoption for what we do is becoming absolutely critical for businesses in running those [indiscernible]. Another thing I'll point out here is the efficiencies with workflows. I've sat through no less than 16 different customer meetings today. This is coming up not only at the business unit level, but at the corporate level with regard to how they drive better efficiencies than their business [ does ] automation and workflow. And it's becoming something that is truly reaching the C-suite at most of our large customers out there. The other piece I'll highlight here, we are very blessed to have the best -- some of the best and brightest partnerships that are out there. And something that you'll hear a little bit when we have our partner panel is the investments that we have our global systems integrators as well as our regional integrators, investing specifically in Appian, recognizing the market opportunity, but also looking at how that helps drive accretive services revenue for their business and we'll talk a lot about that -- more about that in just a bit. So sales philosophy, I wanted to talk a little bit about this, how I approach the market and how we're driving our teams. And I think if I -- before I jump into some of the specifics here, started my career right out of college with IBM and since many, many years ago. And this was in the days, when the IBM uniform was a blue suit, white shirt tie and nice shiny wing tip shoes. In fact, I was thinking about it as I got dressed today. If I were a pink shirt and jeans back in those IBM days, I definitely would have been fired and probably would have been arrested for violating policy. But the thing that I didn't appreciate is a 20-something year old, when I joined IBM, which I personally believe in now as a sales leader and took that approach that they wanted to build a world-class group sales professionals and building a profession around [indiscernible] that wasn't a team of people that were out there selling mainframes and PCs, but really a group of people that were becoming trusted business advisers to their customers. And that was one of the things that I think, again, I look back and grateful for the opportunity that I had and really has become the DNA and how I approach going to market. So value selling, not how we go out there and talk about process mining, RPA, low-code but how we take that and really turn it into how we are driving discernible business outcomes for our customers. High performing teams. We're placing a lot of investment. We'll talk a little bit about some of the investment, but really making sure that we've got the best sales professionals out there that know how to drive value selling. Mandatory enablement sounds simple -- lot of companies, and I've had this in my past fall down because they treat sales enablement as more of an opt-in type of culture versus a mandatory. We are a very complex sale -- we need to make sure, especially given the competition that we have out there and the emerging competition that has started to come out with some of the major players. We've got to be the best out there [indiscernible] not only how -- what's happening in the marketplace with regard to workflow, but how that translates into those true business outcomes for our customers. And as I mentioned before, leveraging our partners for scale, really building that partner first type of model that we talked with our partners yesterday about. From a go-to-market strategy, really 3 fundamental components that we're looking at here. The first is leveraging what you heard today around our platform around [indiscernible] an enterprise class approach, not a departmental approach, but really looking at the entire enterprise, building that next generation in dollar ARR types of customers for us. And if you look at our enterprise, we are an enterprise-focused company, you look at the enterprise customers that we have, to say that we've got 80%, 90% of those that are facing these types of challenges, not at a business unit level, but at an enterprise level. So building that next class of $10 million ARR customers. The other piece is around net new customer acquisition. You've heard a lot about this throughout our session. We are a company that has just under 1,000 customers. We are very aggressively pursuing this how we placed a massive investment over the last 6, 8 months in building out sales capacity, frontline sellers, our SDR organization, sales development representatives to make sure that we have the capacity out there to touch the market that we need to go after. And then lastly, continuing this is going to be a common theme. We launched a new partner program yesterday to our partner community around really forging a much tighter relationship around the partners that are investing in us. I'm going to spend a lot more time talking about the strategy there. But if you take a look at all the things between the capacity that we're adding in the field and leveraging that amongst the partners that have a massive customer base out there, really putting the incentives in place to help us with the net new customer acquisitions. Would not be a go-to-market or sales presentation without having the proverbial pyramid in the chart here. So very quickly through how we are -- I'm a big, I'll call student of market segmentation, how you sell to the Fortune customers versus how you sell to the lower enterprise or the mid-market or territory sale, different selling motion, different way you go to market, different types of people that you need. We placed a lot of investment in getting a data-driven approach around how we approach our marketplace, looking at customers by name, by territory. This year, we rolled out a 4 geographic theater approach. We've got focus on North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa and we carved out a specific focus around our U.S. public sector business, which represents just over 20% of our business. We wanted to have that as a separate [Audio Gap] From a segmentation perspective, very simply, and I know you see a similar chart with other companies. At the top end of the pyramid, this is where we're placing an immense amount of focus around [Audio Gap] in the very high touch [ reps and ] the customers as the ones that have that opportunity to drive that $10 million-plus ARR type of model for us. Moving down, this is where you start getting a lot more accounts, still enterprise class, looking at our enterprise and I'll call high end or mid-market enterprise. This is where we get into many more accounts, part of the reps, really leveraging a partner, led type of model, forging relationships at the top with our global systems integrators, the Accentures, Deloittes, KPMGs and so forth and then our approach at the territory level going after the lower end of the enterprise, leveraging the great partnerships that we have with the RSMs, ZBS Ignite and so forth on a regional basis. We're seeing great traction with this. We've got some great momentum that are happening across each of the geographic theaters in this particular model, and we're going to continue to invest in building out the partner component. On that note, if you take a look, we had yesterday, the largest partner event that we've ever had as a company. We had 320 partners standing remotely in our partner session. I recently brought on board a new partner leader to lead our strategy here, somebody that I had history with in the past that not only knows the partner ecosystem, but really knows how to build a partner culture and accelerate business with partners. I'm often asked the question, Chris, how many partners do you want? And my general answer to that is this isn't a thing about quantity of partners. It really is an aspect around the quality. We want to invest in partners that are investing in us. I feel very fortunate that I am inheriting a phenomenal base of partnerships in the marketplace. We really do have a who's suit relative to the types of partners that are going to help us achieve our goals, both from a large [indiscernible] active, but also get [indiscernible] accounts. So to talk a little bit more about this, really a multipronged approach with regard to what we're doing, very similar to what we're doing from a sales perspective and building a value-oriented sales organization. We're really placing the emphasis on building value around our partners. So again, investing and if you're doing more with fewer partners, investing in the partners that are investing in us. As I have built partner strategies in my past, there's really what I call the 4 Cs that I take a look at, coverage, capacity, capabilities and commitment and so we're looking very heavily across each geographic theater around investing in those partners that are helping us get into new markets from [Audio Gap] that's the capacity. Investing to make sure that we do have the right kind of experience that, that partner can deliver to the end users. And then in perspective, [indiscernible] plans that are truly meaningful to kind of put this in perspective, the