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Field-Tested Trust: Siemens' Approach to OT Security Innovations

Cathy Huang — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Siemens' recent briefing argued that its OT security credibility rests on testing everything on itself before selling it. This includes securing more than 100 of its own factories and using large language models to probe its PLCs for vulnerabilities before shipping firmware. Siemens also organizes innovation into three horizons. These range from AI-assisted vulnerability triage today to identity-based access control in three to five years and post-quantum cryptography beyond that. IDC believes this internal-first validation, paired with Siemens' brownfield depth and multi-vendor ecosystem integration, is a genuine and underappreciated differentiator that pure-play vendors cannot easily replicate.

GlobalFoundries' Silicon Photonic Initiative: The Foundational Infrastructure of Next-Generation Computing

Heather West, PhD, Jim Hines — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

GlobalFoundries' proposed CHIPS R&D investment highlights the growing strategic importance of silicon photonics as heterogeneous computing architectures become increasingly interconnected. IDC believes future competitive differentiation will depend not only on advances in individual processors, but also on the infrastructure technologies that enable diverse computing systems to integrate and scale.

Industry Conversation Handbook: Worldwide Government, 2026

Ravikant Sharma, Massimiliano Claps, Nigel Wallis, Claudia Medina — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Industry Conversation Handbook is designed to provide general and synthetic knowledge to support technology suppliers’ salespeople when they first approach a buyer from government. The handbook is aimed at igniting meaningful customer engagement, addressing these questions:

What is the industry structure, and what are the key business processes?
How can you improve your sales approach to better address the needs of potential buyers?
Learn about how specific technologies interact with the industry and how to position your offerings to meet industry requirements effectively.
Communicate competently with buyers by using language that resonates with them, initiating conversations, and asking questions that are relevant to their interests and needs.
Showcase the most appropriate products/services that meet the buyer’s needs, illustrating with real-life examples how they can be advantageous to the buyer.

The topics discussed in this Industry Conversation Handbook are selected by IDC analysts based on in-depth and ongoing IDC research about the key technologies applied to operations in the government industry.

The handbook equips sales professionals with basic information concerning the government industry to contact buyers with confidence. It provides a toolkit to spark discussions, helping salespeople show preparedness and stimulate interest in technology buyers with significant conversational teasers and examples. It does not provide an in-depth analysis of the industry or of buyer personas, nor does it seek to present a comprehensive sales strategy.

“Government buyers are not buying technology. They are buying faster service delivery, stronger cyber-resilience, and demonstrable public value,” said Ravikant Sharma, research director, IDC Government Insights. “Technology vendors that make that translation explicitly — and can back it with evidence — will earn the sales conversation. Those that lead with features alone will rarely get to the mission conversation.”

The Moat Is the Harness and the Stack: Microsoft's Project Perception

Frank Dickson, Michelle Abraham — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Microsoft will move Project Perception, an agentic security system that routes red, blue, and green team agents through a harness coordinating OpenAI multi-models with its new MAI-Cyber-1-Flash model, into public preview inside Microsoft Defender on August 3, 2026, backed by least-privilege governance and human approval gates. IDC's view is that the harness, not the model, is the real competitive bet, since pairing that orchestration with Microsoft's standing identity and telemetry access raises the bar for AI-native SOC startups to prove outcomes a bundled Defender capability cannot match.

Zebra ZONE: Transforming the Frontline Workforce with Connected Intelligence

Margot Juros, Filippo Battaini — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note offers key insights and takeaways for retailers, based on notable themes, trends, strategies, developments, and retail use cases covered at Zebra's annual customer conference, ZONE. Key themes include workforce empowerment as a strategic competitive differentiator; overcoming common barriers; leveraging AI/agentic AI to enable a faster, smarter workforce to optimize operations and business results; and how quality data and real-time inferencing give retailers an edge in successfully navigating today's fast-changing, volatile retail environment.

"Frontline workforce empowerment is becoming a strategic competitive differentiator in retail as store associates' roles evolve rapidly, absorbing omni-channel fulfillment, higher-value customer engagement, and AI-assisted workflows that demand better tools, collaboration, and real-time intelligence," says Margot Juros, Research Director, IDC Retail Insights.

