Company: APPN
Filing Date: 2025-02-19
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001441683-25-000017
Chunk: 6

Company: APPIAN CORP
Filing Date: 2025-02-19
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 6
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 four categories: (1) providers of custom software solutions that address, or are developed to address, some of the use cases that applications developed on our platform target; (2) providers of low-code development platforms; (3) providers of one or more automation technologies, including business process management, case management, process mining, and robotic process automation; and (4) potential customers using their own internal technology departments to develop, build, and modify their own proprietary systems. 

As our market grows, we expect it will attract more highly specialized vendors as well as larger vendors that may continue to acquire or bundle their products more effectively. The principal competitive factors in our market include: 

•Platform features, reliability, performance, and effectiveness; 

•Ease of use and speed; 

•Data Fabric;

•AI;

•Platform extensibility and ability to integrate with other technology infrastructures;

•Deployment flexibility; 

•Robustness of professional services and customer support; 

•Price and total cost of ownership; 

•Strength of platform security and adherence to industry standards and certifications; 

•Strength of sales and marketing efforts; and 

•Brand awareness and reputation. 

We believe we generally compete favorably with our peer group with respect to the features, security, and performance of our platform, the ease of integration of our applications, and the relatively low total cost of ownership of our applications. We feel this is validated by the fact Gartner ranked Appian #1 for the use case of Complex Internal Applications in the 2024 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application 

8

Platforms (LCAP) as well as positioned Appian as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise LCAP.1

Intellectual Property 

Our success depends in part upon our ability to protect our core technology and intellectual property. We rely on patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secret laws, confidentiality procedures, and employee disclosure and invention assignment agreements to protect our intellectual property rights.

As of December 31, 2024, we had 21 granted patents and 20 patents pending related to our platform and its technology. None of our issued patents expire before 2034. We cannot provide complete assurance that any of our patent applications will result in the issuance of a patent or that the examination process will not require us to narrow our claims. Any patents we may be issued may be contested, circumvented, found unenforceable, or invalidated, and we may not be able to prevent third parties from