Specifically, the new test capabilities will add features that would be familiar to software developers, where you insert breakpoints in, what in this case is a process workflow, as opposed to conventional lines of code. A related feature is a new replay capability so you can step back or forward through a process, so you can narrow down the breakpoints where the fault in the process lies.

In fact, in the BPM space, Appian is hardly alone in advancing new testing features. For instance, in an upcoming release, Pegasystems is adding a new testing feature that exercises different mixes of the business rules that Pega uses for building business processes.

The other new initiative will be expanding its relatively new SaaS, or hosted BPM offering called Appian Anywhere. The hosted service is currently being used by couple customers. Appian’s plans are for the hosted offering to become the platform for partners that develop specialized apps that would run atop the environment, with Salesforce.com’s AppExchange the reference model.

The company, founded by several Microstrategy veterans, has hovered just under the radar since opening up for business in late 1999. The company has run strictly bootstrapped, and claims it’s firmly in the black, serving a Global 2000 and federal government clientele.

The company has built its reputation for scalability, using web-based front end, plus tricks like in-memory analytics and process engines that automatically modify schema and reporting whenever the user modifies a business process. One install at the U.S. Department of Defense is about to expand from an existing base of 1.2 million users to a goal of over 6 million.

“We’re targeting the advanced Microsoft user to be the developer,” explained co-founder and CTO Mike Beckley. Towards that goal, Appian leverages Wiki-like collaboration capabilities and provides web-based tools for capturing milestone decisions and evaluating them with its embedded process analytics engine. Processes and associated analytics and discussion chains are linked and are searchable through the product’s repository. Users also do not have to build schema or tables, as the tool automatically creates them.

The heavy presence of analytics marks the company’s Microstrategy roots. According to Beckley, the goal was to take the type of business intelligence data that Microstrategy customers worked with and make it actionable. That places Appian at the intersection of several markets, among them BPM and so-called “Operational” BI.

And so of course, it makes for an interesting barroom debate over what differentiates BPM from BI, or whether the distinctions are simply artificial. Clearly, adding workflows and defining them as processes that pierce through application silos provides the BPM bonafides. But when you add analytics, the question is, are they confined to comparing the impacts of bottlenecks or other conditions that might impede a process, or are you opening the floodgates to benchmarking overall operational effectiveness? Analytics for most BPM tools are directed toward what-if comparisons on variations in process paths.

But then again, you have analytics in business activity monitor (BAM) dashboards that provide de facto end user front ends to BPM (process management, not modeling) systems. And logically, there’s diminishing rationale that the analytics for a current business process that is executing be any different from the historical trend analyses run against data marts or warehouses.

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