At the Aptean UNITE 2024 customer conference, we unveiled AppCentral, our new all-in-one business software platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI). With a wide range of pre-connected, industry-specific applications available and the innovative Aptean AI Assistant to provide guidance and support, it’s a groundbreaking new offering with nearly limitless scalability and smart automations that boost efficiency.

While the first bundle of apps launched on AppCentral are tailored for discrete manufacturers, we’ll be adding many more in the coming months to support the food and beverage, transportation and apparel markets as well. The overwhelmingly positive reception from current Aptean clients and palpable excitement at UNITE serve to underscore that this is only the beginning of a promising new era for enterprise software.

To better understand how AppCentral furthers Aptean’s mission to help our customers innovate and what makes the platform different from anything else on the market, we sat down with TVN Reddy, Aptean CEO (TVN), and Jenny Peng, Aptean CTO (JP). Their insights on the platform and its potential to revolutionize the business technology industry reveal just how impactful it will be.

Q: How does AppCentral align with Aptean’s long-term vision?

TVN: Aptean’s long-term vision is to provide unparalleled solutions for manufacturers and distributors around the world. The way we choose to do it with AppCentral is providing very powerful, purpose-built, vertically focused applications—we call them “apps” in the AppCentral language—combined with functionalities to automate workflows from taking customers’ orders, manufacturing the goods, maintaining their equipment, driving efficiency of operations, all the way to last-mile shipping.

The platform has the ability to automate the end-to-end operations of our customers through a number of apps that are working very cohesively, value-enhanced by AI every step of the way. Whether it be a single task or end-to-end automation, AppCentral provides a significant value proposition unlike any other.

Q: What differentiates AppCentral from other platforms on the market?

JP: AppCentral is a game changer. Here's what I believe is going to differentiate us in the market. No. 1 is—and TVN talked about this—purpose-built apps. They’re vertically focused and very tailored to the specific industries that we serve.

But we want to do more than that. These apps are going to be pre-connected, with a unified experience for accessing and interacting with them, adding value for our customers in their respective industries. They’re backed by a unified data lake, including the data and documents of the individual applications. And we're able to layer on top AI capabilities that span across the various different functions that our customers have in their back office.

Imagine the type of insights that you're able to mine from the unified data, repository of documents and standard operating procedures. You can find answers to your questions. We’re taking it to the next level with this enterprise intelligence such that we're able to now add value for our customers and give them the information they need to make decisions. And we're able to build in automations for interconnected workflows.

The last point of differentiation is changing the user experience through interacting with our customers. In addition to the core vertical capabilities, we're layering on top education and training, and users can make enhancement requests, open up a support ticket, give us feedback and download their invoices.

You can think of numerous use cases for this platform. So, I think it's a game changer in terms of the vertical industry-specific capabilities, but it's also a game changer because we're evolving the experience of working with our customers and making it bidirectional, tailored and personalized.

TVN: If you think about the enterprise software industry, investing in enterprise software is a big deal, right? Companies have to set up their teams and make big purchasing decisions, and it takes months—sometimes years. And there’s a high failure rate in implementations.

So, all of that is very hard, and meanwhile businesses have their own thing to do—they have to produce and ship goods. They don't really have time to implement software. So, the purpose of AppCentral is making these apps very consumable, sometimes do-it-yourself in terms of implementation, so customers can see the functionality working right away.

For example, thinking about our OEE Pulse application, we ship a box of sensors to the customer, they set them up themselves and in a couple of hours they start seeing real-time monitoring.

Our mission is to continue to develop these apps to be consumable in incremental fashion so that customers can continue to run their business rather than pausing to conduct a big software implementation. And step by step, they’re digitizing their infrastructure, facilitating the flow of data, allowing for AI to help with their end-to-end operations and taking themselves to the next level.

We want to radically change how enterprise software is consumed in the industry. That's very, very exciting for us as we speak with all our customers, and they're super excited about that capability to take one bite at a time instead of doing a big implementation.

Especially if you think about the customers that don't have a big IT staff, right? They have a small number of people, and they might not have the expertise for traditional implementations. That’s why we make it very logical and simple for them to do. They can choose to do it one solution at a time. That's the best way for them to use the software and power of AI throughout their infrastructure. It allows them to drive efficiency and compete in whatever industry they’re in.