conversations that we're having with the large GSIs, we do good business with them today, but they are aspiring to build practices that are literally $100 million to $500 million practices with Appian. That's the kind of service revenue that they believe that they can drive. How that translates to what we do with an Appian. Each of these should be representing kind of $100 million practice for us as we move forward. The partner-led approach, this is where we want to -- as part of our segmentation model, really make sure that we are investing and getting behind the partners and helping themselves. In the past, I think we had a little bit of attention in the marketplace with regard to how we went to market, and we are truly pulling this together, as you heard earlier from Mike with this 1 Appian approach around how we truly lock arms with our partners, build those business plans and go to market together. We talked about the segmentation between the GSIs and the regional partners, all focused around net new customer acquisition. And again, the real -- where they have an immense amount of excitement about the relationship with Appian is the significant services opportunities that they have the opportunity to drive. One of the other things that we did this year is recognizing that Appian has the ability to serve such a multitude of industries. Every industry out there has the types of challenges that we address whereas it relates to workflow process automation and so forth. But what we made a very conscious decision to do is really recognize what are those areas that we have the opportunity to become famous -- that we become known as the solution that's meeting those needs in these particular industries. And we wrapped ourselves around 4 very key industries, public sector and government, both from a federal government perspective as well as local municipalities, financial services, insurance and health care, pharma, life sciences. These are areas that we have placed an immense amount of investment. We've got significant traction out there with regard to very key customers. The business outcomes that we're driving have immense amount of value to these customers -- conversations that I have in government wrap around how we're helping them drive better efficiency in government probably a little play on words there, but the saving money, how they get their services better to the public. Life Sciences, a very significant customer of ours that I'm the executive sponsor, when I asked them the first question around what's the value that you're getting out of Appian. I would call it probably the most significant business outcome, which is you're helping us save lives by getting drugs to market quicker and helping us get through compliance. So these are the ones that we also -- as we look at, and you heard from Suvajit earlier, the ones that we're wrapping ourselves around the types of solutions that we're delivering to the market. You heard him very quickly talk about government acquisitions management, what we call our GAM suite. This is something that we started noticing a trend around government agencies wanting to improve how they actually buy things and very complex process, numerous vendors, lots of paperwork, lots of process involved. We wrap this around what we call our government acquisitions management suite now have that productized and we're gaining an immense amount of traction in the federal agencies that we're now going to be taking into e-procurement to serve the state and local markets. That's then led to in the insurance space, something we call [indiscernible] claims that ultimately gives better customer experience and onboarding for our customers in the insurance, and this is going to be something that we're going to continue to build solutions, not on our own. But the real exciting thing is when you talk to our partners, the hundreds of solutions that have been developed by our partners to meet specific needs and how we wrap around our partners to help accelerate those to market as well. Why we win? You heard a lot about this earlier today. I won't spend a lot of time, but truly this idea of how we approach the market, not as low-code or not as process mining or RPA, but how we truly drive this as a fully integrated suite. Every single customer that we talk with at this conference wants to have that conversation, just got out of a meeting prior to coming here, where they very clearly said, we want to have 1 vendor that can pull this together and really help us drive our entire workflow process and not have to do a deal with different vendors as it relates to product [indiscernible] RPA. [indiscernible] and probably one of the things that I would say has been one of the best cap secrets, and I'm so thrilled in my role that we're really getting out there. This is one of the things that's going to have a massive differentiator. When we have the ability to talk with customers that we don't care, where their data lays, whether it's on-premise, in a cloud or multi-cloud, they don't have to worry about complex technologies to be able to pull all of that in, but how we help them reach all of that data. One less thing that they have to worry about, we pull that [indiscernible] the fact that we've got the referenceable types of customers that we do have that are some of the most -- not only high regulated, but trusted players in the financial services, government, insurance and health care. This helps us tremendously. The customers that we met with today all fell within those categories and leverage the relationships that we have with those customers. And then lastly, as we talk a lot about driving these truly impactful business outcomes very quickly. Matt talked about this on stage. We have something called the Appian Guarantee, where we take the idea to application in a matter of weeks, 8 weeks or less that we approach our customers with average ROI that we're finding in our customer community out there is less than 6 months and the speed to application development is in orders of magnitude, 10x and above. So you pull all of that together, getting speed to market, hitting the ability for us to drive those critical applications very quickly, really gives us an edge in the marketplace. I'll wrap up very quickly with 2 very significant customers of ours to kind of show -- we talk a lot about one of the things we're very proud about as an organization is our gross retention rate. We talked about that on our dollar revenue perspective of being 99%, very sticky customers. Traditionally, this has been a layer model, land adopt, expand, renew. A couple of examples here. This is -- unfortunately, could not use the name, but 1 of the top 3 banks in the world, that started with us with a very basic application really after some of the financial crisis that happened in 2008, really focused on the finance organization and getting into risking and was -- I'll call relatively modest type of land, but what was exciting about this is throughout the course of the year, you started seeing a logarithmic type of curve that happened with regard to how applications started getting spread throughout the bank. First locally and then across the globe. And so over the course of what's been the last 5.5 years, we've seen this grow not only within finance, but then getting into compliance, getting into credit risk, customer onboarding, getting into the commercial banks, lending and then ultimately into -- on a global basis throughout all the organizations. So this is a customer that we've seen over the years grow from about $1 million ARR customer to something that's now over $10 million ARR. And this is an account that we truly believe has the opportunity to double over the next few years as well. The second one, I'm allowed to use the name. I'm not allowed to use the [ logo ] is U.S. Marine Corps. We do a significant amount of business in the Department of Defense. This was a very significant win for us, again, about just under 6 years ago where they came to us around a very basic application around helping them with supply chain and logistics, actually getting packages to marine bases across the globe. This started as a very modest application at just under $1 million and then throughout the course of our relationship, again, continue to grow to about an $11 million ARR customer getting into everything such as our GAM suite and how they actually procure and acquire, recruiting onboarding, troop deployment things that we are truly making very, very massive business outcomes that are protecting our men and women in uniform. And these are applications that I would call we have the opportunity to really copy across all of the branches of the Armed Services not only in the U.S. but globally, having a lot of conversations around this with other defense departments across the world. So again, for your [indiscernible] a little bit of idea around how we go [indiscernible] I know we're bumping up against break. So I guess, we will go to break and then [indiscernible] hear from our customers. [Audio Gap]

