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Appian CORP

APPN

2 articles

$2.8B Market cap · 2026-09-02

@BrokenMoats 2 clicks

Broken Moats on X

$SNOW conference call is the bear case for application software companies. Their data infrastructure combined with coco and cowork on top increasingly makes SNOW a key player in data migrations, and data consolidation for their customers and a key hub to switch between models means SNOW has a seat at the table to be one of the most important and internal pieces of an AI stack....and as they become the permissions data holder with governance and api/mpc to internal and external partners, they can actually become the system of record across applications. This would allow you to use tools like cocoa inside to contextualize in human language what you want built, or even what data/answers you want and how you want that visualized.... Compare this to a Salesforce that is essentially becoming a database company silo to their specific domain by opening up their data to Claude to be the work engine. Eventually companies will increasingly want to stop interfacing with multiple applications to query and want to UI and query across a singular interface (originally thought to be an LLM like Claude, but with specific training and different inference costs / intelligence across models its more like the player presiding over the biggest pool of company data (snowflake, databricks) could become that central payer - less model lock, more flexibly, and central access point for models, data, queries and ui across functions. May not relegate a salesforce obsolete but significantly destroys their value when people access from Snow or even from an LLM like Claude were they lose the ui interface, and behavioral association and slight shared/learned network effects and become a database. Increases switching costs overtime and certainly destroys pricing (agent force consumption model is a step in the modern pricing setup, but start based models are dead, its not an if for most applications without highly defensible and proprietary data) $PEGA, $APPN, $PATH, $CRM, $PAYC are first pass through som of the more exposed names
@BrokenMoats

Broken Moats on X

still feel the rotation from July-current is more about a short squeeze (the opposite end of the Situational Awareness portfolio) and the dispersion of having to unwind the long semi trade portion. But that rubber band is similarly stretched as it was the opposite direction at the end of June. Still feel its in the process of reversing (even the morning action today looks like a top could set in?) $RNG, $IT, $APPN, $TGT, $EXPE, $FDS, $PAYC, $ELF, $MET, $MFC, $GDDY, $V, and many more that were AI losers that have had incredible runs in the past 4-6 weeks seem like good ways to be short against a snap back to AI or a more seasonal unwind from policy risk trying to control rates, midterm/fall seasonal factors, etc. Especially with SaaS earnings taking the stage later this week and next (overshadowed by $NVDA on Wednesday)

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