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Cisco Cloud Control: Can the Harness Become the Agentic Operating Plane ITOps Needs?

Archana Venkatraman — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study analyzes Cisco Cloud Control, presented at Cisco Live 2026 as a new platform of record designed to simplify complex IT operations without sacrificing depth. Cisco Cloud Control is Cisco's attempt to turn four decades of product breadth into a single operating plane for the agentic era. It unifies networking, security, AI infrastructure, observability, and collaboration alongside third-party tools under one login, one view, and one operating model shared by human teams and AI agents, with identity and policy built into the control path rather than bolted on.

"Cisco Cloud Control is a credible attempt to turn portfolio breadth into an operating plane for the agentic era. Its key differentiation is the harness itself, with identity, policy, and enforcement built into the control path rather than bolted onto a dashboard. That is what lets agents act on real systems without breaking them and with human-in-the-loop for trust," says Archana Venkatraman, senior research director, Observability, AIOps and agentic governance, IDC.

HPE Juniper Networking Advances AI Networking Options for AI Training and Inference Deployments

Paul Nicholson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Market Share: EMEA Financial Applications Software Shares, 2025

Bo Lykkegaard — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study examines the financial applications software market in EMEA, detailing market shares for leading vendors in 2025.

The financial applications software market continues to expand as organizations accelerate investments in cloud-based, AI-enabled finance technologies that improve automation, compliance, financial visibility, and decision-making. Demand was further boosted by several new national e-invoicing mandates across the EMEA, partly in response to the EU ViDA initiative.

"In 2025, the financial applications market in EMEA recorded robust growth. This was largely driven by the migration of legacy solutions to cloud-based financial suites, new adoption of SaaS accounting packages for entry-level businesses, and the wave of e-invoicing mandates sweeping across the region. The EU ViDA initiative accelerated developments while new mandates have been announced in the U.K., Ireland, Norway, and in the Middle East and Africa," said Bo Lykkegaard, associate VP, European software research at IDC.

Aftermarket Service Life-Cycle Management Applications Banner Book: CX Path 2026

Nadia Ballard, Douglas Hayward, Tiffany McCormick, Eric Newmark, Aly Pinder — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table banner book provides the data set for the aftermarket service life-cycle management application category of IDC’s 2026 CX Path program.

The CX Path program includes a total of 14 application categories: advertising, marketing, sales, digital commerce, configure price quote (CPQ), product information management/product experience management (PIM/PXM), contact center and customer service, voice of the customer (VOC), customer experience (CX) orchestration, content and experience management, customer data platforms (CDPs), customer and digital experience analytics, aftermarket service life-cycle management, and price optimization applications.

Coverage includes application adoption, deployment models, budget plans and replacement cycle timing, purchasing preferences and attitudes toward CX SaaS buying channels, packaging and pricing options, and generative AI and agentic AI adoption and use for CX use cases. In addition, the program provides in-depth vendor reviews, vendor ratings, spend, and advocacy scores for all 14 application markets.

HPE Discover 2026: Networking Takes Center Stage as Juniper Integration Advances

Chris Barnard, Brandon Butler, Mark Leary, Paul Nicholson, Leslie Rosenberg — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At HPE Discover 2026, HPE advanced its post-Juniper integration strategy by extending Marvis AI operations across HPE Aruba Central and HPE Mist, integrating QFX switching with HPE AI datacenters, and launching a unified SASE orchestration console — signaling meaningful progress toward a cohesive portfolio spanning campus, branch, datacenter, and edge. Execution remains the critical variable, as HPE must sustain dual-platform development, clarify Aruba-Mist use case boundaries, and demonstrate production-scale performance to capitalize on its strong strategic position entering the AI era.

IDC Innovators: Vertical AI, SaaS, and Industry Clouds, 2026

Nadia Ballard — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Innovators presentation identifies three companies developing industry-specific solutions in a growing market driven by demand for verticalized AI, data integration, and governance across complex, highly regulated industries.

“These emerging vertical software leaders highlight the importance of meaningful differentiation, which today increasingly lies in domain-specific AI, proprietary data access, workflow design, and integration depth,” said Nadia Ballard, research director, AI Verticalization and Industry Cloud Strategies at IDC.

IDC Survey: IDC Cloud Pulse Survey 1Q26: APAC AI Infrastructure

Daphne Chung — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines how organizations across Asia/Pacific are scaling cloud-based AI and generative AI (GenAI) GenAI workloads.