Morgan Stanley. There's not many chief revenue officers that are going to come into this year with a 40% increase in sales capacity and you're fortunate in that respect. So the question is with that capacity, how are you going to put that capacity to work and what is likely to be the toughest sales environment, since the great financial crisis? Is it a focus on particular segments? Is it a focus on those 4 core verticals that you laid out? Or are there like new used cases that you are or new playbooks that you are advocating for that will resonate in this type of environment?

Yes, it's a great question. So I do have to, first of all, acknowledge and thank Mark Matheos here for giving me the [Audio Gap]. Yes, having the confidence in me to place this kind of investment. And you're right. In my career, I haven't had the opportunity to be blessed with being able to hire. In fact, coming on board -- this was -- we had to ignite our teams around hiring the -- probably the largest amount of people we've ever done in a short amount of time to make sure that we did have that capacity. On your question specifically, so there's a few areas that we place the investments. One, as we talk about these specific [Audio Gap] I want to make sure I'm fueling the growth around the areas that despite the unknown economic times, can stay with a good degree of confidence, the federal government is going to be spending money, and that will also trickle to the state and local government, where we've been underpenetrated. We've had traditionally a very small team in the state and local. So we're getting very prescriptive, not going out there and saying, I'm going to do everything for all 50 states, but we're picking out the top 12 that we know are very -- have very similar types of challenges that the Feds have state of California, state of New York, Pennsylvania, the big states, so placing a lot of investments in those. That's one. Two, continuing to double down efforts in those key industries that we talked about, financial services, insurance, health care, another area that we placed a lot of investment. One of the challenges that we had is just the capacity of inbound types of inquiries and also getting outbound from our sales development representatives. So we added a significant amount of capacity. That was a lower cost type of investment. A perfect example of how that's paying off net with the customer earlier when I asked her how she knew about Appian. This was a customer in Central America. She went on downloaded a white paper and because our teams were able to reach out in a very short amount of time, it created that dialogue created an opportunity that has -- that we're closing now. So those are some of the key areas in place, some of the investments within the partner organization to build the scale around the key partnerships that we want to build the large GSIs and so forth. So that gives you some idea of really. We got very prescriptive about it. This wasn't just saying, hey, we got -- we're throwing a dart on the map and where it lands we're going to put a person. We got really data-driven specific on this. Part of this, when we took a look at it in the U.S. as an example, when I came in we had about 3,000 accounts that were loaded up in Salesforce in the U.S. When we looked at our market opportunity around really what qualifies as the ideal customer for us, who went out there, did work to get very prescriptive around what are the customers we want to go after. We increased that base to 15,000 in the U.S. alone. We're doing that across the globe to get really, really focused on the key customers so that we can get really laser-focused on the ones that we know have a high propensity to buy. That answer what you're? Thanks.

