451 R ES E A R C H R E P R I N T

REPORT REPRINT

©2018 451 Research, LLC | W W W. 4 5 1 R E S E A R C H . C O M

AppBus transforms the tools needed to drive digital transformation CARL LEHMANN1 9 N OV 20 1 8The tools needed to transform to a ‘digital business’ have a lot of moving parts. AppBus’ approach is to combine the core technologies necessary for modern application automation and integration – so enterprises don’t have to.

THIS REPORT, LICENSED TO APPBUS, DEVELOPED AND AS PROVIDED BY 451 RESEARCH, LLC, WAS PUBLISHED AS PART OF OUR SYNDICATED MARKET INSIGHT SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE. IT SHALL BE OWNED IN ITS ENTIRETY BY 451 RESEARCH, LLC. THIS REPORT IS SOLELY INTENDED FOR USE BY THE RECIPIENT AND MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED OR RE-POSTED, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, BY THE RE-CIPIENT WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION FROM 451 RESEARCH.

AppBus believes that rivalry in all industries requires an accelerated pace to transform to digital busi-ness; we concur. It has been developing and testing its wares since 2016 in the often-unforgiving financial services markets. It has now come to market with a different kind of digital automation plat-form (DAP). The AppBus eXperience Platform (AXP) combines workflow automation, robotic process automation (RPA), API management (APIM) and endpoint management into an integral environment. It is designed to craft new and modernize existing applications; expose their capabilities as services; improve automation and user experiences; and securely deliver data, logic and services to edge de-vices on any network.

T H E 4 5 1 TA K EWe believe AppBus is taking a hybrid development and integration approach to enterprise automation and integration. Its flagship AXP represents a distinct type of DAP that efficiently links some of the core systems and tools needed to enable enterprises to rapidly transform to digital businesses. It’s designed to modernize, link and execute highly distributed and discrete applications and services, and exploit edge computing. Essentially, it can play a multi-function, single-vendor role that now requires multiple platforms that include DAP, RPA, next-generation hybrid integration platform (HIP), and PaaS offerings. As AppBus AXP evolves, it can potentially play vital roles in enterprise IT strategy, as core enabling technology in cloud services providers and managed services providers, and as part of the emerging digital delivery platforms of global systems integrators.

C O N T E X TPhiladelphia-based AppBus was formed in 2014 with the idea of making it easier for enterprises to transform to digital business. Among the challenges it sought to overcome was how to craft new and modernize existing ap-plications to enable efficient process automation across in-place infrastructure that exploit the benefits of modern container, microservices and edge computing architectures. Its flagship AXP offering was first launched as beta in 2015. AppBus employs a force of 40+ and has raised a total of $9m through seed and series A funding rounds from Forte Ventures and Osage Venture Partners.

ST R AT EGY A N D P R O D U C TSAppBus’ approach toward digital business is embodied in a lifecycle journey to discover, optimize, deliver and extract insight from enterprise applications and processes. It begins with a discovery exercise whereby AXP can analyze applications and processes and expose their capabilities and componentry as individual reusable services. This enables users to reimage and improve process automations, minimizing the effort needed for redesign and refactoring. The platform also delivers and deploys designs and redesigns to edge devices. Execution of the ap-plications and processes can be analyzed and fed back into the lifecycle for continuous improvement.

AppBus believes that it is best for distributed applications and services to communicate and execute using a distributed ‘bus’ architecture – one capable of integrating from the edge to the middle tier to the back end – on-premises, in clouds or across hybrid architecture. Indeed, ESBs were poised for such a role, but they were not origi-nally designed for IT environments that are now moving toward discreet cloud-native, container and microser-vices-based architectures. According to AppBus, ESBs will remain within enterprises, but they will likely act as ‘highways’ to integrate legacy systems, while its AXP paves the ‘local roads’ needed to connect highly distributed and componentized systems. AppBus believes that AXP can supplant ESBs to play both roles, but it was designed to support and coexist with them.

451 R ES E A R C H R E P R I N T

451 R ES E A R C H R E P R I N T

The AppBus’ AXP architecture is composed of three technology suites.

The Integration Suite is at the heart of AXP. Its bus architecture distributes contextual data across all enterprise systems. It provides integration and RPA functionality and includes a Services Manager, a Workflow Manager, a Platform Adapter and a UI studio. Among the notable capabilities of the Integration Suite is the ability of the Service Manager to decompose existing applications into RESTful services (APIs) without modifying source code. The vendor is careful to note that this is not a screen-scraping technique. Rather, it is enabled via a programmatic interface and shim (a library that can intercept APIs, change parameters passed and handle operations) convert-ing, the vendor claims, existing applications into microservices. It includes a RESTful API catalog and manager for accelerated contextualized delivery of composable services. The Workflow Manager creates process flows via a drag-and-drop UI, enabling business analysts to craft and deliver RPA ‘bots’ and build business-centric workflows. The Platform Adapter adds a new API layer to legacy applications for integration and context sharing. The UI Stu-dio enables rapid creation of HTML 5 UIs for diverse mobile devices with little to no coding.

