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Comcast continues to intensify its service offering and approach to gain Business Services market share.

Jitesh Bhayani, Ghassan Abdo, Denise Lund, Paul Hughes, Peter Chahal — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Comcast Business continues its strategic efforts to move up market and become a key player of secure connectivity and communications solutions that will drive scale, automation, and business outcomes as an agile, trusted strategic partner for business customers. This progression involves transcending its established small and medium-sized business (SMB) market to encompass mid-sized companies and large-scale enterprises that have a global footprint.

D-Wave: Improving the Quantum Experience with the Introduction of Fast Anneal

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

D-Wave's launch of Fast Anneal is as significant as recent announcements regarding logical qubit and error mitigation research made by gate-based quantum hardware vendors. To reduce the impact of environmental noise, Fast Anneal applies extended control over a much wider range of timescales in the quantum annealing systems, giving end users the ability to solve more complex optimization problems of value. For end users, Fast Anneal provides an opportunity to use quantum annealing technologies to solve complex optimization problems in both the short term and the long term. This is one more step in making quantum computing accessible and usable for end users.

IDC Innovators: European GreenOps, 2024

Filippo Vanara, Remi Letemple, Zuzana Kovacova — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This study profiles European vendors Gaia Generation, Sopht, Greenpixie, Aguaro, and Posetiv Cloud, which have been selected IDC Innovators for providing GreenOps solutions that assist cloud vendors and/or cloud users. IDC Innovators are emerging vendors (annual revenue of less than $100 million) that have demonstrated a groundbreaking business model or an innovative new technology (or both).

"Security remains critical in the cloud computing space, but sustainability and cloud costs will play a key role in Europe, empowered by new and upcoming regulations and the sustainability criteria that IT users increasingly demand. Within this space, GreenOps practices unleash new opportunities to reduce waste and costs while enhancing collaboration and creating business value." — Senior Research Analyst Filippo Vanara, IDC European CloudOps

IDC Innovators: Product Experience Solutions for Manufacturing, 2024

Mark Casidsid — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Innovators report offers insights for line-of-business professionals, innovation managers, and IT teams to make informed decisions about partnering with technology solution vendors for their product and customer experience initiatives. The report analyzes a selection of three vendors in this space — Bluemeteor, Logik.io, and Threekit — that are pioneering innovations to drive product and customer experience transformation in B2B manufacturing.

"Delivering a superior customer experience in manufacturing goes beyond offering quality products. Cultivating a holistic product experience is a crucial differentiator and is key to driving customer engagement and loyalty," said Mark Casidsid, senior research analyst, IDC Manufacturing Insights.

IDC TechBrief: AI for Sustainability

Dan Versace — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative tool for sustainability, enabling organizations to address complex environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges. It optimizes resource efficiency, predicts and mitigates risks, accelerates innovation, enhances stakeholder engagement, and drives impactful decision-making. Generative AI has expanded its applications to include data augmentation, scenario analysis, sustainable design, ESG integration in finance, policy analysis, and stakeholder engagement. However, its adoption comes with risks such as data bias, ethical considerations, regulatory compliance, model robustness, and dependency on technological infrastructure. To mitigate these risks, a comprehensive risk management approach is necessary. Organizations need to assess their readiness to integrate generative AI for sustainability, considering factors like data availability, technological infrastructure, strategic alignment with sustainability goals, ethical and regulatory implications, and readiness for change.

This IDC TechBrief discusses the role of generative AI in addressing environmental, social, and governance challenges. It highlights how generative AI can optimize resource efficiency, predict and mitigate risks, accelerate innovation, enhance stakeholder engagement, and drive impactful decision-making. The document also explores growth of generative AI as a tool for sustainability, its applications in various sectors, and the potential risks associated with its adoption. It concludes by assessing the readiness of organizations to integrate generative AI for sustainability.

"Generative AI represents a transformative approach to sustainability, enabling organizations to harness the power of machine learning algorithms to address complex environmental, social, and governance challenges." — Dan Versace, research analyst, ESG Business Services

Market Presentation: A Super Platform for the Modern, Omni-Channel Store

Leslie Hand, Margot Juros, Anne Paris — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation provides a view into IDC Retail Insights' store "super platform" concept, a modernized technology platform for the omni-channel store that allows retailers to become more agile and able to innovate faster in their never-ending quest to improve business performance by better serving customers and engaging their workforce. The store super platform is a composable technology ecosystem that is founded on certain essential layers of functionality, architected in a way that allows retailers to innovate quickly and cost effectively. This model is data and insight driven, makes full use of hybrid cloud/edge strategies, and leverages composable architecture to ease the development and optimal deployment of store applications.

