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Beyond the Agentic AI Hype: Five Lessons from the European CIO Xchange 2025

Jennifer Thomson — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

European CIOs are moving beyond AI hype, focusing on disciplined strategies to scale AI effectively. Key lessons include prioritizing high-impact projects, ensuring business-led strategy, addressing foundational data and legacy issues, embedding governance, and designing flexible architectures for cost and sovereignty. Success hinges on aligning AI initiatives with strategic business goals, overcoming organizational constraints, and institutionalizing continuous reevaluation to adapt to rapid market changes.

"AI success is not about chasing hype but about ruthless prioritization, business-led strategy, and fixing foundations before scaling." — Jennifer Thomson, AVP European Research, IDC

Cloud Cost Management Best Practices

Daniel Saroff, Jevin Jensen — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective provides enterprises with clear practices to manage cloud costs, ensure cloud investments deliver measurable business value, and embed cost optimization into the ongoing operational fabric. Despite decades of cloud adoption, many enterprises still overspend due to idle resources, oversized workloads, licensing inefficiencies, and hidden SaaS costs. The flexibility that makes cloud powerful also drives cost sprawl at organizations without disciplined governance and processes.

This document highlights eight techniques to control spend and align investments with business value. Decommissioning and rightsizing remove waste through automated sweeps and resizing policies. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans deliver savings when carefully sized to stable workloads. On/off scheduling cuts nonproduction costs by shutting down after-hours. Licensing optimization addresses overlooked expenses across infrastructure and SaaS. Modernization and architecture shifts unlock structural efficiencies through newer instance families, alternative chipsets, and PaaS/SaaS migration. Monitoring, governance, and accountability provide transparency with dashboards, tagging, showback, and chargeback. FinOps maturity grows by moving from ad hoc cost tracking to an accountable, automated model where governance, integrated tools, and a cost-aware culture embed optimization into daily decisions.

"Cloud's promise of agility and cost efficiency fades without discipline. Mastering governance, optimization, and accountability reclaims control and drives business value," says Daniel Saroff, group vice president of Consulting and Research at IDC.

Cloudsmith's Cloud-Native Artifact Management Vision Positions It for Wide Market Adoption

George Mironescu — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note discusses Cloudsmith's latest market movements and prospects for growth.

Considerations in Positioning as a Managed SP in a Cloud World

David Tapper — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective discusses the need for managed SPs to develop a blueprint to determine their optional positions in the managed cloud services market. The goal is to develop an effective position that clearly defines target markets, a set of offerings, a value proposition, and differentiation.

"The dramatic changes in buyer requirements when utilizing managed cloud services, along with a fundamental restructuring of the service provider industry, require that managed SPs more clearly define their positioning in this market," says David Tapper, program VP, Outsourcing and Managed Cloud Services, IDC. "Investments that managed SPs must make to define their position include assessing organizational and operational building blocks, aligning organizational and operational building blocks with strategic business factors, defining boundaries across service providers, and developing a blueprint for continuous adaptation."

IDC Services Path 2025: Technology-Oriented Service Categories Banner Books

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table banner book includes data for IDC's Services Path 2025 program, which provides comprehensive data and guidance on the mind and journey of services buyers. The global markets in these documents cover technology-oriented professional services and outsourcing, managed, and engineering services, including:

Application testing/digital assurance/quality engineering services
Digital business transformation professional services
Digital engineering and operational technology (DEOT) services
Employee experience (EX) management services
IT services for customer success and support
Managed cloud services
Network consulting and integration services (NCIS)

Coverage includes adoption; budgeting trends; purchasing preferences and attitudes; pricing and contract options; friction points in selection, contracting, and managing delivery; and detailed customer satisfaction ratings for vendors. The program also examines what buyers are seeking from the "service company of the future" and where and how service providers must change to meet customers' future needs.

IDC's Worldwide Digital Transformation Use Case Taxonomy, 2025: Value-Based Healthcare

Lynne Dunbrack, Jennifer Eaton, Silvia Piai, Jeff Rivkin, Mutaz Shegewi — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation discusses how the digital transformation of value-based healthcare is evolving from a fragmented collection of pilot programs into an integrated ecosystem that is reshaping how care is delivered, experienced, and measured.

