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Enterprise Connect 2026: Collaboration Take; AI and New Work Canvases Arrive

Wayne Kurtzman — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Enterprise Connect 2026 was held from March 10 – 12, 2026 this year at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, NV. This replaced the years-long home of the event in Orlando, FL. Attendees found a smaller conference that reflected the major shift from last year’s “AI’s possibilities” to this year’s urgent need to launch AI and agents, and determine ROI. While AI and agents were the top theme, significant announcements were made in bringing new work surfaces, or canvases to the forefront of the new era of work. This research analyzes the event, many of the announcements, and the overall trends.

F5 AppWorld 2026: Advancing the Convergence of Application Delivery, Security, and AI Operations

Jim Mercer — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At AppWorld 2026, F5 introduced several platform and product updates designed to address the growing complexity of modern application environments, particularly those incorporating AI-driven workloads across hybrid multicloud infrastructure. The announcements focus on advancing the company’s Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP), which brings together application delivery, security, and operational visibility capabilities. Key updates include BIG-IP v21.1, agentic observability capabilities within NGINX, the introduction of F5 AI Remediate, AI-powered web application firewall enhancements, expanded API discovery and security capabilities, post-quantum cryptography readiness, and the introduction of F5 Insight for ADSP with unified observability. Collectively, these announcements highlight the increasing convergence of networking, security, and platform operations as organizations modernize application architectures and adopt AI-enabled services.

HP Aims to Deliver the World's Most Secure, Resilient PCs

Duncan Brown — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note summarizes HP's Industry Analyst Security Summit, with a focus on the PC part of its portfolio. HP aims to offer the world's most secure and resilient PCs, developing an integrated hardware and software stack that together constitutes the highest level of security, considerably higher than software alone. WXP enables endpoint management with an additional layer of management capability for enterprises.

How Are Asia/Pacific Organizations Realizing Sustainability-Driven Business Value Creation Through AI?

Melvie Espejo — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights how Asia/Pacific organizations are leveraging AI for sustainability-driven business value creation. The study focuses on the implications of this market trend to buyers' decision-making, vendor selection criteria, and future AI for sustainability solutions investments. The study offers guidance to vendors on regional go-to-market strategies and product development. This is the regional Asia/Pacific version and accompanying piece to a worldwide and EMEA report bearing similar titles. It is based on the Asia/Pacific sample cut from IDC's AI and Sustainability Survey 2026 (n = 1,570).

IBM Quantum Advances Toward Quantum Advantage with New Molecular Discovery

Heather West, PhD — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IBM Quantum’s demonstration of a novel half-Möbius molecular topology highlights the growing role of quantum computing in enabling real-world scientific discovery through quantum-accelerated supercomputing approaches. The announcement represents an early example of quantum business advantage and signals continued progress toward broader quantum advantage as hardware, algorithms, and hybrid architectures mature.

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Are Datacenter Strategies Around New Construction, Retrofits, and Maintenance Being Driven by Power Economics and Grid Availability?

Mikhail Jaura, Olga Yashkova — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines how power availability and energy economics are now pivotal in shaping global datacenter strategies. With surging demand for high-density compute and AI workloads, operators are increasingly constrained by grid limitations, escalating energy costs, and evolving regulatory mandates. These factors are driving a reevaluation of site selection, architectural models, and long-term power procurement strategies, with heightened interest in alternative markets and innovative facility designs.

Simultaneously, governments and regulators are imposing stricter sustainability and reporting requirements, directly impacting datacenter design, operational frameworks, and location decisions. Collectively, these dynamics are accelerating a shift toward distributed datacenter development, broader adoption of onsite and hybrid power solutions, and a strategic focus on resilience and operational efficiency.

This analysis draws on findings from the Datacenter Facilities and Operations Survey, which provides comprehensive insights into facility sizing, construction trends, and the evolving landscape facing datacenter operators worldwide.

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Are GenAI Use Cases Impacting IT Infrastructure Efficiency and Sustainability?

Andrew Buss, Luis Fernandes — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights that sustainability and efficiency are becoming crucial when procuring AI and generative AI (GenAI) infrastructure, as GenAI workloads tend to impact the critical IT infrastructure of companies in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) in terms of efficiency and sustainability.

The report is based on IDC's EMEA GenAI Infrastructure Survey, conducted in 2025 among 1,000 organizations in the EMEA region. The survey included organizations in 16 countries across Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa.

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Do European Enterprises Manage Their WAN Now, and How Will That Change?

James Eibisch — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight shows which management models enterprises currently use for their WANs, which models they are moving toward, and what the net result might mean for the overall breakdown between in-house, co-managed, and fully managed networks. This presentation is based on IDC's 2025 European Enterprise Communications and Collaboration Survey, conducted among 1,090 medium-sized and large enterprises with a WAN.

IDC Survey Spotlight: What Are the Drivers and Impact of Workload Repatriation?

Adam Reeves — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the drivers and impact of workload repatriation, highlighting that cloud movement is increasingly bidirectional. According to the IDC's March 2026 PaaS Decision-Maker and Business Value Survey, organizations report repatriating ~18% of application workloads from public cloud PaaS to on premises over the past year. The leading drivers are workload/application performance (36%) and security (30%), making predictable performance, stronger security controls, and hybrid operating models critical for PaaS retention.

IDC Survey Spotlight: What Is to Be the Focus for Agentic AI in Network Engineering and Operations? What Are the Top Impediments to Applying Agentic AI to the Network?

Mark Leary — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight offers insights into the planned role and current impediments for agentic AI solutions targeting network engineering and operations tasks. 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 an overview of responses relating to agentic AI, detailed 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.

"Agentic AI is to have a profound effect on the network infrastructure and on networking staff. Two years ago, AI assistants were labeled leading edge when they offered natural language processing for operator interactions and network management guidance driven by technical manual content. How things have changed! Agentic AI is no longer just a passive informer and instructor but an active intelligent virtual network engineer. Agents gather and process comprehensive network data, develop deep and precise insights, and determine and, increasingly, execute needed network management actions. Whether fixing a network problem, activating a network service, optimizing a network configuration, or responding to a developing network condition, agentic AI solutions are proving more and more useful across the entire network and the entire set of tasks required to engineer and operate the network." — Mark Leary, research director, Network Observability and Automation, IDC