The next round of EM360Tech Quarterly Impact Index voting is now open, with nominees recognised across four categories of enterprise thought leadership impact.
The EM360Tech Q2 2026 Quarterly Impact Index nominees have been announced, and voting is now open.
The Index is EM360Tech’s benchmark for enterprise thought leadership performance. It’s built around one simple idea: we don’t measure content by views. We measure it by impact.
That matters because enterprise technology audiences aren’t short on content. They’re short on signals they can trust. A podcast, campaign, or analyst-led discussion can attract attention, but attention alone doesn’t prove that it helped someone understand a problem more clearly or make a better decision.
For Q2 2026, the EM360Tech Quarterly Impact Index recognises nominees across four categories: the Vanguard Award, Apex Award, Catalyst Award, and Authority Award. Each category looks at a different kind of impact, from forward-thinking podcast insight and audience engagement to campaign performance and analyst influence.
Voting is now open, giving the EM360Tech community a direct role in recognising the companies, podcasts, campaigns, and analysts shaping enterprise technology conversations this quarter.
Building On The First Quarter
The first EM360Tech Quarterly Impact Index created a clearer way to recognise enterprise thought leadership that goes beyond noise, visibility, or short-term attention.
The Q1 cycle introduced the framework, announced the nominees, opened voting to the wider EM360Tech audience, and followed the winners with dedicated case studies. Those case studies matter because recognition is only useful when people can understand what made the work effective.
That same standard continues in Q2.
The Index isn’t designed to treat all impact as the same thing. A podcast that reframes a security problem creates value in a different way from a campaign that performs across multiple channels. An analyst whose perspective carries weight in the market creates another kind of value again.
That’s why each category has its own lens. The purpose is simple: to make enterprise thought leadership easier to recognise, easier to compare, and easier to trust.
EM360Tech Vanguard Award Nominees
The EM360Tech Vanguard Award recognises the most innovative or forward-thinking individual podcast of the quarter.
This category focuses on originality, clarity of insight, and contribution to the wider enterprise technology conversation. It’s not just about covering a relevant topic. It’s about asking a sharper question.
Vote for the EM360Tech Vanguard Award here
Zafran
Podcast: Are Security Teams Wasting Resources on 99% of Vulnerabilities That Don’t Matter?
Zafran’s nominated episode challenges one of cybersecurity’s most familiar assumptions: that fixing more vulnerabilities automatically means becoming more secure.
Security teams are under constant pressure to reduce risk, but they’re also dealing with a volume problem. Vulnerability lists keep growing. Alerts keep arriving. Remediation queues get longer. The issue isn’t only that teams have too much to fix. It’s that many teams still rely on scoring models that don’t always reflect what’s actually dangerous in their own environment.
That’s where the episode stands out. It moves the conversation from patching everything to understanding what genuinely matters. By focusing on contextual exposure management and AI-driven prioritisation, Zafran’s episode asks whether security teams should be spending less time chasing every possible weakness and more time identifying the small percentage of vulnerabilities most likely to create real business risk.
Temporal
Podcast: Why Are Companies Struggling to Integrate AI Models into Business Workflows?
Temporal’s nominated episode focuses on one of the biggest gaps in enterprise AI: the distance between a working model and a working business process.
Many organisations can run AI experiments. Fewer can turn those experiments into reliable workflows that operate inside real systems, with real users, real governance, and real failure points. That’s where AI adoption becomes harder than the demo suggests.
The strength of this episode is that it doesn’t treat AI as a model problem alone. It looks at what has to happen around the model. Workflow orchestration, durable execution, reliability, governance, and scale all become critical once AI moves from testing into production. That makes the conversation more useful for enterprise leaders who are trying to understand why AI value is often harder to capture than AI capability.
BlackCloak
Podcast: Beyond the Firewall: Why Executive Risk Is Reshaping Cyber Strategy
BlackCloak’s nominated episode expands the cybersecurity conversation beyond the corporate perimeter.
Executives are high-value targets because of their access, influence, and visibility. But the risks they face don’t stop at company-owned devices or managed systems. Personal phones, home networks, private email accounts, family members, data brokers, and lifestyle exposure can all become part of the attack path.
That’s what makes this episode a strong Vanguard nominee. It reframes executive protection as a cybersecurity discipline, not just a personal safety issue or an IT concern. As digital risk follows leaders outside the workplace, security strategy has to account for a much wider attack surface. BlackCloak’s episode captures that shift clearly.
EM360Tech Apex Award Nominees
The EM360Tech Apex Award recognises the top-performing individual podcast of the quarter.
