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EMEA Wholesale Radar, 2H25

Jan Hein Bakkers, Tolga Yalcin — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation analyzes recent news and events in the wholesale telecoms market in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The EMEA Wholesale Radar identifies major trends and dynamics from these announcements and places them in the context of overall market development and outlook.

Europe Hardcopy Forecast, 2026-2030

Phil Sargeant — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation quantifies the Europe hardcopy market in detail, analyzing issues, trends, and product advances. It contains IDC's updated review and forecast of the Western Europe hardcopy market for 2026–2030.

"Across Europe, organizations of all shapes and sizes continue to utilize print as part of their business and communication processes. Opportunities to capture pages remain high, even as the long-term growth pattern for hardcopy remains negative." — Phil Sargeant, senior program director, IT Research — Imaging Printing, and Document Solutions

Telefonica Expands Quantum AI Partnerships as Enterprise Interest in Hybrid Experimentation Increases

Heather West, PhD — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Telefónica’s expanded quantum partnerships reflect a broader market shift from foundational quantum readiness toward pragmatic, hybrid quantum-classical experimentation embedded within enterprise AI strategies. While quantum-enhanced AI remains experimental and constrained by current hardware roadmaps, Telefónica’s ecosystem approach positions the company to help organizations responsibly explore targeted optimization and simulation use cases today, building the operational, architectural, and talent foundations required to capture long-term advantage without overstating near-term impact.

AI Is Driving Infrastructure Spending as a Priority in Financial Services in 2026

Jerry Silva — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective describes the thinking of financial institutions that have made their intentions clear about the need for infrastructure improvements, and the inference IDC Financial Insights is making about AI as the main driver behind these decisions. Over three years have passed since GenAI made the news, and while the financial services industry struggled to create real benefits from generative AI, agentic AI and AI agents have further complicated the picture, and the industry, generally, seems to be unprepared to leverage these new technologies fully. But recent surveys of the industry by IDC point to a willingness (even a need) to invest in overcoming the challenges of inadequate infrastructure preparedness in 2026 and beyond.

"The financial services industry is in 'rebuild' mode in preparation for the AI-fueled business," said Jerry Silva, vice president, IDC Financial Insights. "IT investments in infrastructure modernization are outpacing investments in areas like customer experience, even though there isn't always a short-term lift in revenue."

AWS and OpenAI To Expand Partnership With a Co-Developed Stateful Agentic Runtime

Matthew Flug — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AWS and OpenAI announced a jointly developed stateful runtime environment for AI agents, delivered through Amazon Bedrock and designed to run natively within customers’ AWS environments. The runtime will enable AI agents to maintain persistent context, memory, workflow state, and tool connections across multi-step tasks. The goal is to simplify the development and management of AI agents by reducing the need for developers to manually write “glue code” or manage session history and orchestration logic. The new runtime integrates with AWS identity, security, and governance services, allowing organizations to implement existing enterprise controls and compliance boundaries into the runtime’s agentic workflows. The announcement underscores a shift in the application platform market from model-centric differentiation toward runtime architecture, governance integration, and vertically integrated AI infrastructure.

IDC Survey Spotlight: In Supporting AI Workloads Across the Network, Why Is the Platform Preference Fading Given the Many Potential Benefits of a Unified and Expansive Approach?

Mark Leary — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight offers insights into the shifting preferences relating to the platform approach versus best-in-class solutions when supporting AI workloads across the network. These survey results are drawn from IDC's 2026 AI in Networking Special Report, a report driven by a worldwide survey of 500+ enterprise network executives and experts. This report covers both the impact and plans for supporting AI workloads across the network and using AI-powered networking solutions. The focus of this research is comprehensive, covering datacenters, cloud services, multicloud environments, network core and edge, and network management. While this IDC Survey Spotlight offers only a view into total responses, results are available by geographic region, select country, company size, major vertical industries, respondent role, and the AI maturity level of the respondent's organization.

