ENTERPRISE PULSE
Friday, February 20, 2026
Market Intelligence for Enterprise Professionals
🎯 Today's Enterprise PulseUpdated 1h ago
What's happening: Appian ties AI to process governance, posts strong Q4 growth
Appian’s CEO says AI must be coupled with deterministic process governance. The firm posted Q4 cloud subscription revenue of $117 million, up 18% YoY, and total revenue of $202.9 million, a 22% rise. Adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 11% from a -8% loss two years earlier, and it secured a $500 million enterprise license with a U.S. agency.
Also developing:
By the numbers: Nexfibre acquires Netomnia for £2B
🚀 Top Enterprise Headlines
Future-Proofing Virtual Desktops: What IT Leaders Need to Plan for Now
If the past few years have taught IT leaders anything, it’s that stability is no longer the default state. Work patterns shift quickly. Security threats evolve constantly. Business priorities change mid-year, not mid-decade. Against that backdrop, many organisations are re-examining a question that once felt settled: how future-ready is our desktop strategy, really? Future-proofing means building a desktop environment that can absorb change without requiring a complete rethink every time conditions shift. Several forces are already reshaping what “good” looks like for end-user computing… and they’re only accelerating. Demand will keep getting less predictable User demand is no longer linear. IT teams now support a mix of full-time staff, contractors, third parties, seasonal workers, and project-based teams. Mergers, restructures, and new initiatives can introduce hundreds of users overnight—and remove them just as quickly. Over the next five years or so, this variability will increase, not decrease. Desktop strategies built around fixed capacity and long planning cycles will struggle to keep up. The organisations that succeed will be those that can scale desktops up or down quickly, align resources to actual usage, and adjust without introducing operational risk. This requires more than cloud infrastructure. It requires operational flexibility: the ability to manage, optimise, and govern desktops continuously, not periodically. Security and compliance pressure will intensify Security has already moved to the centre of desktop strategy, and the bar continues to rise. Zero Trust, conditional access, identity-driven controls, and tighter compliance expectations are becoming standard rather than exceptional. At the same time, regulation is evolving. Data residency, auditability, and policy enforcement requirements will continue to change, often faster than organisations can redesign their environments. Future-proof desktop strategies assume that controls will need to adapt. They prioritise centralised management, consistent policy application, and visibility across environments so security teams can respond without disrupting users or slowing the business. AI will change how desktops are used and what they need 3-5-year refresh cycles are likely a thing of the past, and AI is no longer a distant consideration. Tools like Microsoft Copilot, automation platforms, and data-driven workflows are already changing how users interact with their desktops. Over the next few years, AI will influence everything from compute demand and performance expectations to how support and troubleshooting are delivered. This introduces new challenges for IT teams. Some users will need more compute for short periods. Others will need always-on access to AI-enabled tools. Capacity planning becomes more complex, and static desktop models start to show their limits. Future-ready desktop strategies are designed to adapt to these shifts. They make it easier to align desktop types to user needs, adjust resources dynamically, and evolve as workloads change without rebuilding the environment from scratch. Operational efficiency will matter more than ever Perhaps the most underestimated factor in future-proofing is operations. Skilled IT resources are already scarce, and there’s little indication that pressure will ease. Over the next several years, IT teams will be asked to deliver more with the same (or smaller) teams. Manual processes, fragmented tooling, and bespoke environments won’t scale in that reality. Future-proof organisations are investing now in automation, standardisation, and centralised management. Not because it’s fashionable, but because it’s the only sustainable way to protect time, reduce risk, and maintain service quality as complexity grows. From resilience to readiness Taken together, these trends point to a simple conclusion: Future-proofing the desktop isn’t about choosing the “right” platform once. It’s about building an operating model that can evolve. That means choosing technologies and tools that don’t lock organisations into rigid designs, support hybrid and cloud environments, surface insight rather than hide it, and automate routine work so teams can focus on what comes next. IT leaders who plan for this now put their organisations in a stronger position to absorb change with confidence. Nerdio Manager for Enterprise helps teams simplify operations, optimise continuously, and stay ready for whatever comes next. Learn more about how Nerdio Manager can help your organization stay future-ready today.
CIO.com
Appian's 'AI Needs Process' Thesis Goes Mainstream - Now It Has to Prove the Math Works
Appian's Q4 2025 results show a company riding the wave of an idea whose time has come. CEO Matt Calkins argues that AI cannot deliver enterprise value without process orchestration, and the market is starting to agree.
Diginomica
What the Nike Breach Teaches Us About the Microsegmentation Imperative of Integrating with EDR
At 14:37 UTC on January 22, 2026, Nike appeared on WorldLeaks’ Tor-based leak site. The countdown timer showed 48 hours until 1.4 terabytes — 188,347 files — would be dumped onto the dark web for anyone to download. Included in the trove of files are assets from Nike’s research and development (R&D) and product creation […] The post What the Nike Breach Teaches Us About the Microsegmentation Imperative of Integrating with EDR appeared first on ColorTokens. The post What the Nike Breach Teaches Us About the Microsegmentation Imperative of Integrating with EDR appeared first on Security Boulevard.
Security Boulevard
Homeostatic Third-Party GRC in GRC 7.0 – GRC Orchestrate
Governing the Extended Enterprise as a Living System There is a fundamental shift underway in governance, risk management, and compliance that many organizations have not yet fully internalized: the enterprise… Continue reading Homeostatic Third-Party GRC in GRC 7.0 – GRC Orchestrate
GRC 20/20 – The GRC Pundit Blog
Salesforce Acquires Momentum
Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), a San Francisco, California-based provider of customer relationship management (CRM) and cloud enterprise software, acquired Momentum, a San Francisco, California-based provider of conversational insights and revenue orchestration platforms. The amount of the deal was not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027, subject […] The post Salesforce Acquires Momentum appeared first on FinSMEs.
FinSMEs
💬 Top Enterprise Social Posts
Tweet by @Alliekmiller
I struggle with the phrase “everyone’s a coder now.” And I hesitate to post because I don’t want you to read this as gatekeeping. If anything, I want more people to build, but in a stronger, more functional way. Building any sort of software is incredibly empowering. Even creating a tiny tool gives folks what I call “pro-poster syndrome”, where they feel more capable and competent than ever. What was solely reserved for the most technical among us is now - at least at a basic level - becoming accessible to anyone with a few bucks a month to spare. But overwhelmingly, and especially in the last few weeks, I am getting more and more frustrated notes from developers at large companies. Yesterday, I heard about salespeople at one company asking for repo access. Earlier, a startup engineer told me his life has been hijacked by non-engineers. “All of their vibe coded apps don’t work.” I spoke with one company whose marketing and finance and partnership teams dropped the ball on their product launch tasks in favor of tinkering with Claude Code / Codex / Replit. Product and design seem to navigate this better. They’re closer to the work, and in many orgs, already have a path to contribute responsibly. Maybe this is a blip and the energy among business users will die down, but I would bet against that. Companies need to figure out how to enable AI-first problem-solving without wrecking the sanity of an entire department, turning engineering into an endless support desk, and derailing critical work in the business. The future is more builders, yes. But most companies are still missing the systems.
by Allie Miller•
Thread by @Leadlagreport
Narratives can crush multiples faster than fundamentals change. Markets are pricing “software is dead” as if AI will commoditize SaaS overnight. But enterprises still need governance, permissioning, audit trails, compliance, uptime, and data orchestration. AI may change workflows, but it doesn’t erase control layers.
by Michael A. Gayed, CFA (Lead-Lag Report)•