The Container Suite enables endpoint management. It’s designed to reduce risks across highly distributed sys-tems and helps facilitate edge computing architecture. It develops secure containers for devices, applications and operating systems with N factor authentications (if required, multiple proofs of identify can be enabled to gain access) and zero-trust security (‘ZT’ abolishes the concept of a trusted network inside a perimeter and mandates the creation of micro-perimeters of control around sensitive data/assets to gain visibility into how they are used). AppBus says it is OS- and device-agnostic and supports iOS, Android, Windows and macOS.

The Insight Suite is a real-time multi-application log of activities across AXP. It uses pattern-based monitoring to discover application usage and activity patterns and includes rules-based alerting. It is designed to understand which applications are used, how often and by whom.

AppBus AXP is now generally available, and the vendor is currently working on simplifying its design and improv-ing its ease of use. Release 3 of AXP is expected by year-end. Currently, the platform is flexibly priced depending on customer size. For now, it is best suited for large enterprises that need to accelerate their transformations to digital business and operations. AppBus is committed to making AXP consumable by all segments and says it will have an offering suitable for midsized firms/budgets available in 2019.

C U STO M E R SAppBus reports having roughly a dozen paying customers. It did not disclose specific customers, but among them is a leading brokerage firm that uses AppBus to reduce its money-transfer process from 14 to three steps. A leading global commercial bank uses AppBus to simplify its underwriting process from 23 to four steps, and yet another large commercial bank uses it to improve data accuracy and decision process efficiencies across underwriter and loan officer teams.

C O M P E T I T I O NAppBus brings rivalry to multiple IT markets including DAP, RPA, HIP and PaaS offerings. Potential DAP rivals in-clude Alfresco’s Digital Business Platform, which offers business process and content management but lacks the integration and RPA capabilities found in AppBus. OpenText’s AppWorks evolved from earlier BPM platforms into what is now a process- and content-centric application development environment. It recently added to its inte-gration capabilities via the acquisition of Liaison, and its Magellan AI platform can assist with RPA. Pega has long offered BPM technology; it acquired OpenSpan in April 2016 to add RPA capabilities, but the vendor is mainly focused on CRM markets. IBM and Oracle possess componentry similar to AppBus, but as with several vendors noted herein, some assembly is required.

Potential RPA rivals include Automation Anywhere, BluePrism and UiPath. All lack comprehensive APIM and DAP capabilities, but we believe it is highly likely that one or all of these vendors will acquire a DAP or iPaaS vendor in the near term to round out their offerings and expand their market footprint.

HIPs are next-generation integration PaaS (iPaaS) offerings. HIP vendors most likely to compete with AppBus in-clude MuleSoft, TIBCO and Dell Boomi. MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform has long enabled ESB, iPaaS and APIM ca-pabilities. Now part of Salesforce, it will act as an integration engine to support Salesforce’s broader Lightning and Heroku application development and execution frameworks. TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix BPM is an evolving DAP. The vendor acquired Scribe Software for its iPaaS offering to round out TIBCO’s integration capabilities. However,

Scribe specializes in Microsoft ecosystems, so it may be of limited value in many J2EE shops. Dell Boomi offers a market-leading iPaaS that includes its Data Hub data quality management capabilities. It recently extended its APIM capabilities with a gateway and developer portal that extends its reach outside the Boomi ecosystem. More-over, Boomi is overcoming some cultural challenges with Dell Technologies and will be more closely aligned with Pivotal to assist in distributed application and integration development.

These markets will also be influenced by the announced acquisition of Red Hat by IBM as well as change the evolving PaaS market. While the deal is pending, Red Hat is aggressively pursuing more comprehensive PaaS development (OpenShift) and integration frameworks that rely heavily on next-generation automation (Ansible) and integration (Fuse, AMQ, 3scale) technology. This will likely drive a leapfrog challenge with Dell Technologies (Pivotal, VMware and Boomi platforms), Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. All will have capabilities similar to AppBus but are not likely to be configured holistically as AppBus is currently designed.

SWOT ANALYSIS

451 R ES E A R C H R E P R I N T

STRENGTHSAppBus has a strong sense of the interdisci-plinary skills and cross-platform interopera-bility required to enable modern digital busi-ness and has developed a platform designed to simplify application integration and mod-ernization to enable digital business.

WEAKNESSESSometimes small vendors can overreach their capabilities and bring to market com-prehensive frameworks that may be diffi-cult to maintain as promised, thus limiting growth. While this risk is real, we think it’s un-likely at this time. AppBus may be commer-cially aligned with the Fortune 1000, limiting its market opportunity.

OPPORTUNITIESEnterprises hoping to become digital busi-nesses are doing so by seeking an integrated strategy and platform that enables them to modernize application development and inte-gration, improve developer productivity, and deliver engaging applications. Such a market is ripe for platforms such as AppBus.

THREATSThe Red Hat acquisition by IBM will change the structure and rivalry in the PaaS market, driving vendors in several IT markets to step up efforts to automate and integrate dis-tributed container and microservices-based applications. Moreover, vendors serving the emerging IoT market are also developing tooling to better enable edge computing – platforms that may, over time, rival AppBus.