Matt Calkins
Analyst · SunTrust Robinson. Please go ahead
Thank you, Kevin and thank you all for joining us today. In the first quarter 2018 Appian subscription revenue grew 36% year-over-year to $25.5 million. Our subscription revenue retention remained high at 119%. These results exceeded our guidance. We’re all just back from Appian World, our annual conference held last week in Miami. We had a big turnout with 55% more customer attendees and 55% more partner attendees than last year. Also, Steve Wozniak was there. At Appian World, we made two major platform announcements one regarding artificial intelligence and the other a new product, both will be generally available next month. AI is now a native part of the Appian cloud. We provide real-time sentiment analysis on any text stream. So us a bunch of words and we tell you from 1 to 100 how happy is the author of those words, using artificial intelligence. This is great for knowing whether your customers satisfied when they write you emails, letters texts, tweets and the like you can also analyzed call transcripts, is good for managing a call center. It’s good for knowing what makes customers happy, what products, which employees most of all it further Appian’s goal of making AI practical and easy. In my opinion the height to value ratio on AI is really high right now and here at Appian we have an opportunity to make AI not just cool, but useful. Built in sentiment analysis makes it easy to get value from AI. We also announced native integration with three leading AI platform, so that customers can run their own AI algorithms. In true local fashion with a minimum of clicks and keystrokes our customers can connect Appian processes with any fit for purpose AI algorithms made on Amazon, Google or Microsoft Azure. The fact that we did this for all three at once is in keeping with our commitment to agnosticism between clouds and stacks. We figure this cloud like diverge or get stickier someday and then our customers will appreciate Appian's portability. For a long time Appian has resisted building an application on our own platform, we finally launched one last week. Our new intelligent contact center, today's a framework a bundle of the best practices in communications components, in the future it will be an application. Our competitors consultant can fill call center seats at a high price, higher price than regular seats. Our competitors sell call center seats at a higher price than regular seats, so there is a precedent for how to monetize this. As the first application this is a very safe choice and we can follow a well-trialed path to market as we learn how to manage the new approach to development, marketing and sales. We are partnering with some great firms like Genesys, Twilio and Temasys to co-sell and provide communication services. We are not new to the call center market. We are already competitive at the highest levels in production at call centers for some of the world's leading institutions today, that track record and the solid customer references that come from it, constitutes the first reason to build the call center app. In addition to that we see an industry in change, at an opportunity to build something unique with three essential advantages; first, Appian offers a 360 degree review of the customer in Realtime. This is one of Appian's greatest competitive advantages in the BPM and local markets. By bringing to bear data from around the enterprise we can help the call center treat each customer personally, so that each moment of connection feels like part of the continuous dialogue. If you never had a call center forget you in between the first person you talk to and the next or may be between when they ask take on the first time and when they ask for it again afterwards, Appian is the opposite of that. Call centers are number two now. Call centers are fundamentally about case management. Customer calls they have an issue, that issue is a case and you have to resolve it. Surprisingly, this process resolution is a big deficiency in many call centers today. Appian is the recognized leader in dynamic case management according to a report last month by Forster. So we have something essential to add that most call centers lack. Third, AI is a major inflection point in the call center market. In a few years AI will talk to you, text replies your questions, recommend actions, set prices and in some cases it is already happening. Appian has a unique approach to AI, a powerful open and practical. AI will change call centers and it will also scramble the provider landscape and so it creates an opportune movement for entry. As I was saying we’re not new to this market. Attendees at previous Appian world as we delivered presentations by Appian customers like Goldman Sachs and Aviva talking about their Appian-based call centers. This year Appian World, HCSC the fourth largest health insurer in the US spoke about how they use Appian in their call center to authorize procedures for their 15 million members. With our platform they respond to the members 15% faster and reduce medical costs by $10 million per year through increased quality. Another customer, Barclays when the world's largest banks uses Appian in the call centers to serve their global customer base. We handle for management, billing disputes and balance transfer errors. With Appian, agents identify, diagnose and resolve these cases in Realtime. Barclays customers get faster and more accurate service, improving customer satisfaction by 64%. We continue to sign up new call center customers. This quarter we won a seven-figure deal with the top 50 global bank. Their Appian call center will consolidate many systems to process claims starting first in the fraud call center and eventually expanding to the rest of their call contact centers. They aim to deliver better customer experiences with increased satisfaction and reduce response times. Most of our Appian presentations, most our presentations at Appian World were from customers and partners. 30 of our customers spoke about their Appian journeys including KKR. a Fortune 500 private equity firm. KKR spoke on the main stage to describe their three-year Appian journey from a very small start a single compliance process to more than 65 processes touching every deal they do. We announced a couple more big features and I will cover this briefly. Interface design in Appian is now low code drag-and-drop. We also announced new robotic process automation or RPA orchestration functionality. You can now manage and communicate with a layer box better than before. Here we continued our partnership with Blue Prism. We mentioned in a previous call that Appian's professional services team is now dedicated to the customer above all and the customer success. In service of that objective, we introduced in Q1 a new role the customer success manager and moved several of our top PS experts into it. This new role of a strategic advisor and generally unbilled evaluated by net subscription revenue retention rather than anything to do with services revenue. Our goal is to stop using services to sell services and start using services to sell software. The introduction of this new role and the reallocation intelligent to it, will affect our service revenue and margins. Two weeks ago we announced our selection of a new headquarters building in Tysons corner Virginia. We had a nice ceremony with the Governor of Virginia at the new facility. We look forward unifying the company in one place, being the primary tenant, putting our name of the building that sort of thing. We plan for the move to happen next spring. With that I will turn the call over to Mark for a deeper discussion of our financials.