"Many solution suppliers are prioritizing a platform approach to the challenges associated with moving AI workloads into production. This survey of networking leaders highlights the shift in preference from platforms to best-in-class solutions when supporting AI workloads across their networks. As certain functional requirements intensify, as IT staff experience and expertise build, and as platforms fall short in delivering expected advantages, IT organizations are more willing to take on the added responsibilities associated with assembling their own mix of best-in-class solutions. For the supplier, the challenge is to avoid developing and delivering a platform that is classified as a jack-of-all-trades and master of none." — Mark Leary, research director, Network Observability and Automation, IDC

IDC Survey Spotlight: What Are the Growth Prospects for Sustainable IT and IT for Sustainability Investments in EMEA?

Katharina Grimme — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight provides a view of how organizations across EMEA are approaching and budgeting for sustainability-related IT initiatives, and what investment plans exist for IT versus LOB functions over the next two years. Tech practitioners will come away with a clear sense of where sustainability investments stand today, how expectations are evolving over the next two years, and how to interpret these shifts when shaping internal investment road maps or vendor positioning.

Inference at the Edge: The Next Frontier

Ghassan Abdo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Inference at the edge refers to executing AI model predictions locally on devices such as sensors, cameras, industrial systems, vehicles, or on-premises gateways rather than in centralized cloud datacenters. Although model training typically remains cloud-based because of its computational intensity, inference is increasingly deployed at the edge to enable real-time decision-making, reduce bandwidth consumption, enhance privacy, and ensure operational resilience in environments with limited connectivity. This shift is driven by use cases across manufacturing, retail, healthcare, telecommunications, energy, Smart Cities, and automotive sectors, where millisecond matters and data sovereignty or cost considerations make local processing more efficient and practical. Achieving this requires model optimization techniques (e.g., quantization and pruning), lightweight runtimes, AI-optimized silicon, secure device management, and integrated edge-to-cloud orchestration.

The document also highlights that edge inference represents a broader architectural transition from centralized AI to distributed intelligence, supporting Industry 4.0, 5G-enabled services, and digital transformation initiatives. However, organizations must address challenges such as hardware heterogeneity, limited compute and power resources, security risks, and the large-scale life-cycle management of distributed devices. A survey of providers — including Akamai, Cloudflare, AWS, Lumen, Tencent, and Telefónica — shows varied strategies, ranging from serverless AI platforms and global edge networks to infrastructure-led bare metal offerings and telecom-based distributed edge architectures. Collectively, these approaches reflect an evolving ecosystem focused on delivering low-latency, secure, and scalable AI inference closer to where data is generated.

"Inference at the edge represents a pivotal shift in enterprise AI strategy, moving intelligence from centralized clouds to the point of data creation. Organizations that successfully deploy edge inference will unlock real-time decision-making, reduce operational costs, and strengthen data sovereignty while enabling new Industry 4.0 and 5G-driven use cases. However, success will depend on integrating optimized models, secure device management, and scalable edge-to-cloud orchestration to manage distributed complexity and deliver measurable business outcomes," says Ghassan Abdo, research VP, Worldwide Telecom.

MWC26 Operations and Monetization Updates: AI and Agentic

Chris Silberberg — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2026 highlighted the telecom industry's shift from technology experimentation to execution, with agentic AI, data quality, and telecom ontologies as central themes. While autonomous networks are advancing, data fragmentation, trust in AI-driven autonomy, and workforce transformation remain significant hurdles.

The Next Wave of Sustainability Services Starts with IoT

Dan Versace — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective highlights the pivotal role of IoT in driving sustainable supply chain transformation, emphasizing its integration for environmental and social impact measurement, compliance, and operational optimization. It details how professional services firms enable this shift through consulting, infrastructure, and IT services and advises technology providers to embed sustainability, foster ecosystem interoperability, and align with evolving regulations. This document underscores IoT's evolution from pilot projects to enterprise-scale, data-driven sustainability execution.

"The days of approximating and measuring from a distance are long gone; organizations looking to drive sustainable outcomes efficiently must integrate IoT into their sustainability operationalization strategy for direct and real-time measurement, management, and analysis." — Dan Versace, Sr. analyst, Sustainability and ESG Services, IDC