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Navigating Programmatic Convergence: How Brands Should Invest as Holdcos, Platforms, and Services Collapse

Roger Beharry Lall — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective reframes the programmatic buying decision for a market in which the old categories no longer hold. Demand and supply platforms are merging, retail data and streaming inventory are arriving as a single product, holding companies are operating as technology platforms, and services firms are building agentic delivery of their own. A brand that once asked which category to buy now faces a different question: How to design the path its budget travels, who it transacts with, how many intermediaries sit between spend and impression, who owns the data behind the decision, and whose software acts on its behalf? This document maps the boundaries that are dissolving, replaces category selection with a small set of recurring decisions, and frames advertising technology as an enterprise choice that the CMO, CIO, and CFO make together, rather than a media line item marketing settles alone. AI runs underneath all of it as the accelerant, compressing intermediaries and turning proprietary identity data into a durable advantage. The through line is that convergence buys efficiency and costs independence in the same motion, and the brands that come out ahead are the ones that keep re-deciding the trade rather than settling it once.

“The question is no longer which platform to buy, because the platforms are becoming one another. It’s how to design the path a budget travels, and to keep the right to change this path when the market shifts under you,” says Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications at IDC.

The Reliability Mindset: A Practitioner’s Guide for Strategic CIO Decisions in a Volatile World

Clay Miller — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective maintains that reliability is a strategic decision rather than a tactical afterthought and that the organizations that thrive in volatile conditions are those that approach decision-making about it deliberately. The document introduces IDC’s Reliability Decision Framework, a practitioner discipline that guides technology leaders to set the target, build to it, prove it, and govern it across the organization, processes, and technology. It establishes two further constructs: “upstream reliability,” the practice of managing failure at its source rather than recovering from it downstream, and “business criticality tiering,” which matches the level of reliability and the investment behind it to each system’s value to the business. The document then applies the framework to five recurring reliability decisions, ordered by importance, and offers practitioner guidance that turns reliability into a deliberate and predictable source of business confidence.

“Reliability has become one of the defining decisions in technology leadership, and the CIOs who treat it as a strategy rather than a technical detail will set the pace in volatile environments,” says Clay Miller, adjunct research advisor, IT Executive Programs (IEP), IDC. “When reliability is decided upstream and built in from the start, it becomes an enabler of speed, instilling the confidence that lets the business move even faster.”

Fighting Fire with Fire: Retailers Arm Themselves with AI to Supercharge Defenses Against AI-Fueled Cybercrime

Margot Juros, Cristiano Quattrini — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping the cybercrime and fraud landscape confronting retailers, making attacks faster to design, cheaper to execute, and harder to distinguish from legitimate customer or employee behavior. The report looks at three converging risks — a surge in AI-enabled breaches, the acceleration of existing fraud and cyberattack patterns across omni-channel retail, and new vulnerabilities introduced by AI agents, chatbots, and GenAI-powered tools — and shows how retailers are countering with AI/ML, GenAI, and agentic AI defenses of their own. The document offers guidance on building a unified security control plane, governing AI agents before they touch transactional systems, and modernizing employee and customer protection programs against AI-enabled social engineering.

“Retailers face a growing incidence of cybersecurity threats, as AI changes the economics of retail cybercrime — attacks are faster to launch, cheaper to run, and harder to tell apart from legitimate customer or employee behavior,” said Margot Juros, Research Director, and Cristiano Quattrini, Senior Associate Advisor, IDC Retail Insights. “Retailers that fight fire with fire, addressing the problem with AI/ML, GenAI, and agentic-fueled defenses, are best positioned to contain these threats quickly and navigate the next wave of AI-driven fraud and cybersecurity with confidence.”

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Datacenter Facilities Management Software 2026 Vendor Assessment

Luis Fernandes, Mary Johnston Turner — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study leverages the IDC MarketScape methodology to evaluate several major datacenter facilities management software providers worldwide. IDC identified a plethora of significant players in this market and analyzed their current offerings as well as planned updates.

"Gaps in monitoring, automation, and orchestration constitute a major hindrance in today's management of datacenter facilities," according to Luis Fernandes, senior research manager, Cloud and Datacenter Research at IDC. "By choosing a best-in-class software solution to manage their datacenter facilities, IT and OT managers are effectively choosing a path of less resistance, with fewer instances of unforeseen incidents which, in turn, lead to overall better human resource management, reduced total cost of ownership, and less unplanned downtime."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Desktop Label Printers 2026 Vendor Assessment

Mitri Roufka, Tim Greene — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape assesses the capabilities and strategies of 15 global vendors of desktop label printers. It also provides guidance to vendors and advice to companies considering the acquisition of such equipment, including the selection criteria they should consider and the vendors that fit their production printing needs best.