IDC Survey: 中国智算云服务市场企业用户调研，2026

Rachel Liu, Qijin Chen — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

本报告基于IDC在2026年4月进行的中国智算云服务市场企业用户调研结果，深入分析了中国企业智算云服务（AI IaaS）的使用现状、IT支出、购买行为、面临的挑战和未来计划。

调研显示，当前智算云用户中，85.8%的企业选择了”外部AI算力+自建数据中心”的混合架构，未来仍将双轨并行。企业AI基础设施采购链路中，需求发起和技术评估环节依然由IT部门主导，但专职AI/算法团队作为新兴部门，话语权正在不断提升，已经超过核心业务团队；最终决策环节九成以上企业仍由CEO拍板。

报告指出，AI落地是系统性工程，单一环节的短板会形成”木桶效应”，拉低整体算力效率。企业AI落地的瓶颈已从”算力短缺”转向”全链路配套能力不足”，机房环境、网络互联、存储吞吐、算力调度、软件适配共同构成了制约AI业务规模化落地的系统性障碍。当前智算云服务用户中，只有近半企业（48.3%）的AI算力资源利用率达到了51%—70%的中等水平，对很多企业而言，提升现有算力的利用率，比采购更多GPU更迫切、ROI更高。

IDC TechBrief: The Role of Network Transformation in Driving Retail Innovation and Resilience

Cristiano Quattrini, Margot Juros — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Network transformation is becoming one of the most important enablers of retail innovation and resilience. As retail becomes more distributed, data-intensive, AI-enabled, and experience-driven, the network is no longer a passive utility. It is the connective tissue linking customers, associates, stores, warehouses, ecommerce platforms, suppliers, devices, applications, and decision engines. Retailers that modernize their networks strategically will be better positioned to scale innovation, protect revenue, strengthen cyber resilience, improve store productivity, and create more consistent customer experiences across channels and regions.

The rise of AI makes this even more urgent, because advanced analytics, automation, computer vision, agentic workflows, and real-time customer engagement all depend on secure, resilient, cloud-connected, and increasingly AI-managed networks.

The worldwide market context shows that there is no single path to network transformation. North America will often lead with cloud edge, AI-enabled operations, SASE, and store automation at scale. EMEA will emphasize secure, compliant, sustainable, and governed transformation. APAC will combine mobile-first innovation, dense urban retail, 5G momentum, and digital ecosystem integration. South America will focus on pragmatic resilience, payment reliability, managed services, and cost-effective modernization. Global retailers should therefore define a common network transformation blueprint while allowing regional execution models to reflect local infrastructure, regulation, cost, and maturity.

The central message for technology leaders is that network transformation must be linked to business outcomes from the start. The right question is not whether the retailer needs faster connectivity, but which business capabilities require a more resilient, secure, intelligent, and observable network. The most successful retailers will build a metrics-driven road map that connects network modernization to store uptime, payment continuity, inventory accuracy, omni-channel execution, associate productivity, cybersecurity posture, innovation speed, and customer trust. In this sense, network transformation is a retail operating model transformation and not only an IT modernization initiative anymore.

Market Forecast: Worldwide Customer Relationship Management Applications Software Forecast, 2026–2030

Michelle Morgan — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides the five-year forecast for the customer relationship management (CRM) applications market for 2026–2030.

The CRM market's projected climb to 12% in 2027 likely reflects a concentrated wave of AI-driven investment, as vendors rush to embed generative and agentic capabilities into their platforms and buyers, still early in evaluating what actually works, continue to spend. The subsequent softening to 11.4% by 2030 is probably less a sign of cooling interest and more a signal of market maturation, where organizations that overinvested during the hype cycle begin consolidating vendors, demanding demonstrable ROI, and waiting to see which platforms have genuinely earned their place in the stack.

"CRM's center of gravity is shifting from the application to the data beneath it. The winners over the next decade won't be the platforms with the most features, but the ones that treat customer data as the product and AI as the engine that acts on it," says Michelle Morgan, senior research manager, AI-Enabled Sales, Customer Service, and Contact Center Strategies, at IDC. "As those capabilities become standard, features alone will commoditize. The lasting advantage will belong to vendors that turn clean, unified data into outcomes their customers can measure."