This is the most directly data-led category in the Index, focused on standout engagement, reach, and commercial impact. The nominees reflect episodes that didn’t just cover strong topics. They connected with enterprise audiences in a measurable way.
Vote for the EM360Tech Apex Award here
FireMon
Podcast: Why Cybersecurity Policies Fail And How To Fix Them
FireMon’s nominated episode tackles a problem many security teams know too well: policies that exist on paper but fail in practice.
Most organisations don’t lack security policies. The problem is often implementation. Firewall rules accumulate over time. Visibility gets weaker across complex environments. Teams inherit decisions without always understanding why they were made. Compliance requirements may be met, while practical security control remains inconsistent.
The episode resonates because it deals with the messy reality of enterprise security. Policy only matters if it can be enforced, understood, updated, and trusted. FireMon’s conversation puts that operational gap at the centre, making it especially relevant for security leaders managing complex, multi-vendor environments.
Starburst
Podcast: AI Is Replacing BI: Here’s What CIOs Need To Know
Starburst’s nominated episode speaks to a major shift in enterprise analytics: what happens when AI changes how people ask questions of data.
Traditional business intelligence has often depended on dashboards, reports, and structured queries. Those tools still matter, but AI is changing user expectations. Business teams increasingly want conversational access to insights. They want answers faster, in plain language, and with enough context to trust what they’re seeing.
The episode’s strength is that it doesn’t treat AI as a shortcut around data discipline. It makes clear that trusted data, semantic layers, governance, and metadata still matter. In fact, AI often exposes data chaos rather than fixing it. That makes the conversation useful for CIOs trying to understand whether AI will replace BI, reshape it, or force enterprises to build a stronger foundation underneath it.
Omada
Podcast: Non-Human Identities and Agentic AI: The New Frontier in Identity Security
Omada’s nominated episode focuses on one of the fastest-growing identity challenges in the enterprise: identities that don’t belong to humans.
AI agents, bots, service accounts, API keys, machine identities, and automated systems are becoming harder to track and govern. That creates a serious problem for identity security because many existing processes were designed around people, not autonomous or semi-autonomous systems.
The episode stands out because it connects non-human identity growth to the rise of agentic AI. If AI systems can act across workflows, access data, and trigger business processes, organisations need much stronger visibility and control. Omada’s conversation places identity governance at the centre of that shift, which is why it landed so strongly with enterprise security audiences.
EM360Tech Catalyst Award Nominees
The EM360Tech Catalyst Award recognises a campaign that delivered strong performance across multiple channels.
This category looks beyond a single podcast or asset. It reflects how a campaign performs across podcasts, articles, social channels, audience engagement, lead generation, and wider market relevance. Because meaningful campaign impact rarely happens in one place.
Vote for the EM360Tech Catalyst Award here
Informatica
Informatica’s nominated campaign is built around one of the most important questions in enterprise AI: how do organisations build trust before they scale adoption?
The campaign focused on the trust paradox in AI adoption, drawing on insights from Informatica’s 2026 CDO Report. That paradox is simple but serious. AI ambition is rising quickly, but many organisations still struggle with data quality, governance, readiness, and control. They want the benefits of AI, but they don’t always have the data foundation needed to trust the outcomes.
That gives the campaign its strength. It connects research, thought leadership, and practical guidance around enterprise data management. For businesses trying to modernise cloud data strategy, improve governance, and make AI more reliable, Informatica’s campaign speaks directly to the work that has to happen before AI can deliver real value.
Noibu
Noibu’s nominated campaign focuses on ecommerce resilience, revenue protection, and conversion growth.
That matters because ecommerce teams are operating in a difficult environment. Customer expectations are higher. Acquisition costs are harder to absorb. Technical issues can quietly drain revenue before teams fully understand what’s happening. A broken journey, a slow page, or an unresolved site error doesn’t just create friction. It can directly affect sales.
The campaign stands out because it links technical performance to commercial outcomes. Noibu’s message is not just about analytics or monitoring. It’s about helping ecommerce teams understand where revenue is being lost, what customer friction looks like, and which fixes should be prioritised. That makes the campaign practical, business-focused, and highly relevant to digital commerce teams under pressure to do more with clearer evidence.
SailPoint
SailPoint’s nominated campaign focuses on the changing future of identity governance.
Traditional access reviews have long been part of enterprise security, but they’re under pressure. Certification fatigue, machine identities, AI agents, shadow AI, and fast-changing access needs are making static review cycles harder to rely on. The question is no longer only who has access. It’s whether that access still makes sense in real time.