[ Pankaj Chanda from Granite. ] You talked a lot about -- I mean, in the presentation, the marketing and the investments, their improvements plus you have a sharper focus. So how would you assess the productivity of the quota-carrying reps in the past? And what should we expect?

Yes. So again -- so it's really two-pronged on that, right? I inherited a level of legacy reps that have been here for a while. And as you can imagine, given the complexity of the sale that we have -- it is a longer-term sales cycle. So the reps that have been in place that have built the relationships with the large financial institutions and so forth. The other area that we placed investment in is the whole area around sales enablement, because of the amount of people that we ramped up or we brought on board, we've got to ramp them up very quickly. And this goes back to the comment I made about a mandatory enablement type of culture. So we placed a lot of investment in making sure that we built that boot camp type of mentality to get people up to speed very quickly. Since we hired those more towards the end of last year, as I take a look at what I'm seeing going forward, very optimistic with regard to how we are shortening the time that it takes for people to get up to speed to be productive. But again, we've got a lot of newness in there. So it's going to take that time. But investments we're placing in the people about how we get them up to speed quickly.

I would say from what I saw in the past with the investments that we're placing, I'd say -- if I'm looking at a rep that we recently brought on Board to full -- to really have that happen in the 9-month type of time frame.

9 months for ramp-up, but actual productivity per rep relative to in the past, should they be 25% well...

Oh, you're saying as far as the actual per rep?

Per rep. Yes.

Yes. Some of the things that you brought up. We're very cautious around expecting a massive -- this is why we place a lot of effort -- as we look at going into the next few years, I would generally say that I'd expect somewhere around a 25% increase in productivity from the base of rep side we would have.

We'll take a quick break. For those online, we'll be back at 3:20.

Great. Thank you. [Break]

We good to go? All right. Well, welcome. Well, we ended on a very positive note talking about how critical our partner ecosystem and our partner strategy is to our business. We talked a lot about yesterday around building a partner lead and partner first type of model. With me today, I'm thrilled to have 3 of our very significant partners. And gentlemen, I can't thank you enough for coming up here and being able to do this. And then we've had an opportunity to spend a lot of time together. I hope that what you are seeing coming from Appian is truly showing our commitment to the partners and I can't thank you enough about what you all are doing and helping us build our business globally. So why don't we just kind of start out. We've got 3 -- I know you all come from very small organizations across the globe. But if we could maybe just give a quick introduction of who you are, your role the company that you're with. Let's start there.

Sure. Hi, everybody. Usman Tareen, I'm the Managing Director within our cloud first practice, and I look after our local nuclear practices here in the North America.

Great. Good afternoon, George Kaczmarsky. I'm a partner at EY. I lead what we call our process solutions and automation practice and financial services. So that basically means any automation technique that we can apply to manual processes in our clients' financial services.

Chandra Surbhat. I'm Vice President, and I had a digital experience business for Wipro Technologies globally. And for us, end to end process automation is a key element of digital experience, of which Appian is a key vendor product.

Fantastic. Thank you. Why don't we start? I'll start with a very simple question. I know in speaking over the last few days and actually rather last several months in how we built the partnership out together. I'd love to hear, as you started down the journey with Appian, how long -- talk a little bit about how long you've been working with Appian and maybe a little bit of insight into what was it that got you embedded with Appian? How did you really start? What were some of the compelling reasons? And Chandra, want start with you?

Sure, no, it's a great question. And if you think about the way the software engineering is going, it's all about how fast can you get anything off the ground because the market is changing dramatically. The businesses want agility and low code, no code is a great way in which we can get things faster to the market, and that's where Appian plays a great role. And when I think about anything that we could do from low code, no code or a process automation, it's about not just case management, not just about customer servicing part, but largely about front-end customer experience that we could transform. More and more consumers would allow to do a lot of things on their own, self-service where there were very little patience to get down to a call center or a conversation with an enterprise. So what we can get them in an experiential transformation way, how can you reimagine the process? How can you mine the process on an ongoing basis? How do you automate and how do you get those decisioning capabilities and instant mechanisms in which the consumers can experience all of what they want to do from an enterprise standpoint is key. And for us, in that context, so when we think of Appian and this is a journey that we have had great success over the period of a few years. And for us, the ability to impact the organizational processes, reimagine the process in a rapid fashion. Look at all of the opportunity through mining -- process mining, look at the automation and with AI capabilities and, of course, plugging anything from an RPA standpoint. So we take a holistic view of it, has been a great way in which we could impact for our customers. So that's been our journey so far.

