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AWS in Asia/Pacific: Evolution of Agentic AI and the Push for Digital Sovereignty

Yih Khai Wong — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IDC recently attended an analyst briefing organized by Amazon Web Services (AWS), held in conjunction with its annual AWS Summit in Singapore. AWS delivers a portfolio of cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and security services to enterprises, governments, and developers worldwide, with a growing focus on agentic AI capabilities and regional digital sovereignty.

The briefing emphasized AWS’s shift toward agentic AI, its growth of the large-language model (LLM) ecosystem via Amazon Bedrock, and its focus on digital sovereignty in the Asia/Pacific region. AWS highlighted its platform’s ability to support various stages of AI development, from simple AI assistants that automate routine tasks to AI agents that manage end-to-end workflows and fully agentic AI systems that mimic human logic and reasoning. AWS also stressed that trust, accountability, and compliance are essential pillars for enterprise AI growth in this region.

AI's Environmental Reckoning: Vendor Strategies for Sustainable AI Infrastructure

Bjoern Stengel — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective discusses how AI is dramatically accelerating datacenter infrastructure expansion, driving global electricity consumption toward 915TWh by 2028 and increasing carbon emissions at a CAGR of 16.7% despite significant renewable energy investment. IDC's 2026 AI and Sustainability Survey (n = 1,570) reveals that enterprise buyers are embedding environmental criteria into vendor selection with growing rigor, and that buyer personas diverge significantly — requiring IT infrastructure vendors to develop differentiated engagement strategies by function. Vendors that invest in validated sustainability disclosures, persona-specific messaging, modular energy-efficient infrastructure, and circular life-cycle services will gain a competitive advantage as sustainable AI transitions from a reputational consideration to a procurement requirement.

"AI's environmental reckoning is not a distant policy challenge — it is unfolding now, in procurement offices and sustainability committees across the enterprise. IT infrastructure vendors that treat their products' energy efficiency and carbon intensity as competitive assets, not compliance obligations, are the ones that will define the sustainable AI infrastructure market." — Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability research and practice lead, Sustainable Strategies and Technologies, IDC

Ant International Makes Clear Inroads on the Gaps in Global Payments Needs

Michael Sek Pheng Yeo — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Ant International's MoMents 2026 and associated International Media and Analyst briefing in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia held on the 23^rd of April 2026 positioned the company as a major infrastructure provider for the next phase of AI-driven commerce. Their new capabilities combine payments, global accounts, embedded finance and AI-led operational tooling into a consistent narrative on where the Ant International sees the future of commerce in. The event highlighted how Ant International is stitching its assets together in a broad merchant, wallet, banking and financial services ecosystem to provide cross-border interoperability, treasury intelligence and new standards for trusted agentic commerce.

The most important signal from this event was that Ant International is moving beyond its already very successful and well-integrated cross-border payments offering in Alipay+ and towards a more integrated and holistic commerce stack for enterprises and SMEs. Their strategy aims to directly address market realities including payment fragmentation, market volatility and uneven SME access, especially relevant in key markets in Southeast Asia. Beyond these areas, Ant International also demonstrated their commitment and investments in AI such as in using it for agentic commerce as well as security. By combining these offerings into a themed offering for businesses, they aim to tackle and solve common issues head on in a seamless manner.

Anthropic expands legal tools with deep integrations. Harvey and Legora officially on notice.

Ryan O’Leary — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

GRC Software as the IT Intelligence Fabric for Suppliers

Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective looks at GRC software as the IT intelligence fabric for suppliers. The GRC market is reaching an inflection point for GRC software technology suppliers. Traditional platforms still handle policies, controls, evidence, exceptions, and risk registers, but enterprise buyers now expect more: a live view of assets, data, services, models, and third parties, including ownership, criticality, control coverage, and business consequence. The market signal is increasingly clear that static inventories and periodic evidence exercises are no longer enough. Capabilities such as continuous control monitoring, CMDB enrichment, data mapping, classification, and AI-assisted analysis already exist across adjacent platforms, but they remain fragmented across separate tools and teams.

