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2026 Software Engineering Challenges: AI and the Escalating Complexity of Cloud‑Native Software Delivery

George Mironescu — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation examines the key engineering challenges facing software delivery teams in 2026, drawing insights from over 1,000 decision-makers surveyed between November 2025 and January 2026 under IDC's AI and Cloud-Native Software Delivery Survey.

The presentation provides insights into the most pressing areas affecting the software engineering organization and exposes the attitudes of various roles involved in shipping software, including application development, solution architecture, infrastructure and platform engineering, security, and IT leadership.

The presentation informs senior IT leaders about the most important tactical and strategic considerations in relation to these challenges and the trends shaping the agenda in 2026 and beyond.

IDC Market Glance: Collaboration, Communities, and Conferencing, 1Q26

Wayne Kurtzman — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance highlights trends across the larger collaborative market, including team and visual collaboration, collaborative work management, and intelligent collaborative workspace applications. Also spotlighted are community, conferencing and virtual events applications, and collaborative extenders, including extended and virtual reality solutions. These AI-enabled applications will be highly integrated across the applications of each workforce and often extend to an organization's partner and customer community.

IDC Market Glance: Payer, 1Q26

Jeff Rivkin — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance provides a glance at the current makeup of the payer IT landscape, illustrates who some of the major players are, and depicts the segments and structure of the market.

SUSE Embraces IIoT with Losant Acquisition

Rob Tiffany — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

SUSE acquiring Losant represents the market finally catching up to what edge-native architecture demanded almost a decade ago, with a full-stack, open platform where OT and IT worlds converge without proprietary entanglements. The open sourcing commitment is the boldest move in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in years, and if SUSE follows through, it could do to the cloud-based IIoT incumbents what Linux did to Unix.

Zoho Days 26: Celebrating 30 years of Innovation and Growth with AI Readiness for 2026 and Beyond

Mickey North Rizza — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

Zoho Corporation held its Zoho Days 2026 for analysts in Austin, Texas February 18 and 19^th, 2026. The event brought together the innovative Zoho organization professionals, some of the Zoho clients and industry technology analysts. Zoho provided updates to their business, product direction and considerable new innovation coming out in 2026. With these announcements, Zoho appears set for the future as it now has more than 1 million customers, greater than 150 million users globally, growth of 32% year over year in customers and 20% growth in revenue from 2024 to 2025.

Beyond the Prototype: Vibe Coding, Natural Language, and the New Realities of Enterprise Software Development

Arnal Dayaratna — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

India-based vibe-coding start-up Emergent surpassed $100 million in annual run rate just eight months after launch. The company has attracted more than 6 million users, a large majority of whom have no prior coding experience, who have built millions of applications, replacing spreadsheet- and email-driven processes with custom CRMs, ERPs, and inventory or logistics tools. Emergent operates in a crowded field that includes Lovable, Bolt, Base44, and Figma's Make environment, where sustained differentiation will depend on the depth of applications, integrations, and governance rather than natural language input alone. Its rise raises questions about how natural language fits into modern software development more broadly, which applications it is best suited for, how far it extends from proofs of concept into production-grade systems, and what that implies for platform strategy, governance, and developer roles.

IDC Survey: Data Platform Findings from Enterprise Intelligence Services Survey, 2025

Reid Sherard — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines the spending intentions of buyers of enterprise intelligence services, with a specific focus on data platform buyers. It includes data taken from respondents' answers to questions about a range of issues, including the following:

Which of the following were the three most important business outcomes that your organization was trying to achieve from data platform initiatives in the past 12 months?
In which areas of your data platform value chain is your organization planning to invest the most in the next 12 months?
What have been the top challenges in adopting data platform solutions?
What characteristics does your organization look for in an external services provider for data platform services?

The worldwide sample size of 612 respondents included participants from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China, Australia, and Japan, from a variety of industries and organization sizes ranging from 500 employees to 10,000+ employees.

Japan Enterprise Intelligence Services Forecast, 2025-2029

Takuya Uemura — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Forecast provides spending projections for the Japan enterprise intelligence services and AI services market.

Takeya Uemura, senior research manager for AI and Automation at IDC Japan, says, "Parallel to or following core system modernization, the shift toward AI-driven business transformation and AI implementation, along with efforts to rebuild data platforms, is driving growth across the enterprise intelligence services market. Going forward, support services for implementing autonomous AI agents and realizing agentic AI will continue to expand across both IT services and business services. Service providers will need to support enterprisewide AI-ready data governance and platform preparation."

Key Software Delivery Challenges and Pain Points in 2026: AI Further Snarls Existing Complexity of Cloud-Native Landscape

George Mironescu — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective looks into the challenges and pain points in 2026 for software delivery, which faces escalating complexity as AI integration compounds existing cloud-native and security challenges. Organizations must navigate technical debt, legacy systems, skills gaps, and regulatory demands while rapidly productizing AI under intense leadership pressure.

"Success hinges on pragmatic modernization of data and application infrastructure, embedding security throughout the life cycle, and clear-eyed vendor engagement," said George Mironescu, associate research director, Software Development, Software Delivery, Software Engineering at IDC.

Liability Dwells in Your Payer Architecture; A Deep Dive on "Consent-to-Share-Data"

Jeff Rivkin — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective shares an outlook on the evolving consent landscape, the architectural and operational challenges payers face, and recommendations for technology buyers and partners.

Consent-to-share is foundational to a data sharing strategy within the healthcare interoperability ecosystem.

The trajectory from meaningful use to modern interoperability mandates reveals a recurring pattern: rapid enablement of data exchange followed by delayed industry standardization of controls.

For payers, the absence of foundational consent standards shifts complexity downstream to them, requiring customized governance overlays, manual audits, and vendor-specific controls. The healthcare system has "opened the barn door" with large-scale data exchange but failed to implement commensurate control structures. Time is running out: foundational controls cannot be retrofitted once data is already flowing at scale.

Payers must proactively invest in agile, defensible consent infrastructure to preserve trust, ensure compliance, and prevent erosion of legitimate access to clinical data by investing in robust architecture, operational processes, and governance, aiming to meet regulatory requirements, building member trust, and enabling secure, efficient data exchange.

"Regulators and courts no longer care what you intended. They care what your systems allow…. Liability lives in architecture," says Jeff Rivkin, research director of Payer IT Strategies, IDC.