That's great. George...

Yes, Chandra, I would echo a lot of what you said. The dynamic that we're seeing in the market right now is certainly a need for agility and speed to market, and we're being responsive. But we're also seeing beyond the pressures of efficiency we're seeing growth. And we're seeing our clients not wanting to scale linearly by throwing bodies at the problem as they're growing at the same time. And so the need for automation -- end-to-end automation, not task level, but end-to-end process automation is paramount for these organizations to compete and reimagine the way work is performed in the future. And to do that, there needs to be a portfolio of automation technologies and techniques that need to be brought forward. And what we're really excited about with the Appian platform is it transcends those techniques. It brings a full suite of capabilities that we can bring to our clients and ultimately achieve business outcomes by reimagining end to end processes, much like you talked about, through process reengineering and then applying the right technology and technique to the process. For us, the journey has been about 4 years. We incubated and started with the financial services and now significantly expanding across the globe.

Awesome.

Yes. So much like the same, I would say, digital transformation at scale, right? When the clients who are looking to do a lot of things, there's only a few tools that can do that, right? Appian is one of the top ones. We cannot only do the low code part, but also the automation part as well as process mining RPA. So you can buy one license and you can do digital transformation at scale. That's one of the biggest reason why would we pick Appian. And we've been doing work in Appian since 2013. But in the last few years, I think we have seen a lot of growth and demand in Appian and clients really want liking the tool and asking us, and it's been a pretty growth for us.

That's great. Thank you. We've had a lot of conversations about truly what I'll call, not just doing deals together, but truly building a practice together, right? And you heard it yesterday in the partner session around our commitment is what are the investments we're going to be placing in partners to build that out, the investments that you guys have placed you came in, I made a comment to the team and a couple of folks that challenged me on this when I talked about the growth potential with the types of organizations that you have. And I know in some of the conversations we've had, we have interesting business that we're doing together. But as we talk about really building significant and relevant practices, am I to out there thinking that we got the opportunity to build multi-hundred million dollar types of practices within your business. George?

No.

Good answer. Why don't we drop the mic on that one. And the -- but you truly see, right?

We do. We think the market, aside from market share between the 3 of us and our peers, the market is significant, the demand in our clients is only increasing. I think to say $100 million businesses is very fair.

Yes. And that's really because of the capacity that you have, again, not in selling the software, but really the kind of services revenue and the type of value that you ultimately bring to your customers?

Right.

Yes. But I know we had somewhat of a conversation here.

Yes. I would even say the opportunity is much bigger than $100 million. I think Gartner is projecting about 60% to 70% of development to be done on low code, right? If you think about the market, it's humongous. It's partly the front end, right? So a lot of companies out there they have older tech, which what we call digital decoupling, right? So what we don't want to get rid of the entire stack is if there's a mainframe in the back, it does a pretty good job at transaction. So what we want to do is we want to complement it with new technologies like cloud native architecture, user experience, mobile, things like that, that Appian provide postmining stuff like that and kind of ripping and replacing, we are seeing a lot of demand in terms of complementing that. So -- and those are like multiyear large projects. So absolutely, I think over -- the demand is much higher, and it would be much better than $100 million practices.

That's great. Chandra...

I think I completely agree. The ability to rapid showcase value in 8 weeks, 10 weeks, as you saw in the morning in some of the keynotes. And then once the value we've shown the ability to further expand and grow within an organization to be of a significant digital transformation impact is very high. That's where the -- some of our customers, we may start off on a smaller initiative in terms of what we could impact for a particular process for a particular use case to a department. But we have seen large-scale enterprise wise adoption and as Usman said low-code, no-code is what all of the analysts are talking about 70% to 80% of the software development will be on these platforms. So we do see these capabilities way easily, of course.

Let me build off that one there, Chandra. You mentioned the low code, and I got a lot of comments earlier about hey, we didn't hear much about low code. We didn't hear anything about low code this morning, right? It was more around how we're trying to approach from a workflow and a process automation standpoint. Would love to get your thoughts on kind of the positioning of how we are going out to market now, not really hammering home on that low code is -- I think we've evolved. Low code is not what we do, it's how we do it. But as we start talking about selling this platform that combines RPA and process mining and intelligent document processing and wrap that around low code. How do you feel about the Appian strategy there?