In 2025, healthcare organizations are leveraging advanced technologies not just to digitize workflows but to fundamentally improve outcomes for both patients and providers. Remote monitoring platforms, powered by wearables and connected sensors, are enabling continuous data collection and early interventions aimed at reducing hospital readmissions and empowering patients to manage chronic conditions from home. Telehealth has become a mainstay of hybrid care models, expanding access for rural and underserved populations while offering clinicians greater flexibility and operational efficiency. Artificial intelligence (AI) now drives predictive analytics, diagnostic decision support, and automation of administrative tasks, allowing clinicians to focus more on human-centered care rather than repetitive documentation. For employees, digital tools have enhanced engagement and reduced burnout by simplifying communication, streamlining scheduling, and providing real-time insights into patient status and resource utilization. Equitable access to healthcare also remains at the forefront of digital transformation. Healthcare organizations are deploying unified digital health platforms and digital strategies to integrate disparate systems, improve care consistency, and ensure that innovations reach all populations. The convergence of industry cloud, telehealth, remote monitoring, and AI is shifting the paradigm from fragmented pilots toward robust, scalable ecosystems that deliver proactive, personalized, and universally accessible care.

"The evolution of healthcare digital transformation is no longer defined by discrete innovations but by the convergence of AI, interoperability, and patient-centric design working in harmony to deliver smarter, more personalized, and equitable care experiences across the continuum," says Jennifer Eaton, research director, IDC Health Insights.

Microsoft Marketplace Unification: A Strategic Shift in Partner Engagement and AI-Driven Solution Delivery

Stuart Wilson — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

Microsoft's consolidation of Azure Marketplace and AppSource into the unified Microsoft Marketplace represents a strategic evolution in hyperscaler ecosystem design. With embedded experiences, federated reach, and AI-centric innovation, the new marketplace empowers partners to scale and customers to discover solutions in context. IDC sees this as a foundational shift toward ecosystem-led growth, where marketplaces become intelligent surfaces for solution delivery, partner engagement, and customer transformation.

Perspectives from AWS Cloud Day Riyadh, 2025: From Cloud Vendor to Sovereignty Partner

Uzair Mujtaba — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note examines the discussions that took place at AWS Cloud Day Riyadh, 2025 on September 29. It looks at how AWS’s planned Saudi Arabia cloud region, AI Zone, and skills programs align with the kingdom’s Vision 2030 and its various data, AI, and cloud regulations and policies. It explains where AWS differentiates (custom chips, model governance, partner delivery) and where execution risk remains (skills, legacy modernization, evolving regulation). It also outlines the sovereignty lens, where control beyond data location and the trade-off between deep localization and customer choice have become key differentiators.

“AWS is aligning with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 through investments in sovereign cloud, AI zones, and skills. Vertical integration, AI governance controls, a broad partner base, and localized services strengthen its position, but outcomes will depend on talent readiness and adaptation to localization needs.” — Uzair Mujtaba, senior research manager, software and cloud, IDC.

Profiling Digital-Native Businesses as Emerging Tech Partners in Europe

Martina Longo, Lapo Fioretti — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation examines European digital-native businesses as both creators and adopters of emerging technologies. It highlights their dual role as innovators (developing new applications and platforms) and early adopters (leveraging cutting-edge technologies to drive disruption and competitive advantage). The report outlines the defining traits that enable this dual position and concludes with an analysis of collaborative dynamics within Europe’s innovation ecosystem, emphasizing EU initiatives that support start-ups and scale-ups as well as the broader pursuit of technological sovereignty.

VMware Explore 2025: Make Your Cloud Simpler and Plan for the Future

Matthew Flug, Jim Mercer, Adam Reeves — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses VMware Explore 2025, held the week of August 25 in Las Vegas, Nevada, that provides a look into the past year of Broadcom's VMware investment as well as a view into forward-looking plans for its private cloud offerings.

"A victory lap for VCF 9.0, VMware Explore 2025 served as evidence of Broadcom's execution on its commitment to invest in VMware," said Adam Reeves, research director, PaaS for Developers of Modern and Edge Applications research at IDC. "In addition to the focus on VCF, the conference also demonstrated ongoing investment in Tanzu, security, and private AI."