"Desktop label printers are evolving from simple output devices into critical infrastructure for digital traceability, compliance, logistics automation, and product branding across global industries. Future market leadership in desktop label printing will depend not only on hardware performance but also on vendors' ability to support evolving compliance, connectivity, automation, and customization requirements," says Mitri Roufka, program director, IDC Imaging, Printing, and Document Solutions team.

Resilience Beyond the Firewall: Operational Resilience and Third-Party Risk

Sam Abadir — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Financial services concentrate vendor relationships more than the broader market, calling it risk management. IDC survey data shows that strategy has not reduced exposure: ransomware hits land harder on supplier, partner, and SaaS-adjacent systems in financial services, backup compromises succeed more often, and recovery takes longer. Switching intent on the concentrated vendors that carry this risk is flat, while switching intent on smaller tools is higher. Regulation that includes DORA is already landing harder on financial services IT plans than on the market, and the US and UK have similar rules emerging. The piece argues concentration is an untested trade-off, not a proven risk control, and tells technology buyers where to focus oversight instead.

“Financial services picked vendor concentration and called it risk management, but the data shows nobody checked if it worked,” says Sam Abadir, research director, Risk, Financial Crime, and Compliance, IDC. “The ransomware hits, the backup failures, and the slow recoveries land exactly where that concentration sits. DORA is going to ask that question first, and the US and UK won’t be far behind.”

The Evolution of Industrial Interfaces for Data-Driven Operations

Jonathan Lang — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective provides guidance to industrial organizations about how to navigate the increasing options and requirements for industrial interfaces. These decisions depend on an understanding of the interface dilemma in operations, the role-based requirements to align an interface strategy around, and a clear view of what the future state of technology interfaces might look like.

“Every new technology shift has been supported by this attitude that you can just spin up a new interface for workers to adopt,” says Jonathan Lang, research director, Worldwide IT/OT Convergence Strategies, IDC. “As we think about a future where data and autonomous capabilities are everywhere, this approach requires a fundamental rethinking to capitalize on the full potential that breaking down silos and becoming data-driven offers.”

Anthropic and Salesforce: AI and CRM Join Forces

Tim Law, Shari Lava, Neil Ward-Dutton, Max Pepper — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce. This new partnership launches with Salesforce in Claude, a plugin available to select pilot customers now, with open beta expected in September 2026. It signals a shift in the AI partner ecosystem, where large enterprise application providers combine with AI models to leverage deterministic, trusted enterprise applications alongside the power of nondeterministic AI models and natural language interfaces. It also solidifies Anthropic's focus on bringing frontier reasoning and intelligence to commercial enterprises by collaborating with large enterprise systems of record.

Cisco Extends Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to Rack Scale, Trading Engineered Platform Control for Rapid Time to Market

Brent Ellis, Kuba Stolarski, Ashish Nadkarni, Matthew Eastwood — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Cisco's expansion of Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to rack-scale infrastructure through a partnership with Supermicro gives enterprises another full-stack AI infrastructure option as the market shifts from large-scale training to AI inference and agentic implementation, which carry support and governance requirements that training clusters do not. The partnership blends Cisco's reputation as a reliable enterprise infrastructure provider, built on the company's engineered networking and compute portfolio, with Supermicro's speed to market as an ODM implementer of NVIDIA reference designs for AI-dense servers, as well as rack-scale solutions like NVL72; the adoption of Spectrum-X networking rather than in-house Cisco designs shows how the NVIDIA release cadence is resetting the pace of enterprise infrastructure deployments and engineering.

Tech Buyer Survey Spotlight: How Are Vertical Sectors Addressing IT/Connectivity and Related Cost Impacts?

Paul Hughes — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This Tech Buyer Survey Spotlight examines how enterprises view the impact of tariffs and economic shifts on the cost of IT services, and how tech-specific tariffs or currency changes will most affect budgets. Over 60% will simply increase their IT budget to address increased costs; however, that percentage differs significantly by vertical market.

The data in this Spotlight comes from IDC’s 2026 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey Wave 4, with 1,835 respondents across 27 countries and 15 vertical industries.