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Conquering Time to Value: The Case for Industry Clouds

Nadia Ballard — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation describes how the specialized attributes that have helped industry clouds deliver time-to-value (TTV) benefits to their users can be adjusted for use with integrated vertical AI solutions (including generative AI and AI agents). The document provides details, data points, and examples of vendors that have successfully implemented these industry cloud and vertical AI practices to deliver TTV to their clients.

“The most successful companies don’t treat industry AI as a black box that magically works. They design it as a collaborative tool that learns from domain experts, adapts to established industry-specific use cases, and leverages the proven industry cloud model, including prebuilt elements and deep integrations to not only deliver quick TTV but also create compounding value over time.”

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Conversational AI Platforms for Back-Office Use Cases 2026 Vendor Assessment

Hayley Sutherland — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study represents a vendor assessment of the conversational AI platforms for back-office use cases market through the IDC MarketScape model. This assessment discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that provide guidance about back-office-focused conversational AI platform vendors and their offerings. This IDC MarketScape covers a variety of vendors participating in the market and focused on providing platforms that can provide conversational AI solutions, including AI assistants, copilots, and agents, for a wide variety of back-office use cases and communication channels. The evaluation is based on a comprehensive and rigorous framework that assesses vendors relative to the criteria and to one another and highlights the factors expected to be the most influential for success in the market in both the short term and the long term.

"Over the past few years, IDC has seen vendors continue to expand their conversational AI offerings for back-office use cases, evolving from basic chatbots that were limited to answering employee FAQs or forwarding help desk tickets to IT to complex AI agents that can provide personalized learning and career paths, triage and troubleshoot IT help desk inquiries, provide synthesized business learnings and recommendations for executives, and assist knowledge workers in deep research workflows," said Hayley Sutherland, research manager, Conversational AI at IDC. "This IDC MarketScape evaluation of conversational AI platforms for back-office use cases should help business and IT leaders gain valuable insight into what is available in the market today, as well as help inform longer-term strategies."

IDC Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa Directions 2026: Cloud Professional Services Outlook

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation explores the expanding role of cloud and cloud-related professional services in the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) region as organizations reinvent themselves in the agentic AI era.

This combines presentations from the IDC Directions event in Dubai, held in February 2026, to provide a unified view of key technology areas shaping the evolution of cloud professional services and the drivers of customer demand for these services. These technologies include IT services, cloud, cybersecurity, and AI.

“Service providers are undergoing a strategic shift in cloud-related services as they leverage AI technologies to deliver business value at higher velocity and greater scale. Customers are modernizing their infrastructure to leverage a complex mix of cloud-based technologies and are demanding more sophisticated service outcomes, including digital sovereignty, extensive automation, and strategic business alignment,” said Associate Research Director Jonathan Tullett, Services, IDC Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa.

SAP 4Q25 and Full Year 2025 Results: Building the Business of the Future with an AI Foundation

Mickey North Rizza, Bo Lykkegaard, Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, Robert Parker — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective discusses SAP’s 4Q25 and full year 2025 results. SAP 4Q25 earnings and full year 2025 finds cloud and business AI setting up 2026. This document is a review of the earnings so organizations can understand what it means to them. It also discusses the new clients SAP is reporting for the quarter and breaks the information out by region.

“The world is shifting to AI powered. SAP is embedding AI into its processes and using it with contextualized data to make it easier for organizations to operate in 2026 and beyond,” said Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software. “Agents are the new Apps of the AI digital world. Look for SAP to continue to embrace AI.”

CIO Readiness in the Face of the Middle East War: Resilience, Cyberpreparedness, and Workforce Continuity

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how an expanding Middle East War could reshape CIO priorities through 2026 and beyond by increasing volatility in energy markets, cloud and network availability, cybersecurity exposure, and regional technology supply chains. It presents two planning scenarios: prolonged instability and escalation with energy shock. It outlines the immediate and longer-term actions technology leaders can take to protect people, sustain operations, and preserve strategic flexibility.

