Earlier today, Appian issued a press release with its 1st half results.  

The release reads:

Appian, the global innovator in enterprise and cloud-based business process management (BPM) today announced strong growth through the first half of 2011. The company signed 34 new-name customers across government, financial services, healthcare, energy and other industries. Sales orders for the Appian BPM Suite grew 158 percent over 1H 2010. In addition to large on-premise software deals, Appian continued its dominance in cloud BPM, with Appian Cloud orders growing 181 percent over 1H 2010.

Some big numbers - 34 new customers in 6 months.  Orders up by 158% and cloud orders grew even faster.

The problem is:  Those three numbers are all the information in the release.  

No information on absolute customer growth or way to extrapolate into any actual financial performance. I'd love to know how many developers they currently employ and how many salespeople.  What is the trend on all these metrics?

As one of the last pure play vendors standing, a full set of Appian results might have provided interesting insight into the trajectory of the sector.  Tibco, IBM and Pega all have all sorts of other product lines to complicate the picture. Appian might have provided a pure proxy for the BPM market generally.

Still, 34 new customers is more than 1 per week in 2011 so I guess we should expect some good case studies in the coming months.