Appian acquires process mining company Lana Labs

Low-code automation platform Appian today announced it has acquired process mining company Lana Labs for an undisclosed amount. Appian says that with the addition of Lana, it will be able to deliver actionable and continuous process optimization with people, systems, and data in the same workflow.

Digital transformation and the ability to adapt quickly are critical in today’s business environment. That’s why a growing number of companies are adopting process mining, a family of techniques that support the analysis of operational processes of event logs, with the goal of turning event data into insights and actions. In a recent Deloitte survey, 63% of organizations have already started to implement process mining, and 83% of companies are already using process mining to expand their initiatives.

Berlin, Germany-based Lana, which was founded in 2016 by Karina Buschsieweke, Rami-Habib Eid-Sabbagh, and Thomas Baier, automates the analysis of repetitive business workflows. The container-based platform, which is portable between Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and customer-managed environments, ships with pretrained algorithms for data transformation and automation.

“Lana emerged rapidly as a process mining leader based on our dual commitment to industry innovation and delivering customer value,” Lana Labs CEO Dan Wucherpfennig said in a press release. “This is how Appian built its industry leadership, and we are excited for our future together.”

Appian acquisition

Research firm Gartner estimates the market for hyperautomation-enabling technologies will reach $596 billion in 2022, up nearly 24% from the $481.6 billion in 2020. For example, the robotic process automation (RPA) market is expected to reach $12 billion by 2023. As organizations look for ways to accelerate the digitization and structuring of data and content, technologies like document ingestion and natural language processing will remain in high demand.

Appian CEO Matt Calkins sees a “natural synergy” between process mining, process modeling, and automation. Combining Lana process mining with Appian, he believes, will enable “rapid automation” of analysis insights for organizations’ back-office workflows.

“We believe that our acquisition of Lana means that only Appian will be able to take customers from knowing to doing, in a unified suite,” he said in a statement.

Appian was founded in 1999 by Michael Beckley, Robert Kramer, Marc Wilson, and Matthew Calkins. The cloud computing and enterprise software company, which is headquartered in McLean, Virginia and has raised tens of millions in venture capital, sells a platform-as-a-service for building enterprise software apps. It’s focused on low-code development, business process management, and case management markets.

Prior to purchasing Lana, Appian acquired RPA company Novayre Solutions SL, developer of the Jidoka RPA platform.