"CIOs cannot control geopolitical volatility, but they can reduce the fragility it exposes. The organizations that fare best will be those that protect people first, diversify dependencies early, and make resilience a design principle rather than a crisis response." — Daniel Saroff, group vice president, Research and Consulting at IDC

EMEA Wholesale Radar, 2H25

Jan Hein Bakkers, Tolga Yalcin — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation analyzes recent news and events in the wholesale telecoms market in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The EMEA Wholesale Radar identifies major trends and dynamics from these announcements and places them in the context of overall market development and outlook.

AI Is Driving Infrastructure Spending as a Priority in Financial Services in 2026

Jerry Silva — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective describes the thinking of financial institutions that have made their intentions clear about the need for infrastructure improvements, and the inference IDC Financial Insights is making about AI as the main driver behind these decisions. Over three years have passed since GenAI made the news, and while the financial services industry struggled to create real benefits from generative AI, agentic AI and AI agents have further complicated the picture, and the industry, generally, seems to be unprepared to leverage these new technologies fully. But recent surveys of the industry by IDC point to a willingness (even a need) to invest in overcoming the challenges of inadequate infrastructure preparedness in 2026 and beyond.

"The financial services industry is in 'rebuild' mode in preparation for the AI-fueled business," said Jerry Silva, vice president, IDC Financial Insights. "IT investments in infrastructure modernization are outpacing investments in areas like customer experience, even though there isn't always a short-term lift in revenue."

AWS and OpenAI to Expand Partnership with a Codeveloped Stateful Agentic Runtime

Matthew Flug — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AWS and OpenAI announced a jointly developed stateful runtime environment for AI agents, delivered through Amazon Bedrock and designed to run natively within customers' AWS environments. The runtime will enable AI agents to maintain persistent context, memory, workflow state, and tool connections across multistep tasks. The goal is to simplify the development and management of AI agents by reducing the need for developers to manually write "glue code" or manage session history and orchestration logic. The new runtime integrates with AWS identity, security, and governance services, allowing organizations to implement existing enterprise controls and compliance boundaries into the runtime's agentic workflows. The announcement underscores a shift in the application platform market from model-centric differentiation toward runtime architecture, governance integration, and vertically integrated AI infrastructure.

IDC Survey Spotlight: Are Companies in EMEA Avoiding Massive Exit to the Public Cloud for Their GenAI Workloads and Why?

Andrew Buss, Luis Fernandes — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight focuses on how EMEA companies regard using public cloud versus private IT for their AI and GenAI workloads and what is keeping them from moving entirely to a public cloud environment.

This IDC Survey Spotlight is based on IDC's EMEA 2025 GenAI Infrastructure Survey, which surveyed 1,000 organizations in EMEA. The survey spanned 16 countries across Western Europe; Central and Eastern Europe; and the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa.

IDC Survey Spotlight: In Supporting AI Workloads Across the Network, Why Is the Platform Preference Fading Given the Many Potential Benefits of a Unified and Expansive Approach?

Mark Leary — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight offers insights into the shifting preferences relating to the platform approach versus best-in-class solutions when supporting AI workloads across the network. These survey results are drawn from IDC's 2026 AI in Networking Special Report, a report driven by a worldwide survey of 500+ enterprise network executives and experts. This report covers both the impact and plans for supporting AI workloads across the network and using AI-powered networking solutions. The focus of this research is comprehensive, covering datacenters, cloud services, multicloud environments, network core and edge, and network management. While this IDC Survey Spotlight offers only a view into total responses, results are available by geographic region, select country, company size, major vertical industries, respondent role, and the AI maturity level of the respondent's organization.

"Many solution suppliers are prioritizing a platform approach to the challenges associated with moving AI workloads into production. This survey of networking leaders highlights the shift in preference from platforms to best-in-class solutions when supporting AI workloads across their networks. As certain functional requirements intensify, as IT staff experience and expertise build, and as platforms fall short in delivering expected advantages, IT organizations are more willing to take on the added responsibilities associated with assembling their own mix of best-in-class solutions. For the supplier, the challenge is to avoid developing and delivering a platform that is classified as a jack-of-all-trades and master of none." — Mark Leary, research director, Network Observability and Automation, IDC