Sure. I can take that. If I think about -- you're right, about 2 to 3 years back low code was a very fancy term, right? Everybody loved. We have seen that -- everybody was on a high code model. And when something came up like low code, it was a big impact with our customers. The ability for them to do a rapid rollout and see the results was high. But I agree, low-code also sometimes doesn't -- could mean that there are certain smaller use cases, simpler use cases, which organizations were experimenting with. But in a true essence, when you're impacting a process, when you are looking at process from re-imagination standpoint from a mining to automating to the AI part of it where the process can be triggered off of any particular e-mails, could be triggered off of any kind of different ingestions or input scenarios. I think the way to think about it is digital transformation, process re-imagination. Low code makes it much more sweeter and better because you are getting off the ground much faster. So I agree with the position. And all the organizations get it and customers get it that it is off of a low code but what they're really looking for is much beyond a low code in terms of its full suite of product, full suite of capability for their end-to-end impact.

Yes, Chandra, I think you bring up an interesting point. To me, low code makes a very feature-rich product accessible to developers. And it gets to the -- what you said earlier, time to market and speed of delivery. I think the other thing to think about low code is almost now a necessity and what you're bringing out in the platforms. If you look at the significant demographic shifts we're seeing now in the workforce that's entering out of college, they're very, very technically astute capable. Most of them can code in Python, right out of college. They expect accessibility this kind of technology, and it's going to accelerate their ability to deploy applications. And so I know we don't talk about it as much anymore. Everyone is RPA vendor and there are low code , no code vendor and now they're generative AI company those trends come and go, but these are features that are necessary to be able to make products like this available in the market and to make the penetration we expect.

So in 2 ways, right, so a lot of -- I mean I do a lot of calls with our clients, they trying to understand the low-code market. It's a very mixed message segment, right? I don't want to use the word diluted, but everybody is a low code vendor these days, right? So how do you separate from the herd? How do you show the client that you're not just faster go to market, but there's a lot more efficiency and other things baked into the product, right? So that's where like things like RPA process mining and business rule-based automation is key to separate that. The other thing is, I think because there are so many vendors involved, this is just my opinion. Low code is going to become a feature of every product, right? And that would be mostly considered to like having a workflow. So some drag drop ability for you to either build something simple, fast on that ecosystem or extend that ecosystem, right? So I think for positioning Appian more than just a low code is, I think, is the right way to go about it because it's just not a low code, it's a lot more than that.

So this architectural approach that we're taking or platform approach that we're taking it resonates.

Yes.

Okay. Good. Another good answer. Thank you. As we look at the partnership, one of the things that we've also talked about, we talked about this earlier is the investment that we're placing in taking a more solution approach to what we're driving in. As we were mentioning earlier, while Appian has an investment in some key areas like our government acquisitions, management suite and so forth, where we're seeing immense amount of traction happening is with our partner community. You guys are close to the customer, developing great solutions. We'd love to get some thoughts around the future direction and how we continue to grow our businesses together there.

Yes. I think that's the way to go because most of the clients that we talk to, they are looking, if not the full solution. They just want something out of the box that can accelerate that development, right? Like what panelist talking about, you're faster go-to-market. So even us -- we typically don't build behind closed doors. What we do is we collaborate with our clients and going to build something and then take that to go to market. We do it on Appian. We've done like more than 10 platforms in the last year and Appian is also used for our patient services, INTIENT platform in life science, right, all the workloads based on Appian. So even though it is a platform and you can build any sort of like a customer application, I think it is essential for building some strategic industry application for -- even if you don't sell them, giving them out of possible what it would look like. So I think that's a must-have these days in every tool.

I love that comment. That's what we were just talking about earlier about the concept of while that might not be something that is an immediate need for the customer, it is almost like a Trojan Horse that opens up the art of the possible, what you can do with the platform like Appian.

Absolutely. I think the ability to create an industry framework, industry solution and accelerator is a great value proposition for us to combine with the technological capability of Appian. And that's where the value comes much more stronger. We have a financial risk and resilience solution that's built off of an Appian. When you showcase to the customer, it's just not about a product. It's actually packaging it with certain capabilities, which influences directly certain processes of this is a great value proposition. And then the customer starts understanding the art of possibility of what a particular product can do into the domain, into their actuarial processes. And sometimes it could also be a function of showcasing that and doing a much more different work sometimes, but that gives them a way to reimagine that these capabilities are real and that's a high impact for them.

Chris, you asked about solutions. The platform is powerful. It's also accessible and our clients can implement it themselves. They can hire for capacity. That's great. But for us, our strategy is to come to our clients with specific business outcomes we're trying to make a difference in. And so for us, solutions are paramount. Like we're not going to go in there and charge a certain rate just for capacity. I mean, it's possible, but it's not differentiating. All of us can do it. But where we're going to compete is we're going to have certain things that are very relevant to our clients, and we're going to bring forward to the market. And what I like about your strategy is you're enabling us around the solution views that we have and that we can take to market. And I love to compete all day long, but we're going to have different things we bring. And so your comments to us over the last couple of days around, hey, how do we help enable your solution development, how do we help go to market together on it, what do you need from us is really important for us in the partnership. So thank you for doing that but it's also...