That’s where SailPoint’s campaign lands. It positions identity governance as something that has to become more continuous, more intelligent, and more responsive. By connecting real-time access decisions with the rise of non-human identities and autonomous systems, the campaign reflects a clear shift in enterprise security: identity can’t remain a periodic checkbox if the environment itself is changing every day.
EM360Tech Authority Award Nominees
The EM360Tech Authority Award recognises analyst influence across EM360Tech content during the quarter.
This category isn’t tied to one episode. It looks at consistency, depth of insight, engagement, and market relevance across analyst contributions. The strongest analyst voices don’t just host conversations. They help shape how enterprise audiences understand the issue in front of them.
Vote for the EM360Tech Authority Award here
Chris Steffen
Chris Steffen brings a strong cybersecurity and infrastructure lens to the Authority Award shortlist.
As Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates, his work is grounded in the realities of IT operations, security management, and enterprise infrastructure. Across Q2, his EM360Tech contributions through the Cybersecurity Awesomeness Podcast covered a wide range of security topics, including RSAC 2026, agentic AI, AI-assisted attacks, quantum computing, privacy regulation, hardware security, Microsoft Build, and CISO strategy.
That range matters because security leaders aren’t dealing with one isolated problem. They’re dealing with many changes at once. Steffen’s strength is his ability to connect emerging technology shifts to practical security concerns, giving enterprise audiences a clearer way to understand what deserves attention and why.
Christina Stathopoulos
Christina Stathopoulos brings a data and AI education perspective to the Authority Award shortlist.
As the Founder of Dare to Data, she focuses on helping people and organisations make better use of data and AI through a responsible lens. Her Q2 EM360Tech work touched on board readiness for agentic AI, AI use case management, business value from AI, ecommerce resilience, and manufacturing transformation.
Her contribution stands out because she makes technical conversations feel connected to real business decisions. AI adoption isn’t just about tools. It’s about literacy, governance, value, responsibility, and readiness. Stathopoulos brings those threads together in a way that helps enterprise audiences think about AI with more confidence and less noise.
Dana Gardner
Dana Gardner’s Authority Award nomination reflects his long-standing role in enterprise technology analysis and podcast-led thought leadership.
As founder of Interarbor Solutions and host of long-running enterprise technology conversations, Gardner brings depth across AI, cloud, data strategy, infrastructure, DevOps, observability, SaaS economics, and operational readiness. His Q2 work on Tech Transformed covered many of those themes, connecting fast-moving technology shifts to the business and architecture decisions behind them.
That consistency is what makes his contribution valuable. Gardner doesn’t treat enterprise technology as a series of disconnected trends. He connects them to systems, strategy, cost, performance, and maturity. For audiences trying to understand how AI, cloud, data, and infrastructure choices fit together, that kind of perspective carries weight.
How Voting Works
Each EM360Tech Quarterly Impact Index category is open for a seven-day public voting period.
Public voting gives the wider EM360Tech audience a role in recognising this quarter’s nominees, while the shortlist itself is built around defined award criteria. That balance matters. It keeps the process open without reducing the awards to a simple popularity contest.
The Q2 shortlist reflects the different ways enterprise thought leadership can create impact. Some nominees stood out for the originality of a single podcast conversation. Others delivered strong performance across measurable engagement, multi-channel campaign execution, or analyst-led influence.
Voting links will be shared across EM360Tech channels, giving audiences, partners, analysts, and technology leaders the opportunity to support the nominees they believe made the strongest impact this quarter.
What Happens Next
Once voting closes, EM360Tech will announce the Q2 2026 Quarterly Impact Index winners.
The winners will also be celebrated through dedicated case studies that look more closely at the work behind the result. That’s an important part of the Index because the value of recognition doesn’t stop at the announcement. The real value comes from understanding why something worked.
Over time, those case studies will continue to build a clearer picture of what strong enterprise thought leadership looks like across podcasts, analyst-led discussions, and multi-channel campaigns.
Not as theory. As evidence.
Final Thoughts: Impact Needs A Better Benchmark
Enterprise technology doesn’t need more empty attention metrics. It needs better ways to recognise substance.
The EM360Tech Quarterly Impact Index is all about that very idea. It recognises that impact doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes it’s a podcast that reframes a familiar problem. Sometimes it’s a campaign that creates momentum across channels. Sometimes it’s an analyst whose perspective helps audiences understand what’s actually changing.
The Q2 2026 shortlist reflects all of that.
These nominees show that enterprise thought leadership still matters when it’s specific, useful, credible, and connected to the problems technology leaders are actually trying to solve.
Voting is now open. This is your chance to help recognise the work that didn’t just get seen, but made a measurable impact.
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