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Coupa Inspire 2026: Autonomous Spend Management Takes Center Stage

Jordan Steele, Kevin Permenter, Patrick Reymann — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Coupa Inspire 2026 showed a vendor intent on moving from digital spend management to an autonomous, data-driven platform, with Rossum, Coupa Compose, and Coupa Catalyst as key proof points. The event messaging focused on eliminating unstructured data bottlenecks, unifying direct and indirect spend, and lowering economic and organizational barriers to AI adoption for procurement and finance teams.

DevOps and DevSecOps Merger and Acquisition Activity, 2011–2025

Jim Mercer, Katie Norton — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table provides an update to DevOps and DevSecOps Merger and Acquisition Activity, 2011–2024 (IDC #US53363325, May 2025), adding merger and acquisition (M&A) activity tracked in the DevOps and DevSecOps markets from 2025 into the data set.

IDC Survey: Strategic Priorities of Energy Retailers and Water Suppliers Amid Geopolitical Disruption — Insights from IDC's 2026 Energy and Utilities Industry-Specific Tech and Innovation Survey

Gaia Gallotti — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines a portion of IDC's 2026 Energy and Utilities Industry-Specific Tech and Innovation Survey. This landmark study, run between February and March 2026, covers utilities worldwide.

The survey covered 800 respondents, of which 531 are utilities respondents from the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, KSA, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, UAE, the U.K., and the U.S.

This study extrapolates and analyzes select data for 260 energy retailers/suppliers and water suppliers.

This presentation covers the strategic business priorities of the survey, analyzing areas such as:

Strategic priorities for the next 24 months
The impact of geopolitical and regulatory disruption on strategic direction
Differences and similarities between energy retailers and suppliers and water suppliers
The balance between growth, sustainability, efficiency, and risk management agendas

SAP Sapphire 2026: The Business AI Platform as Developer Infrastructure

Adam Reeves — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At SAP Sapphire 2026, SAP unified its platform, data, and AI assets into SAP Business AI Platform, organized around building agents, contextualizing them with enterprise data, and governing them at scale. The announcement is fundamentally a bet that the depth of SAP's proprietary business data, process knowledge, data models, and enterprise governance gives it a structural advantage over general-purpose agentic platforms, and a potential incumbent advantage in enterprises where SAP already runs the ERP core and is a dominant center of organizational gravity.

SaaS and Agent Path: Executive Summary, 2026

Nadia Ballard, Mickey North Rizza, Eric Newmark, Frank Della Rosa — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides an executive summary of the worldwide findings from IDC's 2026 SaaS and Agent Path program.

IDC's 2026 SaaS and Agent Path Survey polled 2,845 respondents across 5 continents and 12 countries to collect information on SaaS adoption, the SaaS buyer's journey, the value of generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI in SaaS applications, and SaaS vendor preferences and ratings.

Coverage includes application adoption, deployment models, budget plans and replacement cycle timing, purchasing preferences and attitudes toward SaaS buying channels, pricing options, SaaS-based AI, vendor ratings, spend, and advocacy scores for 22 functional application markets, including accounts payable; accounts receivable; collaborative application; contract life-cycle management (CLM); core HR; asset life-cycle management (ALM); employee experience; ERP; facility management; finance; learning experience management (LXM); payroll; procurement; product life-cycle management/computer-aided design (PLM/CAD); professional services automation (PSA); supply chain management (SCM); subscription management; talent acquisition; talent management; tax; travel and expense; and treasury and risk management.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail Marketplace Platforms Software Providers 2026 Vendor Assessment

Ornella Urso, Cristiano Quattrini — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study examines the key strategies and capabilities of global technology providers that enable the design, deployment, and scaling of retail marketplace platforms. This assessment evaluates vendors' strengths, including the breadth of marketplace functionality across seller onboarding, catalog aggregation, transaction management, and ecosystem orchestration, as well as the depth of capabilities supporting governance, monetization, and operational execution. It also assesses vendors' understanding of the specific challenges associated with operating multisided retail platforms, including partner management, data quality, fulfillment coordination, and customer experience consistency, ultimately enabling organizations to build and scale marketplace-driven business models.

In addition, this study evaluates vendors' ability to support ecosystem expansion through integrations and partner networks; their commitment to innovation across areas such as artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven optimization; and their capacity to deliver measurable business outcomes through scalable, secure, and flexible platform architectures. The assessment also considers vendors' customer engagement models, including onboarding, enablement, and ongoing support, as well as their ability to adapt to evolving market dynamics, regional requirements, and emerging marketplace use cases across both B2C and B2B environments.

