rsssoftware

Accenture FY 4Q26: Bookings Recovery and Full-Year Revenue Above Guidance Point to Sustained AI Transformation Demand; OT Security Platform Now in Market

Lars Goransson — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Revenue was $18.7 billion for the quarter, up 7%. By type of work, Consulting was up 7% to $9.3 billion and Managed Services was up 7% to $9.4 billion. For the full fiscal year, revenue was $74.2 billion, up 5%, with Consulting up 3% to $36.9 billion and the faster-growing Managed Services up 6% to $37.3 billion. With acquisitions contributing an estimated 2 percentage points of full-year growth, organic growth was approximately 3%. Accenture estimates that its U.S. federal business reduced full-year growth by approximately 1 percentage point.
All three geographic markets grew 7% in the quarter. Communications, Media & Technology led the industry groups with 11% growth, followed by Health & Public Service (9%), Financial Services (6%), Resources (6%), and Products (4%).
GAAP operating margin for the quarter was 15.3%, 20 basis points above adjusted operating margin a year earlier, and gross margin was 32.0%, up 10 basis points. GAAP diluted EPS rose 46% to $3.29. Full-year adjusted EPS was $13.97, up 8%. Free cash flow was $2.8 billion for the quarter, down from $3.8 billion, and $11.6 billion for the year. Days services outstanding rose to 50 from 47.
New bookings were $22.2 billion, up 5%, with a book-to-bill of 1.2 (Consulting 1.0, Managed Services 1.4). Managed Services bookings of $12.8 billion were a record. The quarter included 37 clients with bookings above $100 million, bringing the full-year count to a record 141, 12 more than in fiscal 2025. Full-year bookings were $84.5 billion, up 3%, with a book-to-bill of 1.1.
Head count rose approximately 5% to 814,000. Fixed-price work, including outcome-based contracts, now accounts for more than 65% of bookings. Accenture said revenue per person increased in fiscal 2026 and that it expects to keep hiring in fiscal 2027, at a lower rate in part because of AI, including at entry level.
Fiscal 2027 outlook: revenue growth of 3% to 6% in local currency, including 2 to 2.5 percentage points from acquisitions; operating margin of 15.9% to 16.1% (10 to 30 basis points over FY26 adjusted); and diluted EPS of $14.39 to $14.81. Accenture will hold an Investor Day on October 14.

Miro agrees to be acquired by Bending Spoons for $1.4b: The Follow Up

Wayne Kurtzman, Melinda-Carol Ballou — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Bending Spoons S.p.A. (NASDAQ: BSP) has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion. Miro, a leader in the visual collaboration market, brings another level of engaging modalities to a company on an interesting buying spree. This research examines what the Miro acquisition brings to Bending Spoons and the possible outcomes. This research analyzes the details of the acquisition offer and another recent, related Bending Spoons acquisition with Airtable (for $1.255 billion), which closed on September 4, 2026. These two acquisitions within a month offer augmented potential for the combined organizations to position Bending Spoons with Intelligent Collaborative Workspace (ICW) offerings, assuming effective coordination and execution.

2026 CIO Signature Report — The Evolving CIO Agenda: Driving Business Value Through Governance, Talent, and AI

Martina Longo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation explores the outlook of CIOs worldwide over the next 12 months, examining their measures of success, key challenges, strategic priorities, technology investment plans, talent and skills gaps, governance responsibilities, and relationships with technology partners.

Drawing on quantitative findings from IDC's Worldwide CIO Sentiment Survey (n = 459) and qualitative insights from six in-depth interviews with CIOs across global markets, this inaugural CIO Signature Report provides a unique perspective on the priorities shaping the technology leadership agenda. It also examines the growing connection between technology investments and business outcomes, and how this shift is redefining the CIO's role as a strategic business leader.

