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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Embedded Payment Applications in Treasury Management Workflows 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jordan Steele, Kevin Permenter — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses vendors offering embedded payment capabilities inside treasury workflows, covering cash aggregation, multi-horizon forecasting fed by AP and AR data, treasury-grade payment execution, and FX and liquidity risk monitoring. The study evaluates how well vendors extend forecasting and cash visibility from a broader finance platform into a genuine treasury capability rather than a bolt-on reporting layer.

"Cash aggregation across banks and accounts has become table stakes, so the real differentiation in treasury now comes from how forecasting draws on live AP and AR data instead of static exports," said Jordan Steele, research manager, Financial Applications, IDC. "Agentic AI adoption in treasury is still uneven across the vendors we evaluated, and that gap is likely to define the next round of competitive separation in this workflow."

Intelligence at the Edge of Fraud: AI-Enhanced Financial Crime Analytics

Sam Abadir — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective recommends extending the edge-fraud deployment template to identity and security operations, testing the trust concern directly rather than treating it as settled, and treating signal-sharing participation as a criterion in payment-partner selection rather than an assumption. Financial services has moved past evaluation on AI-driven fraud defense at the edge: 46.2% of the financial services firms already have autonomous fraud detection and transaction decisioning deployed. Two gaps remain. Agentic AI adoption in broader security operations lags the all-industry rate, and it coincides with elevated concern over data privacy and security exposure, although the data doesn't isolate that concern as the cause rather than regulatory uncertainty, vendor immaturity, or integration cost. And a structural blind spot sits upstream: merchant and payment-processing fraud defense increasingly intercepts fraud before it reaches the bank, but whether that benefits the bank's own detection depends on a signal-sharing relationship that isn't yet standard across the ecosystem.

"Financial services didn't wait to deploy AI against fraud where it mattered most. Nearly half already run autonomous fraud detection at the edge," says Sam Abadir, research director, Risk, Financial Crime, and Compliance, IDC. "What's less certain is whether banks are actually benefiting from the fraud defense happening upstream of them, or just assuming they are."

Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Cloud and Datacenter Networking, 2026

Paul Nicholson, Petr Jirovsky — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective delivers a current-state view with analyst insights on the cloud and datacenter market and related technologies, including switching, multicloud networking, application delivery controller, and service mesh areas. The analysis also provides insight into the impact of future trends such as generative AI (GenAI), AI factories, and inference. Business executives, product marketing, product managers, and corporate strategy teams can use this information for understanding buying criteria and market and technology impact.

Enterprise technology investment is being fundamentally rewritten, as organizations move from experimentation to execution in their race to operationalize generative and agentic systems at scale.

"This shift is landing squarely on the datacenter network, as GPU clusters, high-speed interconnects, and low-latency fabrics become the critical infrastructure that determines how quickly enterprises can actually deploy these workloads. The organizations pulling ahead aren't just investing in new technology, they're the ones re-architecting their network and interconnect strategy so bandwidth and latency never become the bottleneck standing between experimentation and execution," says Paul Nicholson, VP, Research, Cloud and Datacenter Networks, IDC.

Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Enterprise Campus and Branch Network Infrastructure, 2026

Brandon Butler — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the Enterprise Campus and Branch Network Infrastructure market, focusing on enterprise WLAN, campus and branch Ethernet switching, and SD-WAN as critical infrastructure pillars.

It includes an overview of the current market landscape, a technology buyer perspective, a market outlook, and IDC's advice for technology suppliers in this market.

"Campus, branch, and edge networks are undergoing a transformative upgrade cycle as organizations deploy Wi-Fi 7, retire legacy infrastructure, and future-proof their networks for AI workloads. To support high-bandwidth, low-latency workloads while defending against evolving threats, enterprises increasingly require unified, AI-powered network platforms with natively integrated security and comprehensive analytics. Combined, these elements make up the essential building blocks for future-ready networks," says Brandon Butler, senior research manager, Network Infrastructure & Services.

Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Personal Computers, 2026

Linn Huang — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the personal computers market. It provides insights into the latest developments shaping the global PC industry including the current memory crisis as well as continued push of on-device AI.

"The PC industry is in the midst of unprecedented supply chain shakeup. Historically, price hikes in lieu of component shortages have been temporary with markets recovering once supply normalizes. With the current memory crisis, we do not see prices regressing in the future." — Linn Huang, research vice president, Devices and Displays

Beyond the Agentic SOC: Splunk and Cisco Build the Data and Observability Layer for AI

Michelle Abraham, Duncan Brown, Christopher Kissel, Katie Norton — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At .conf26, Splunk paired new agentic skills for detection, threat hunting, investigation, and governance with a broader set of foundational moves designed to make machine data usable for AI at scale. To help both security and AI teams track the behavior of AI agents in their environment, Agent Observability is designed to monitor the performance and cost of AI agents and prevent undesired actions before they can be executed.

Equinix Inference Exchange and Metro Edge: Colocation Becomes AI Production's Middle Tier

Olga Yashkova — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note examines Equinix Fabric One and Equinix Inference Exchange, announced at the company's inaugural Horizon conference, and their implications for enterprise AI infrastructure strategy. Built with NVIDIA and Together AI and slated for 1Q27 availability, Inference Exchange positions metro colocation as a production-grade middle tier for AI inference, sitting between centralized cloud training and device-level far edge, and raises the competitive bar for neutral edge and colocation providers, hyperscaler edge programs, and network operators alike.

"Equinix is making a clear bet: The next battleground in enterprise AI isn't just which model you choose but where inference actually runs. By turning metro colocation into a pre-integrated production tier, Inference Exchange forces every neutral edge and cloud provider to answer the same question: proximity or scale, but not both," said Olga Yashkova, research manager, Worldwide Telecommunications Services at IDC.

Fastly Adds AI Runtime Control and AI Firewall to its AI Portfolio

Matthew Flug — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Fastly recently introduced AI Runtime Control (ARC) alongside AI Firewall and new API Security capabilities, with ARC serving as a managed gateway that channels enterprise model calls across public and self-hosted providers and centrally enforces access, budget, rate-limit, failover, and logging policies. The launch adds model governance to Fastly's delivery and security portfolio, offering customers a way to manage AI access, spend, and provider resilience.

How Much Traffic Is AI Use Adding to European Enterprises’ Networks, How Are They Responding, and What Will Drive Further Growth?

James Eibisch — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight shows how AI use is increasing traffic on European enterprise networks, where the greatest increases are occurring, how enterprises are responding, and where they believe further AI-related traffic growth will come from. The report is based on the European results from IDC’s Future Enterprise Connectivity Infrastructure and Services Survey, conducted in August 2026.

How Much Traffic Is AI Use Adding to U.S. Enterprises’ Networks, How Are They Responding, and What Will Drive Further Growth?

James Eibisch — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight shows how AI use is increasing traffic on U.S. enterprise networks, where the greatest increases are occurring, how enterprises are responding, and where they believe further AI-related traffic growth will come from. This document is based on the U.S. results from IDC’s Future Enterprise Connectivity Infrastructure and Services Survey, conducted in August 2026.