"Modern retailers face a complex array of internal and external pressures that are driving them to invest in technology at an increasing rate to meet threats head on and to take advantage of new opportunities. A simplified, unified technology super platform approach for the store will open channels for innovation and iteration, reducing the technology debt burden on retailers overall," said Leslie Hand, GVP, IDC Retail and Financial Insights.

"Now is the time to rethink the optimal balance of cloud and edge/on premises for your operations, along with enhanced connectivity needs to better support the technologies and solutions needed for data-driven, secure, seamless omni-channel retailing," said Margot Juros, research director, IDC Retail Insights.

Policies to Drive Effective Cybersecurity Capabilities

Christopher Tozzi — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation, which uses IDC's Cybersecurity Capabilities Assessment Framework 1.0 (#US51014923, July 2023) as a reference point, provides templates for a range of security policies across the seven key domains that IDC has identified as critical for enabling a holistic cybersecurity strategy: network security; endpoint security; identity and digital trust; data security; application security; response, recovery, and resilience; and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Enterprises will need to adapt these policy templates to fit their unique needs, and they must accompany them with security procedures that translate the policies into effective practices. However, these templates provide a starting off point for developing a comprehensive and effective state of cybersecurity readiness in the face of modern threats.

Policies serve as the foundation for enabling effective cybersecurity capabilities across the enterprise — which is why defining clear and comprehensive policies is an essential step toward mitigating threats. However, deciding which policies to adopt can be challenging given the broad range of security domains to manage as well as the fact that tolerance for risk may vary widely across different domains and between businesses.

Workday Innovation Summit 2024: Workday’s Platform and AI Strategy is an Opportunity to create the Experience-Orchestrated Business

Mickey North Rizza — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Workday held its annual Innovation Summit for 2024 in California Tuesday, April 16 – Wednesday, April 17, 2024. The one and half day summit brought forward an esteemed group of industry analysts to gain an understanding of Workday’s trajectory in 2024. It appears 2024 will be a banner year for Workday if it can deliver on its promise. The event gave us a review of Workday’s technology platform and innovation; AI strategy, approach, and application; industry approach, capabilities, and momentum; partner ecosystem; HCM, Finance, and Planning aspects; and customer value and success stories.

AI Partner Ecosystem and Roles

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective highlights AI partner ecosystem and roles. Artificial intelligence (AI) will have a massive impact as companies invest heavily in technology and begin integrating AI models in their existing business processes. AI will impact operating processes and potentially drive business model change, which will be transformative and disruptive at the human and technology levels.

According to Douglas Hayward, research director, Worldwide Digital Strategy and Agency Services at IDC, "GenAI is a powerful and transformative technology, so the decisions you make around GenAI will be strategic to your organization. There is a broad ecosystem of partners in the IT services and infrastructure segment to help you implement the appropriate strategy."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Microsoft Implementation Services 2024 Vendor Assessment

Brian Wood — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study represents a vendor assessment of the Microsoft implementation services ecosystem through the IDC MarketScape model. This assessment discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that explain success in the Microsoft implementation services market. This IDC MarketScape covers a variety of vendors participating in the Microsoft implementation services space. 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.

The Microsoft implementation services market is broad and complex. The breadth of the offerings spans IDC's foundation markets of IT consulting and systems integration, which implies the need to satisfy the requirements of an array of stakeholders. IT and line-of-business (LOB) stakeholders will have different priorities and goals with respect to Microsoft implementation services. This means that in order to be successful in the market, service providers will need to address these varying requirements through specific marketing and go-to-market messaging and deliver effective solutions across industries at the IT, LOB, and C-suite level.

The market is also quite dynamic as Microsoft rapidly adds functionality and technology to the platform, applications, and tools. This means that services organizations have to be continuously acquiring or developing new skills and capabilities. Some vendors will offer only one or a few of the categories of solutions in the Microsoft portfolio, while others plan to deliver the full range of solutions across the six Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Designations mentioned previously. Buyers of these services should be aware of the full scope of Microsoft solutions and look for service providers that have experience with and understand the synergies across these solutions.

"In a rapidly evolving Microsoft implementation services market, strategic partnerships and innovative AI solutions are key to unlocking sustainable business value," says Brian Wood, research director, IT Consulting and Systems Integration at IDC.