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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Contract Life-Cycle Management Software for Corporate Legal 2026–2027 Vendor Assessment

Ryan O'Leary, Esq. — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates several vendors from the contract life-cycle management (CLM) software market, focusing on their ability to support corporate legal departments. It emphasizes the importance of deep analytics, AI functionality, customer support, customizable workflows, and integration capabilities as critical success factors. The document advises technology leaders to seek vendors that are true partners in their CLM journey, highlighting the significance of vendor support across the implementation process for successful CLM adoption.

"AI isn't replacing the contract life-cycle management platform. It's raising the bar for it. Buyers should look for vendors that pair AI with the workflows, playbooks, and support that help legal shift from reviewing routine paperwork to doing higher-value work," says Ryan O'Leary, research director, Privacy and Legal Technology, IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Operational Databases 2026 Vendor Assessment

Devin Pratt — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates worldwide operational database software platforms for 2026. Vendors evaluated include AWS, Broadcom, Cockroach Labs, Couchbase, Databricks, EnterpriseDB, Google, IBM, InterSystems, MariaDB, Microsoft, MongoDB, Oracle, Progress Software, SAP, and SingleStore. The market spans relational, nonschematic, and multimodel architectures deployed across on-premises, cloud-native, hybrid, and edge environments, and it is being reshaped by the convergence of transactional and analytical workloads and the rise of agentic AI.

As enterprises move agentic AI into production and consolidate years of accumulated database sprawl, vendors are racing to embed vector search, autonomous operations, and open interoperability as baseline capabilities rather than differentiators. Convergence of transactional and analytical processing is accelerating, deployment is standardizing on hybrid and multicloud, and open source is now nearly universal. The result is a market where transactional reliability is assumed and competitive advantage is shifting to deployment flexibility and real-time intelligence.

"The operational database has become the control point for enterprise AI, the place where agents access and act on live business data," said Devin Pratt, research director of Database Systems for Enterprise Intelligence at IDC. "Leadership will belong to the vendors that make governed, real-time context a core capability, not an add-on."

Basware VIP 2026 Dublin: Governed AI and Continuous Compliance Take Center Stage

Bo Lykkegaard — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note reviews announcements, customer feedback, and IDC analyst impressions from Basware VIP 2026, the vendor's annual customer and analyst event held in Dublin. It draws on keynote and breakout sessions, the executive analyst session, and conversations with Basware customers.

"Basware already sits inside the invoice flow of many large companies, and that gives its AI plans a strong foundation," said Bo Lykkegaard, associate vice president, Software Research at IDC. "It has also made strong progress in compliant e-invoicing. To get to the next level, Basware must strengthen the submission side (accounts receivable) of e-invoicing."

The AI Stack: Where Are Your Customers Investing?

Carla Arend, Ewa Zborowska — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Web Conference was broadcast on October 15, 2026.

Europe's AI market is worth $105 billion, and customers are busy building their own AI stack, layer by layer, reshaping each one as they go. For vendors, the interesting question is not whether this market will grow, but where exactly the money is going within the AI stack and how to position themselves for growth.

BrainChip's Sequora Extends Edge AI from Sensing to On-Device Generative AI

Olga Yashkova — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

BrainChip Holdings Ltd. unveiled its new Sequora product to extend the company's ultra-low-power Akida platform from recognizing sensor signals to running generative AI, including language models of up to 3 billion parameters, directly on battery-powered devices. For chip vendors and device makers, the significance is that a fixed-memory design lets one product pair always-on sensing with on-device language and voice interaction, a combination that has typically depended on cloud connectivity or a much larger power budget.

Digital Engineering and Operational Technology Services Banner Book

Nadia Ballard, Mukesh Dialani, Lars Goransson, Eric Newmark — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table banner book includes data for the digital engineering and operational technology services (DEOT) category from IDC's Services Path 2026 program.

The Services Path program provides comprehensive data and guidance on the mind and journey of services buyers. The global markets in these documents cover business-oriented and technology-oriented professional services and outsourcing, managed, and engineering services, including:

Application testing/digital assurance/quality engineering services
Business consulting services
Customer care business process services
Customer experience services
Digital business transformation professional services
Digital engineering and operational technology services (DEOT)
Employee experience management services
Enterprise intelligence services
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) business services
HR and talent management outsourcing services
IT consulting and systems integration services
Managed cloud services
Procurement business process services
Talent acquisition outsourcing services

Coverage includes adoption; budgeting trends; purchasing preferences and attitudes; pricing and contract options; friction points related to selection, contracting, and managing delivery; and detailed customer satisfaction ratings for vendors. The program also examines what buyers are seeking from the "service company of the future" and where and how service providers must change to meet customers' future needs.

Effective AI Agent Cost Management: What Executives Must Understand to Transform Unpredictable AI Spend into Strategic, Auditable Investments, and How to Enable Your Teams to Get There

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Leader Presentation is based on IDC's AI Economics and Cost of Ownership Survey, August 2026 (n = 1,184). To help executives turn unpredictable spend into auditable, strategic investment, the document sets out a four-phase framework covering plan and budget, source, implement, and operate. Agentic AI is scaling faster than most organizations can govern or budget for, and its costs behave differently from the cloud spend finance teams already know how to manage. Agent costs rise with conversation length, tool-call depth, and task complexity, not with anything provisioned in advance.

"When it comes to AI economics, most companies are focused on the wrong things. They're too busy counting tokens. That's important, but IDC research shows there are at least 10 other critical factors in planning for AI costs that companies aren't considering, and most don't have the mechanisms in place to track them effectively. Organizations that build visibility into these factors now will be far better positioned to scale AI profitably," says Shari Lava, group vice president, Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Automation at IDC.

HR and Talent Management Outsourcing Services Banner Book

Nadia Ballard, Mukesh Dialani, Lars Goransson, Eric Newmark — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table banner book includes data for the HR and talent management outsourcing services category from IDC's Services Path 2026 program.

Application testing/digital assurance/quality engineering services
Business consulting services
Customer care business process services
Customer experience services
Digital business transformation professional services
Digital engineering and operational technology services (DEOT)
Employee experience management services
Enterprise intelligence services
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) business services
HR and talent management outsourcing services
IT consulting and systems integration services
Managed cloud services
Procurement business process services
Talent acquisition outsourcing services

IDC Market Glance: EMEA AI-Fueled Workspace, 3Q26

Leonardo Freitas, Gala Spasova — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance is a taxonomy document intended to visually depict a concise current-state view of the AI-fueled workplace ecosystem in EMEA. It maps the vendors across three layers: building management, workforce enablement, and services. IDC's take is that European specialists are redrawing the regional map, and that digital sovereignty and ownership changes now shape how buyers should evaluate vendors.

India Case Study: Building Nugget — How Zomato Scaled Its Conversational AI Platform to Production on Amazon Web Services

Rajiv Ranjan — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective documents the stages of Zomato's modernization to develop Nugget, a robust, modern conversational AI–enabled CX platform. The case study discusses Nugget's development, its usage internally by Zomato employees, and its launch to the external market and adoption. It also highlights what value Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided in building and launching Nugget and why enterprises should consider Nugget.

"Conversational AI platforms can help organizations modernize fragmented, legacy CX processes into a unified, multichannel, and multilingual experience that delivers personalized interactions and scales on demand to support a growing customer base," says Rajiv Ranjan, associate research director, IDC.