Amazon unBoxed 2026: Amazon Ads Agent Merges the Console and DSP and Puts AI in the Planning Seat for Advertisers of All Sizes

Roger Beharry Lall, Allyson Leavy — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its unBoxed 2026 conference in San Francisco (September 28–30, 2026), Amazon Ads repositioned and expanded its offering. It merged the Ads Console and Amazon DSP into one AI-led platform named Amazon Ads Agent, which now includes Full-Funnel Campaigns and DVA+, which help advertisers by using Amazon's models to choose channels, audiences, and bids. It also extended advertising into Alexa for Shopping conversations and local services through Branded Conversations and Sponsored Services. With these updates, Amazon puts the AI interactive brief ahead of the complex advertiser dashboard or bid desk as the main interface, opening streaming and programmatic media to midmarket and smaller buyers.

Braze Forge 2026: Building a Martech Stack for the Future of Agentic Marketing

Gerry Murray, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Braze used Forge 2026 to show that it is positioned as the execution layer for agentic marketing, with the journey builder as one piece of it. Decisioning Studio Go, Operator building full Canvases, and Agentic Standards for QA move decisioning and campaign checking from marketers to AI agents. Operator Connect and the Braze MCP Server let agents in Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot call Braze directly. CMOs should now judge engagement platforms on decisioning quality, the scope of actions agents can take, the governance around them, and access to enterprise data, in addition to channels and orchestration.

Faros Positions Its Token Engineering Platform for Outcome Optimization

George Mironescu — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note discusses Faros' platform repositioning around token engineering and the key capabilities supporting this value proposition.

"Many organizations burned through AI budgets quickly and reacted with blunt token caps that indiscriminately penalize teams and project initiatives. This pattern stems from both limited visibility and control of agentic software delivery. Faros' Token Engineering platform repositioning seeks to address this challenge," says George Mironescu, associate research director, Software Development, Delivery, and Engineering at IDC.

Four Operating Logics Applied to Mainframe Modernization: A Composed Decision

Matthew Flug, Shannon Kalvar, Archana Venkatraman — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

“Mainframe modernization is a composed decision in which the custodial, procedural, flow, and bounds requirements stay active until the last workload moves. Organizations that name who settles workload decisions, and that translate what experienced staff know into test cases, change records, and limits on automated action, can resolve objections that a revised schedule would leave in place. Treating those objections as resistance puts at risk the system knowledge on which modernization depends,” says Matthew Flug, Research Manager, Intelligent Application Modernization and Deployment Platforms at IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Agentic AI Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Neil Ward-Dutton, Melih Murat — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study represents a vendor assessment of the agentic AI platform software market through the IDC MarketScape model. This assessment discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics, providing guidance about agentic AI platform software vendors and their offerings. The evaluation is based on a comprehensive and rigorous framework that assesses vendors relative to the criteria, and it highlights the factors expected to be the most influential for success in the market in both the short term and the long term.

"As organizations start to scale their use of AI agents, platforms that they can use not only to build and deploy — but also to operate, secure, evaluate and govern — AI agents become very valuable," said Neil Ward-Dutton, research VP, agentic automation and AI technologies at IDC. "IDC research shows that almost three-quarters of organizations are already at the stage of deploying multiple agent workflows, so the time for organizations to explore the benefits of these platforms is now."

IDC Survey Spotlight: Which Finance Areas in Your Organization Are Most in Need of Process Improvement?

Heather Herbst — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight discusses the results of IDC Syndicated Surveys 2026: CFO Buyer Insights Survey, April 2026 (n = 517) on the finance areas CFOs identify as most in need of process improvement, with financial governance, risk, and compliance emerging as the single largest source of pain across the function. Procure-to-pay, corporate risk and treasury management, tax, and business continuity cluster closely behind, pointing to a broader process improvement agenda that cuts across the office of the CFO and requires a modernization portfolio approach rather than isolated point fixes.

Worldwide Hyperscaler and Top Service Provider Infrastructure Demand Presentation, 2Q26

Leon Kao — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides an overview of service provider infrastructure demand trends among the 15 selected service providers through the second quarter of 2026.