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Asia/Pacific (Including Japan and Excluding China) Partner Survey 2025: Vendor Relations and Partner Strategies

Vinay Gupta, Daniel-Zoe Jimenez — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey is based on IDC’s 2025 Global Partner Survey and provides insights into partner business models, cloud strategies, and vendor–partner dynamics in Asia/Pacific (Including Japan and Excluding China) (APJEC). The survey was fielded from August to October 2025 and includes responses from 520 senior stakeholders of partner organizations from Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong.

Key themes covered in this data cut include:

Partner firmographics and business models
Business outlook and market conditions
Cloud business maturity and marketplace engagement
Vendor relationships and partner program value

IDC Survey Spotlight: Is Organizational Size a Barrier to Ad Optimization?

Roger Beharry Lall — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight shares findings from an April 2025 survey of 100+ U.S. marketing and advertising decision-makers, exploring how organizational size shapes technology adoption and optimization priorities. The results challenge common assumptions: Midmarket companies are outpacing large enterprises in prioritizing AI, data precision, and real-time optimization. Contrasting organizations with 500–999 employees against large enterprises with over 5,000 employees, the smaller organizations seem more agile, viewing predictive modeling, machine learning, and high-fidelity data as core to competitive advantage. In contrast, larger organizations seem constrained by legacy priorities.

Excerpted from IDC's 2025 Marketing and Advertising Audience Data Survey, this IDC Survey Spotlight reveals a growing "intensity gap" driven less by resources than by focus and execution — signaling that agility may matter more than scale in AI-driven advertising optimization efforts.

Workforce Transformation — The Human Dimension of Physical AI

Sarah Lee, Gunjan Bassi — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores the workforce implications of physical AI and AI agents on the shop floor workforce, focusing on the emergence of hybrid roles that blend operational knowledge with digital and automation capabilities. It outlines how manufacturers must adapt roles and skills to enable effective human-machine collaboration.

"As physical AI reshapes the shop floor, the future belongs to those who see workforce transformation as the true engine of innovation, says Sarah Lee, research director, Manufacturing Insights, IDC. "Organizations that focus solely on deploying advanced technologies without equally investing in their people will struggle to realize meaningful returns. The real differentiator lies in how effectively manufacturers equip their workforce with the skills, tools, and frameworks needed to collaborate with intelligent systems, adapt to new roles, and make informed decisions. Those that embed workforce strategy into their AI initiatives from the outset will not only accelerate adoption but also build the agility and resilience required to compete in increasingly automated and dynamic production environments."

"Physical AI is transforming work at its core, laying the groundwork for entirely new categories of roles that will blend technical, operational, and analytical skills in ways traditional job structures were never designed to support," says Gunjan Bassi, research manager, IDC Manufacturing Insights, IDC. "Workforce transformation is emerging as a critical enabler of that value, and it starts with developing human capability alongside the technology, not after it."

Global Partner Survey, 2025: Partner Business Models, Vendor Relationships, and Program Value

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey is based on IDC's 2025 Global Partner Survey and provides insights into partner businesses and priorities. The survey was fielded from August to October 2025 and combines responses from nearly 2,500 senior stakeholders at partner organizations across North America (NA); Latin America (LATAM); Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Asia/Pacific (AP).

Key themes covered in this data cut include:

Partner firmographics and business models
Business outlook, market conditions, and cloud marketplaces
Vendor relationships and program value

Malbek BusinessIQ Launch Previews the Future of CLM

Patrick Reymann, Ryan O’Leary — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Malbek has announced the general availability of BusinessIQ, which it positions as the world's first Commercial Intelligence Platform. Powered by proprietary LIVEGraph and Context Threading technology, BusinessIQ transforms static contract repositories into proactive, queryable intelligence engines capable of surfacing hidden risks, unrealized revenue, and strategic commercial insights in real time. This release signals an evolution in what contract life-cycle management (CLM) is expected to deliver, moving beyond workflow automation toward proactive and actionable decision support.

NVIDIA Ising: Accelerating Quantum Computing Development Through AI

Heather West, PhD — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

NVIDIA's introduction of Ising, an open source family of AI models purpose built for quantum computing, marks a significant milestone in the convergence of AI and quantum hardware by addressing two of the field's most persistent engineering challenges: processor calibration and error correction. With more than two dozen organizations across national laboratories, research universities, and commercial quantum hardware and software companies already deploying the models at launch, Ising signals a meaningful shift in how the industry is approaching the path to scalable, useful quantum computing.

SugarCRM Rebrands to SugarAI, Signaling a Shift to AI-Driven Revenue Intelligence

Roger Beharry Lall — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

SugarCRM's rebrand to SugarAI represents a substantive strategic shift rather than a cosmetic update, as is commonly seen with rebranding efforts. The company is repositioning from a traditional CRM provider toward an AI-driven revenue intelligence platform focused on "precision selling" — leveraging signals from ERP, transactional, and engagement data to guide sales actions in real time.

This direction aligns with a broader industry inflection point, where AI is forcing a reassessment of CRM's core value proposition. Historically, CRM systems have struggled with low seller adoption, inconsistent data quality, and an overreliance on manual data entry, often limiting their effectiveness as decision-making tools. AI is now being applied to address these gaps by automating data capture, enriching context, and shifting systems from passive repositories to proactive guidance engines.

SugarAI's approach reflects this transition by reducing dependence on manual input and emphasizing automated insight generation. However, the strategy also reinforces the company's potentially limiting focus on sales execution, with comparatively less focus across the broader customer experience (CX) stack (i.e., marketing and service), which is critical when addressing the entire customer journey.

The Impact of AI on PaaS

Adam Reeves — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation is an excerpt from IDC's December 2025 PaaS Decision-Maker and Business Value Survey, which highlights a series of questions related to artificial intelligence (AI). It includes analysis of deployment plans, use cases, and impact on PaaS adoption.

This IDC Survey interviewed 310 individuals from midsize and large organizations in the United States who are leaders, decision-makers, or influencers in their organizations' platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud application deployment platform strategies.

Maximizing Engineering ROI: Optimizing DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering to Accelerate Customer-Centric Innovation

Helen Beal — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective outlines how organizations can reduce cognitive overload, enforce compliance, and directly link technical investments to measurable business outcomes while avoiding the pitfalls of toolchain sprawl and AI hype.

CIOs face mounting complexity as DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering (PE) have become mainstream but remain fragmented, increasing cognitive load and impeding business alignment. In 2026, the imperative is to consolidate these frameworks into unified, platform-centric solutions and leverage agentic AI to automate, standardize, and optimize the digital value stream.

“Labels like DevOps or SRE are just operational scaffolding; outcomes are the architecture. Modern CIOs must bridge the ‘context gap,’ ensuring engineering teams understand the ‘why’ of the market, while the C-suite respects the ‘how’ of the stack. Success requires aligning engineering throughput with value stream delivery, ensuring technical health maps to business outcomes,” says Helen Beal, adjunct research advisor for IDC’s IT Executive Programs (IEP).

OpenAI's Trusted Access for Cyber: A Scalable Governance Framework for Cyber-Capable AI

Frank Dickson, Grace Trinidad — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The ecosystem TAC is assembling individual defenders, enterprise security teams, open source contributors, skill and agent creators, and threat hunters to function as a distributed intelligence network whose collective signal grows stronger as participation scales. TAC is a framework-first answer to a problem that coalition-first approaches like Anthropic's Project Glasswing address differently. The market is watching both.