I'm so glad to hear that, reinforcement that -- and I think we're just at the -- really, it's just the onset of what the art of the possible is and how we partner together and really start to propagate the solutions that you all are developing as part of our sales strategy to really open the market. So let me ask one more. The -- and then we have questions to ask. Okay. So we want to open up for some of the questions here, but let me just ask one more. So we're entering into an environment where this -- I think it's arguably easy to say that this world of workflow process automation is becoming one of the hottest areas within technology today. It's top of mind. We've all had conversations around this. What that ultimately leads to is we're probably entering into one of the biggest competitive environments. We've got some major names that are out there that are getting into this. If you had to give advice to us as a company to maintain a competitive edge and the partnership that we have with you to continue the growth that we're expecting. What would that be?

I think given the range of capabilities that Appian brings us is rock solid in terms of being end-to-end. The partner conversation that we just all spoke about, the ability to double down on partnerships, the ability to enable a joint solution, which differentiates truly, brings all the capabilities of Appian and brings the industry and transformation capabilities of our partner which truly showcases art of possibility could be one of the real differentiator, I would say. So if that can be further propagated, that would significantly differentiate.

So many things going through my mind. The space is unquestionable getting crowded right now. Some of it is -- some of that's grounded in fact and some of it is hyped, right, in terms of marketing that some companies are doing versus other ones. A couple of thoughts. One, you have a very strong feature-rich set of capabilities, you need to double down on that. I think the other thing is brand awareness. Who is Appian, why is it different? We'll do the selling on the business outcome side. We'll bring the solutions that are relevant, but the platform needs to get out there and people need to understand it.

Yes. That's a great input.

Yes, I think so most of your competitors are either in SaaS, providing additional capability to do additional stuff or like it's an ancillary product to kind of core services, right? They will always lag behind in our opinion because that's not their core business. So Appian will always be ahead of them because that's your core businesses platform, not like SaaS offering, right? I think the thing that it is hard for most of the clients to understand is what Appian is right, because it's so big. A lot of times, they will come to your conference and look at it like what can Appian cannot do? You get that like so I think some type of a branding, in my opinion, which kind of help simplify -- it is a great product, right? But how can you use it? That's some sort of a team that simplifies it for people who are not very sophisticated buyers, what I think really help the brand a lot.

Specifically like here are the outcomes you can drive by leveraging Appian?

Yes, something like which is relatable like if you say ITSM, certain vendor comes in mind, right? Something -- because most people are not very simplified buyer. They're not doing these things in and out like we do, right? So we can look at the platform, we can tell what is good, what is bad, but they don't, right?

Chris, can I add one more thing? When we spoke yesterday, I said our clients come to us with 2 big questions, right? And one of them was how do we arbitrate inside our own organizations when we have to decide between different similar capabilities. If I have Appian here and product A and B here. And I've got a use case, how do I know when to use Appian. Those are questions we're being asked. I think to the extent that you can bring that differentiation and explanation to the market, will help our clients be able to navigate.

No, I appreciate that. I think that's spot on. So we're going to turn it over for some questions before we do that, I just -- I wanted to say just again, and thank you enough for the partnership and the investment that you all placed in this. Thrilled to be going to market with you. I was asked a question earlier about sales productivity. I'm passionately a believer that by properly leveraging our partner ecosystem helps me build sales productivity because of the 1 plus 1 equals 3 aspects of rule. So extremely excited about the partnership opportunities that we have. And thank you, gentlemen, so much for that.

Sanjit Singh, Morgan Stanley. Thank you for all your insights. That conversation was super helpful. I had 2 questions, one specifically for George in his financial services expertise. But then to the broader panel, I wanted to tackle back to that question around competitive differentiation because you guys have partnerships, not only with Appian, but with the ServiceNows of the world, and UiPaths of the world. So when you guys go to clients, when is it the right time to bring Appian to the project, to the initiative? And when is it more appropriate to bring ServiceNow into the mix versus UiPath, how do you guys think through that decision in terms of what's best for the client? So that's the first question. And then George as you answer that question, just around financial services, you've had issues in the banking sector. How are you thinking about selling in an environment where financial services spend could be increasingly under pressure? Those would be the 2.

How about if I start in reverse order. You may have to remind me of the first question a little bit. But look, financial services is it's always fun to watch. It goes up and down in terms of spend, growth and retraction regulatory. We -- banking, in particular, is very focused on efficiency as of late. It has been and continues to be. I think we will see more shift towards regulatory and risk use cases and focus. And I think platforms like this will adjust really well to that. I think safety, security, scalability and platforms for financial services is paramount. Without that, it's not going to get through the front door in most of our clients. I think we'll see -- when we look at solutions that we can sell, we're going to organize around the things that are relevant to financial services at this time. In banking, it will be around, like I said, resiliency, safety, regulatory. And insurance, it's going to be a little bit more around growth in interest rate hedge, right? Asset management will continue to be focused on efficiency and frictionless experiences on onboarding of funds and PE hedge funds and stuff like that. So I think there's a pretty wide categorizations of the types of use cases that this platform will be able to do comfortably across all those. We just need to invest and build those outcomes. I don't know if that completely answered your question, that helped? Okay. And then the first question was a little bit more around we have different...