"Retail marketplaces are rapidly becoming the foundational architecture for next-generation commerce. The ability to orchestrate complex ecosystems of sellers, services, and data is emerging as a critical differentiator. Technology providers that can combine robust operational capabilities with scalable architectures, ecosystem enablement, and AI-driven intelligence will be best positioned to support retailers in transitioning from transactional commerce to platform-based growth models," said Cristiano Quattrini, senior associate advisor, IDC Retail Insights.

Red Hat Hardened Images Delivers a Supported, Minimized Base Image Catalog Built on Its Open Source Software Factory

Katie Norton — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Red Hat Hardened Images brings a no-cost catalog of minimized container base images to the market, built on the same software supply chain foundation Red Hat uses across its broader portfolio. The new offering gives Red Hat customers a lower-friction path to adopting hardened images and reinforces hardened images as an increasingly mainstream software supply chain control.

中国智能体开发平台市场份额, 2025

Zhenya Sun, Yanxia Lu — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

本IDC研究提供了2025年中国智能体开发平台市场的市场份额数据，2025年是中国智能体开发平台市场规模化落地的关键一年。供给侧围绕Agent DevOps与全生命周期运营完成了一轮密集的产品迭代，头部厂商相继发布覆盖开发、编排、测试、发布、运维的完整平台形态，自然语言驱动的智能体构建、企业级长记忆等能力进入主流产品矩阵，产品成熟度不断提升。叠加国务院《关于深入实施“人工智能+”行动的意见》与工信部《“人工智能+制造”专项行动实施意见》等政策牵引，市场整体进入供给成熟、需求明确、商业路径初步清晰的规模化运营阶段。

2025年，中国智能体开发平台市场的竞争焦点从Agent开发与编排向全生命周期运营迁移。头部厂商围绕Agent开发、测试、发布、运维等能力完成了一次集体产品升级，平台能力从开发编排向测试评估、运行托管、运维治理与闭环迭代延伸。伴随企业内部Agent数量增多，自建、平台、开源以及直连大模型四类Agent并存的治理问题开始浮现，平台厂商的能力边界也从开发工具进一步扩展到智能体的纳管与协同。进入下一阶段，竞争关键在于能否把Agent嵌入企业业务流程与组织流程，并在规模化运行条件下沉淀出可持续的商业模型。

2026 Oracle Restaurant Summit: How Oracle Is Siezing the Assembly Line Moment and Bringing Industrial-Scale AI to Restaurants

Dorothy Creamer — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how Oracle is seizing the assembly line moment and bringing industrial-scale AI to restaurants. Oracle used the 2026 Restaurant Summit to reinforce a strategic repositioning that restaurant technology is no longer a standalone domain but a node in a broader consumer industries platform that spans retail, hospitality, supply chain, and enterprise infrastructure. The co-location with Oracle Retail Cross Talk 2026 was a visible expression of the company's commitment to put restaurant operators in the same room as retail leaders to experience the shared platform, shared AI capabilities, and shared partner ecosystem that Oracle is building across all three verticals.

"The gap between technology aspiration and operational reality is closing as brands like Oracle commit to 'make the unbelievable believable,'" says Dorothy Creamer, senior research manager, Hospitality and Travel Digital Strategies at IDC. "The 2026 Oracle Restaurant Summit served as a reminder that as our expectations for AI often outpace benefits, it is important to remain rooted in operational reality. Building solutions and platforms against a foundation of trust, choice, and scale, as Oracle aims to continue to do, will translate that potential into a practical and successful reality with tangible outcomes."

Arqiva: Scaling CRM Toward a Unified Workflow Across Customer Service and Field Operations

Ornella Urso, Alex Holtz — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines Arqiva's strategic consolidation of fragmented operational systems into a unified enterprise workflow platform, partnering with ServiceNow, enabling end-to-end (E2E) visibility across customer service, field operations, and portfolio management. Initially driven by the need to replace multiple disconnected service management systems, the program evolved into a broader digital maturity strategy centered on workflow automation, AI augmentation, and knowledge digitization.

"Arqiva's experience underscores the necessity of modernizing core systems as a prerequisite to effective workflow automation," says Ornella Urso, research director, IDC. "Rather than approaching consolidation as a straightforward IT replacement exercise, Arqiva's journey illustrates the value of treating such initiatives as holistic business transformations, where operational processes, governance, and organizational culture are equally addressed."