2026年国内ネットワーク機器市場企業ユーザー調査

Kenichi Kusano — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

本調査レポートは、企業ネットワークに関するアンケート調査の結果を分析したものである。本調査は、2026年5月に、従業員数10人以上の国内の企業700社（官公庁を含む）を対象に実施した。主な調査項目は以下のとおりである。

企業ネットワークのトレンドと課題
ネットワーク障害への対応状況
ネットワークセキュリティの動向：ネットワーク管理者の視点
ネットワーク運用管理におけるAI（Artificial Intelligence）活用への期待

「汎用的なAIツールは、企業のネットワーク運用管理業務にもすでに浸透している。生成AIが得意とする社内提案資料や手順書といった文書の作成や、マニュアルやRFC（Request for Comments）の要約に加えて、コマンドラインベースの運用業務にも活用されている。ネットワークソリューションベンダーは、独自のAI活用機能やソリューションを導入しているが、汎用的で軽量な業務は、汎用的な生成AIツールで代替される可能性に留意して機能開発を進めるべきである」とIDC Japan、Network & Securityのシニアリサーチディレクターである草野賢一は述べている。

IBM Advances Trusted Quantum Computation, Introducing a New Framework for Quantum Advantage

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

As enterprises increasingly prepare for quantum computing to deliver business value, confidence in the reliability and reproducibility of quantum results will become just as important as computational performance. IBM Quantum's latest research advances this objective by introducing complementary approaches for trusted quantum computation, representing an important milestone on the path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing and future enterprise applications.

IBM Earnings 2Q26

Lars Goransson, Shari Lava, Ashish Nadkarni, Robert Parker, Rick Villars — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IBM entered the second half of 2026 with a softer quarter than it expected, reporting revenue up 1% year over year (y/y) in constant currency to $17.2 billion, below its own guidance. All references in this document are in constant currency. Software grew 5%, and Consulting grew 1%, while Infrastructure declined 7%. As IBM noted in its pre-announcement on July 13, the shortfall came in the final weeks of June, when clients shifted spending toward servers, storage, and memory to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases, and tens of large software deals failed to close on the timelines IBM expected. IBM still expanded its operating pretax margin by 30 basis points, generated $2.5 billion of free cash flow in the quarter and $4.8 billion through the first half, and revised its full-year outlook to 4–5% constant currency revenue growth while maintaining its target of roughly $1 billion in free cash flow growth.

IDC’s Worldwide Digital Engineering and Operational Technology Services Taxonomy, 2026

Mukesh Dialani, Francesca Ciarletta — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides a detailed description of IDC’s digital engineering and operational technology services taxonomy. In 2022, the taxonomy also includes individual foundation markets grouped within primary market segments: product engineering (PE) services, product life-cycle management (PLM) services, operational technology (OT) services, and digital engineering services. At the worldwide level, spending is also segmented across three geographic macroregions: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and Asia/Pacific. These macroregions are further segmented at the regional and local levels. IDC’s worldwide services taxonomy is the basis for IDC’s research studies, trackers, and forecasters for services.

“IDC’s digital engineering and operational taxonomy services taxonomy presents a comprehensive and standardized view of the overall PE, OT, and digital engineering services market,” says Mukesh Dialani, research vice president, Digital Engineering and Operational Technology services. “As technology product and enterprises continue to focus on time to market, achieve higher ROI for their engineering investments accelerated by AI and agentic AI, operations resiliency, the building of new software platforms, digital innovation, global engineering talent, ecosystem leverage, and improvement in product quality and throughput, they will increasingly reach out to and partner with service providers offering these services.”

Japan IT Security Forecast, 2026–2030: Software and Appliances

Kotaro Saito, Mayumi Nishimura — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Forecast provides market size projections for the IT security market, which is the sum of the security software market and the security appliances market, for both the overall market and each functional market from 2026 to 2030.

"IDC predicts that the information security market will continue to achieve significant growth, driven by demand stemming from the utilization of AI and compliance with legal regulations. On the other hand, it is also true that uncertain circumstances in Japan and abroad, as well as the rapid changes in technological trends, pose barriers to corporate investment in security. It is important for vendors to quantitatively demonstrate the implementation effectiveness of their products and enable user enterprises to realize that their contribution is commensurate with their investment," says Kotaro Saito, senior research analyst, Network & Security, IDC Japan.

This is the English translation of the Japanese document (IDC #JPJ53501826).