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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 05/17/04 issue

Fed clients demand scale, rigor

By Susan M. Menke, GCN Staff

Matthew Calkins became a director of MicroStrategy Inc. in 1994, in his twenties, at the height of the dot-com era. He and three friends co-founded Appian Corp. of Vienna, Va., in 1999.

Their goal for that venture, he said, “was to link people to information on a grand scale.” Appian has done that with several groundbreaking information portals it built for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Federal Emergency Management Agency and World Bank during the last two years.

The privately held company, which started with four employees, now has 134 who mostly work on federal projects. Calkins serves as president and CEO. Last year’s revenue, he said, was $24.6 million.

Born in Hartford, Conn., Calkins grew up in Mill Valley, Calif. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Dartmouth College and was named his class’ outstanding economics graduate.

GCN chief technology editor Susan M. Menke interviewed Calkins by phone. GCN: You’ve built several portals for the government in the last five years—notably Army Knowledge Online, Navy Knowledge Online and Disaster.gov. Is that Appian’s main work?

CALKINS: I’d phrase it a lot more broadly. Portal is a catchword that caught on a couple of years ago, but I don’t think it describes the heart of our business well. We’re building information infrastructures, processing information for the government.

GCN: How did you get started?

CALKINS: We were doing consulting work that had to do with routing the right information to the right person, and the portal was the closest market to what we were already doing. So when we came out with software that connected people with information, they called it a portal.

In fairness, we’re really doing more than that. It’s not a Web page. We’re trying to target information, add knowledge and real-time analytics, and route information through a process. It’s deeper than a portal and also really big—scalable.

GCN: How many of these have you built, and how many are you continuing to work on?