Appian's (APPN -3.87%) acquisition of process mining company Lana Labs allowed it to get ahead of the market. It now offers a suite of products from process mining to workflow to automation that none of its competitors can match. According to Lana Labs, "the goal of process mining is to precisely analyze business and production processes for weak points and opportunities for improvement."
In this "Beat and Raise" segment recorded on Oct. 8, Fool contributors Jeremy Bowman and Nicholas Rossolillo discuss that new model and why Appian is leading the market.
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Jeremy Bowman: Yeah, I just want to make one more point or just hammer this home. I think the company is really, we talked about this convergence with process mining and the low-code workflows and automation. The company is really ahead of the market here. That's certainly how they see it. Historically, automation was a separate bucket from low-code, like Nick was talking about with UiPath.You have one provider for this and one provider to do process mining. Appian's really unifying that market. I think that could be pretty powerful. That can be a turning point in the performance or it's already done well, but it could make it do even better. I think it will take at least a few quarters to see how this plays out, if not, a couple of years or a few years. But I think long term they're in the right place. It's just a question of when the right time is.
Nick Rossolillo: It's a differentiator today because there are some other players doing similar things, but none of them are really doing all of it like Appian is. But the route they've chosen to go at least thus far is, with the exception of those couple of very small acquisitions they've made, they're building out this full suite services, these fully built up platform organically for the most part.
Jeremy Bowman: Yeah.
Nick Rossolillo: They're not going out and working for big splashy acquisition company that has tons of sales of its own already, a big sales force developed already that they can try to meet up with what they are doing. Those organic growth stories just take time. It's not going to be a snatching success really quickly as a result. But because they bootstrapped it in the past and they're going the more conservative route, at least from an acquisition standpoint going forward. That's where you get those really nice, pretty looking gross profit margins and operating profit margins, so there is that.