I mean, you work with Appian, but you also work with the ServiceNow and the UiPaths of the world. So how do you sort of decide when to bring -- do you take like a siloed approach and say, okay, Appian for workflow or an UiPath for RPA brings on for process mining? Or are you coming through...

It's less about -- so one, as a good consultant, I'll tell you, it depends, the answer, right? I'd like to avoid the question as many ways as I can, but when my clients ask it not in this room. Those are typically multivariant decision points that we have to go through. It depends on the use case. It depends on the financial construct of your licensing arrangement. It depends on how much market share might be within one vendor than another one inside of a client. The example you gave, if it's an ITSM use case and you're already a particular vendor platform user, you might go that way. If it's in the front office, and you happen to have a big call center implementation on the platforms you might do this. So we don't get a ton of questions around, hey, which platform should we bring in-house. We do get a lot of questions around, hey, we're building a use case and then we have to go through a decision criteria. We actually advise our clients to build structured decision matrixes around when these use cases come up to know how to arbitrate between the different platforms. If it's complete white space, it's a very long discussion. So I know it's a little bit of a nonanswer, but there's not one answer one way or other. For us, internally, as we build solutions, we have to go through a similar process. And most of the time, we'll look at a combination of feature functionality and business relationship around what we bring to the market. Some of that helps.

George, I thought you told me last night that you based it on an alphabetical order.

I think George covered a lot of it. It is case by case. What I will say is that it usually like order saying it starts at a pure play and then kind of like depending on what the base -- use case is and the answer might be different. So I can give you an example. So you're looking for process mining, there's a vendor that does just that, right? So you start with that. But if that process mining associated with the process that you're going to build or like it's already built on the platform that provides process mining, then you go in a different direction, right? So the other thing with Accenture is that we have all these practices and then we have our client account leads, right? So their relationship is with the client. So they kind of first filter. They kind of like interview us. They say, hey, my client is looking for this, why Appian, right? So we kind of explain -- help them understand what the capabilities provide and then it clicks for them, right, because they have to click for them before we can go back to the client. So then if they feel like, let's say, Appian and something else, something else, there are 3 vendors that are equally competent to do something. So they don't typically try to like make the decision for the client. So what they will do is they'll ask us to do a proposal, [indiscernible] like other practices to do a proposal. So they want to have the client actually be educated on those things through our capabilities and then make the decision. So we are just kind of like helping our accountants understand where there is conflict. And then they take that message and we help them with proposals with the clients to kind of understand that differentiation.

I think it covered probably just to add consulting approach, trying to understand the holistic picture and see what fits is the right way to approach it.

This is Jacob Roberge with William Blair. So just a little bit of a different spin on that question, but we've talked about earlier today this and then process automation and really in the optimization around that and how Appian has built low code, it's brought together process mining. It's brought together RPA. Do customers that you speak to understand the value prop to combining all of these into one platform and adopting the full platform versus piecing together the puzzle with the UiPath or the different solutions that are out there.

Absolutely. Customers do understand. If you think about a lot of tools came out, which are purely RPA for quite some time, there was tons of bots built beyond a point, it was a governance nightmare. So customers struggle and then you move into a low code for certain use cases. You've got mining that is, again, a differentiated part. So when you think about these different investments, customers definitely struggle and beyond a point, governance nightmare and dealing with relationships and stitching these 3 different pieces together. So it is always a good value proposition when you can solve a particular use case, when you can solve a particular business problem, think through from a mining standpoint, from a process reimagination standpoint, designing the process and then, of course, plugging in the last mile through RPA. So customers definitely see that differentiation.

yes, I think they see it. But certainly, the more mature and advanced ones. You'd be surprised we still come across some that don't. They tend to be mid-market, smaller, a little late to the game. I think that the -- while it is really nice to be able to bring a whole portfolio of capabilities under one platform that may not always be realistic at more mature, larger, certainly in financial services, some of the larger banks. We have to work in a multi-tenant strategy and have the flexibility of being able to integrate across different platforms. And so we've had this conversation with Appian, it can do both, which is really important to us and really important to our clients. Because if you already have for better or for worse, bots are running multi-tenant organization with a particular vendor, I still have to -- I have a lot of legacy that I have to integrate with and possibly continue to build on top of it. So yes, most understand and some can take a pure platform play. Others may migrate towards a pure platform play, but what we're seeing is we got to work in. What's the best-of-breed, more multi-tenant environment.

So I agree with most of it. I think where you're going is, you're saying today, do they get it all the way to the -- how do you like squeeze every ounce of it, right? The answer to that is no. If they do, then all the consultant would be out of work and Appian will be dominating the world.

See, I think we're going -- again, gentlemen, thank you so much for doing this. Love the partnership. Thank you.