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IDC Survey Spotlight: Are Communications Service Providers Capitalizing on Their High-Performance Network for the Surge in Edge AI Adoption?

Ajeet Das — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight presents the evolving use cases for edge AI and organizations' top criteria for supporting AI workloads at the edge. It contains data from IDC's January 2026 Worldwide AI in Networking Special Report based on responses from 330 enterprises worldwide.

"As edge AI maturity advances, the selection criteria for enterprise solutions are shifting away from basic hardware toward high-performance connectivity and data offloading. The market is recognizing that 'intelligence at the edge' is only as effective as the network supporting it. In 2026, the winners in the space — particularly in etlecom and retail — are those prioritizing low-latency wired and wireless integration to handle the specialized AI workloads that on-device compute cannot manage alone." — Ajeet Das, research director, Telecom Infrastructure at IDC

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Does AI Maturity Impact the Adoption of Edge AI?

Brandon Butler — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights research from IDC's November 2025 AI in Networking Survey, which is a global survey of network practitioners exploring two major angles of AI in networking: networking for AI, or how network infrastructure must evolve to support AI workloads; and AI for networking, or how AI-powered capabilities are transforming the engineering and operations of the network. This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the rapid expansion of edge AI, especially as organizations advance in their overall AI maturity.

"Edge AI adoption is closely tied to broader AI maturity, and as organizations scale AI initiatives, network infrastructure will become a critical enabler. Enterprises will need network architectures that can support unpredictable, latency-sensitive AI workloads and increasingly distributed inference environments with security built in," says Brandon Butler, senior research manager, Enterprise Networks at IDC.

IDC Survey Spotlight: What Comes After Adoption to Drive FinOps at Scale?

Jevin Jensen — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the evolving role of FinOps in large enterprises and how expectations for AI capabilities within FinOps tools are changing. As FinOps adoption reaches new levels, shifts in how organizations evaluate supporting technologies signal a broader transition in market priorities. These developments highlight a move toward greater operational discipline and raise important questions about how vendors should position and evolve their FinOps strategies.

IDC Survey: Power and Cooling as Strategic Priorities for Global Datacenter Operators

Olga Yashkova — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey report presents results from IDC's Datacenter Facilities and Operations Survey, 2025, comprised of responses from 320 datacenter facilities owners and operators worldwide. The study examines how organizations that own/lease and operate datacenter facilities are planning for 2026–2028, including rack density evolution and priorities for power and cooling to deliver new capacity, as well as anticipated capex and opex required to support datacenter expansion, modernization, and ongoing operations.

IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Refurbished MFP and Printer Taxonomy, 2026

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides a comprehensive overview of and definitions for the refurbished MFP and printer market. The definitions represent the scope of IDC’s refurbished MFP and printer hardware research. This taxonomy outlines market segmentations and measurement methodologies for the product, including classification by product category, product/product detail, vendor, geography, and revenue metrics.

“IDC’s worldwide refurbished MFP and printer taxonomy presents a standardized and detailed framework of the refurbished MFP/printer market,” said Phuong Hang, director, Worldwide Imaging Trackers at IDC. “The taxonomy document serves as a guideline to better understand and use IDC’s refurbished hardware (MFP/printer) research.”

Tech Buyer Survey Spotlight: Will AI Workload Deployments Drive Significant Bandwidth Demand Within Datacenters Over the Next Year?

Paul Nicholson — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Survey Spotlight examines how AI workload deployments are accelerating bandwidth demand within datacenters as organizations expand infrastructure to support growing data processing and inference needs. While cloud environments remain important, many enterprises, particularly those in data-sensitive industries, are also investing in on-premises AI infrastructure and targeted network upgrades. Ensuring sufficient bandwidth and selecting the right networking architectures are becoming critical priorities to support evolving AI workload requirements.

Tech Buyer Survey Spotlight: Will AI Workload Deployments Drive a Surge in Inter-Datacenter Bandwidth Over the Next Year?

Paul Nicholson — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This Tech Buyer Survey Spotlight examines how AI workload deployments are driving a sharp increase in inter-datacenter bandwidth, with many organizations planning to expand capacity over the next year. This growth reflects rising demands for data access, inference processing, and continuous model updates, positioning bandwidth expansion as a critical enabler of AI-ready network transformation.

IDC Survey Spotlight: Which Provider Types do European Enterprises See as Best and Worst Placed to Meet Their Future WAN Needs, and Why?

Masarra Mohamed — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights results from IDC’s EMEA Enterprise Communications and Collaboration Survey in August 2025 (N = 1,716). It examines how European enterprises perceive four provider types — cloud providers, IT partners, network service providers (telcos), and in-house IT teams — in terms of their ability to address future WAN requirements. This analysis uses a Sankey diagram to visualize the flow between provider perceptions and the service attributes driving those views. It concludes with IDC’s strategic take: cloud providers lead on broad IT capability, but poor customer treatment across the market (particularly among telcos) keeps the competitive landscape wide open for providers that can pair technical depth with superior service experience.

Q.ANT Deploys Analog Photonic Native Processing Units at LRZ for Energy Efficient AI

Heather West, PhD — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Q.ANT’s deployment of its second-generation analog photonic Native Processing Units (NPUs) at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) marks an important step in moving alternative computing architectures from experimental validation into production-level evaluation, as the industry seeks new approaches to address the growing energy and performance constraints of AI infrastructure. By demonstrating integration into existing HPC environments and reporting significant gains in throughput and energy efficiency, the deployment highlights the potential role of photonic co-processing within increasingly heterogeneous architectures, while signaling that organizations should begin evaluating such technologies for energy-constrained, compute-intensive workloads.

Worldwide PC Monitor Market Overview, 2026

Linn Huang — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation was delivered to clients at the end of 1Q26 and covers the PC monitor market including what drove market gains of 1% in the prior year and where the market is headed in the next few years.