What problem does Durable Execution solve in distributed systems? Temporal Technologies did not emerge to participate in an existing software category. It created one with Durable Execution, a programming model that preserves application state and guarantees workflow completion even in the face of infrastructure failures. Decades of operating experience at Amazon, Microsoft and Uber shaped the founding team’s approach to Durable Execution. The result is a platform built to keep business-critical processes, such as payments, onboarding and automation, running consistently in production. "My co-founder Samar and I developed durable execution over years of operating distributed systems," says Maxim Fateev, co-founder and CTO. "It's the concept of code that fundamentally cannot crash. We've been building it for a very long time.” The model emerged in response to a fundamental shift in how software is built and operated. As organizations moved from monolithic systems to distributed cloud architectures, execution became harder to manage. Application developers were increasingly required to coordinate incomplete processes, stalled transactions and unpredictable system behavior across services. This reflected a deeper structural imbalance. While infrastructure evolved rapidly, from virtual machines and containers to serverless platforms and intelligent agents, programming models changed far more slowly. Developers continued to rely on low-level abstractions such as queues, databases, and handlers that were never designed to guarantee end-to-end execution, placing the burden of consistency directly on application teams. From Operational Experience to Category Creation How did prior distributed systems experience shape Temporal’s creation? Maxim Fateev, co-founder and CEO of Temporal encountered these limitations firsthand while operating some of the world’s largest distributed systems. As a technical lead on Amazon’s messaging platforms, including those behind Simple Queue Service, he observed how queues and pub/sub systems were deployed at scale across complex organizations. While these architectures enabled communication between services, they pushed reliability concerns into application logic. Developers were forced to manage retries, partial execution and inconsistent state, making it clear that event-driven messaging alone was insufficient for coordinating complex, long-running processes. Existing orchestration frameworks offered little improvement, lacking the scalability and flexibility required for modern workloads. Seeking a higher-level alternative, Fateev and his collaborators began rethinking how execution itself should be modeled. Early work took shape in Amazon Simple Workflow Service, where Fateev served as technical lead. After a brief time at Google, Fateev moved to Uber while his co-founder, Samar Abbas, went to Microsoft, where Abbas created the Durable Task Framework that later became Azure Durable Functions. At Uber, Fateev and Abbas reunited to build Cadence, validating the approach under extreme scale and operational pressure. Each stage reinforced a central principle: developers should be able to write normal application code while the system preserves execution state and manages recovery automatically. This accumulated experience ultimately led to the creation of Temporal, which opened this lineage to a broader audience and established Durable Execution as a distinct execution paradigm.

Karolium was built to solve a specific enterprise problem: how to extend existing ERP systems with new, best-of-breed capabilities without rebuilding them, accumulating integration debt, or losing governance. As enterprises push beyond the functional limits of core ERP platforms like SAP and Oracle, they increasingly encounter gaps in areas such as asset intelligence, supplier collaboration, and multi-enterprise orchestration. Traditional custom development fills these gaps at the cost of rising complexity, brittle integrations, and long upgrade cycles. Most low-code/no-code (LCNC) platforms ease workflow automation but fall short when applied to ERP-scale systems that demand deep data consistency, extensibility, and long-term architectural integrity. To address this, Karolium positions itself as an enterprise zero-code platform designed explicitly for ontology-driven extension of existing ERPs. Rather than replacing core systems, the platform introduces pre-composed, enterprise-grade models that plug into existing technology stacks, allowing organizations to add missing capabilities while preserving their foundational infrastructure. At the core of Karolium’s approach are AI-driven, ontology-based data models that abstract and normalize enterprise data across source and target systems. Unlike rigid schemas, these models allow global and vendor-specific structures to coexist, enabling enterprises to adapt processes without creating downstream integration friction. In Karolium’s view, this architecture eliminates much of the technical debt traditionally associated with customization and point integrations. “Our scalable, fully secured, plug-and-play LCNC PaaS platform understands your data, context, machines, processes, and disruptions across your business ecosystem to deliver proven, enterprise-grade, re-composable solutions that accelerate your IT and OT transformation,” says Shan Muthuvelu, president and CEO. “It also reduces total cost of ownership and technical debt from high-cost licenses, integrations, and customizations by up to 35% within 2 to 5 years.”

Owners and technology teams are often tasked with identifying what they need regarding technology and security systems during a building construction project. Sometimes they understand the entire process but often they have spent their time with their silo’d system and do not have a complete building and technology infrastructure mindset. Without a clear picture of how information should be gathered, distributed, and used inside and outside a facility poor drawings can leave room for interpretation, contractors are forced to make assumptions, and clarity comes too late—after walls are closed and budgets are committed. For more than 20 years, Commtech Design has helped organizations avoid those outcomes by bringing clarity to technology and security design early in the process. Now in its 21st year, it operates as a complete technology and security consulting company specializing in detailed, buildable drawings that guide projects from concept through installation. Rather than approaching systems in isolation, it treats infrastructure, networks, wireless, audiovisual, and security systems as a single cohesive plan. “We translate our clients’ operational goals and security philosophy into drawings that can be clearly understood, accurately priced, and built correctly,” says Bret Emerson, president and owner. Commtech serves a diverse client base, including K–12 school districts, higher education campuses, corporate facilities, municipal and state projects, and correctional institutions. Each environment presents different operational needs and security considerations, and that exposure gives the company a broad understanding of various technologies, security approaches and end-user requirements. Those insights allow it to create designs that work across new construction, renovations, and phased projects alike.

CIOs face a familiar problem in the less familiar domain of physical security: Digital identity management has long benefited from interoperability and open standards while physical security continues to operate in proprietary silos. This has created the same fragmentation, compliance gaps, and operational inefficiencies that IT worked hard to eliminate, making physical access a significant gap in digital transformation strategies for organizations tasked with enabling hybrid work and extending zero-trust principles across the enterprise. As a result, physical security is finally at the crossroads that IT faced years ago, where the rip-and-replace approach to standardize on a single vendor is expensive, disruptive, and often infeasible. Organizations are now seeking a different solution that unifies physical identity and access management across existing infrastructures without requiring costly replacement, the same approach that succeeded in digital transformation. SwiftConnect’s Network Approach SwiftConnect's connected access network platform represents a fundamental shift in how organizations approach physical access management and governance. Rather than managing building access systems in isolation, the platform creates a unified identity layer that orchestrates access permissions, credential management, and policy enforcement across existing systems and infrastructure from multiple vendors and buildings. This means organizations can now manage one identity that works seamlessly across every building and access point without ripping out and replacing fully functional systems. Since this mirrors the shift that CIOs have widely adopted with cloud-based single sign-on (SSO) for IT security and compliance, it is also the next logical step to enabling connected access across physical domains. To accomplish this, the SwiftConnect connected access network platform integrates physical access credentials (traditional cards, fobs, and mobile credentials) with access control systems, identity providers, and other systems that govern physical security. This enables fully centralized, automated identity and access management and governance that accelerates mobile access deployments in NFC wallets, meeting the demand to provide users with effortless physical access experiences via their smartphones and other mobile devices. SwiftConnect’s growing momentum around delivering these user experiences and automated capabilities is at the crux of why its platform was named the “Best Connected Access Network Platform 2026” by CIO Review.