The strategic opportunity for suppliers is to move beyond disconnected control towers and build a trusted intelligence fabric that unifies context across assets, services, identities, data, controls, and risks. Done well, this fabric becomes a shared utility that enriches SOC triage, exposure prioritization, change management, IAM, data governance, AI governance, business continuity, audit, and leadership reporting. For suppliers, the key question is no longer how to collect more data, but how to reconcile partial truths, infer missing context, republish trusted insights into operational tools, and reduce manual reconciliation across the enterprise in a way that makes the platform materially more strategic to buyers.

“For GRC software technology suppliers, the future is not better record keeping; it is building the trusted intelligence fabric that turns fragmented enterprise signals into shared, decision-grade operational context.” — Phil Harris, research director, Governance, Risk and Compliance Solutions, IDC

HPE's New Compute Scale-Up Server 3250 Offers Scalability, Performance, Resilience, and Security Benefits for Mission-Critical Workloads

Chris Drake — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IDC classifies Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE's) new Compute Scale-up Server 3250 as an Availability Level 4 (AL4) server, with its ability to offer the highest level of server availability for mission-critical and business-critical workloads. The new 3250 represents a considerable step-up from its predecessor, the 3200, with improvements across the processor architecture, memory capacity and throughput, I/O, scalability, security, and reliability.

Hailing a Hotel: When Ubering Shifts the Demand Funnel, the SuperApp Answers the Call

Dorothy Creamer — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Link examines Uber's recent announcement of its partnership with Expedia Group integrating hotel booking, and ultimately vacation rental inventory from Vrbo, directly into the Uber app. Unveiled at Uber's sixth annual GO-GET event in New York City, the partnership provides a distribution channel for Expedia's inventory of more than 700,000 hotels worldwide while advancing Uber's stated goal of becoming an "everything app." The move is a meaningful step toward the hospitality and travel superapp model IDC has predicted and carries implications for hospitality and travel providers, online travel agencies (OTAs), and the technology and solutions providers that serve them. Ubering has already become synonymous with hailing in a public transportation context, but this announcement indicates the intent of Uber's leadership for the verb to become more omnipresent – when you can "uber" your entire journey, the demand funnel if not shrinks, shifts and the most seamless experience may win.

IDC PeerScape: Practices for Quantum Computing Governance

David Weldon, Heather West, PhD — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape explores how some forward-thinking organizations are preparing for this shift. They are developing quantum governance strategies that build on existing data and risk management practices.

"The development of quantum computing will certainly bring significant benefits in terms of analytics and speed of compute capabilities," says David Weldon, adjunct research advisor for IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP). "But smart organizations are also taking steps now to develop quantum governance practices that will protect data in this new environment."

"The risk is two-pronged. Sensitive data needs protection now against 'harvest now, decrypt later' attacks, and the process of migrating critical infrastructure to post-quantum cryptographic standards is complex and must begin now in order to be prepared for future quantum systems," says Heather West, PhD, senior research manager and research lead, Global Quantum Computing Research, IDC.

Iterable Rebrands and Raises the Stakes with Nova AI Agent Launch

Roger Beharry Lall — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Iterable has introduced Nova, an AI agent designed to automate and optimize cross-channel customer engagement in real time, alongside a broader set of platform enhancements unveiled at its Activate Summit 2026. These updates, combined with recent executive leadership changes and a recent rebrand signal a coordinated strategic shift.

Sustainable Business Value Creation in the Era of AI Everywhere — from Compliance to Competitive Advantage

Bjoern Stengel — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines IDC's Sustainability Maturity Model and maps it to the business value outcomes, buyer priorities, and IT requirements at each stage. The 26x business value gap between sustainability beginners and advanced organizations is the defining commercial dynamic in enterprise technology. IDC's 2026 AI and Sustainability Survey shows that 84.6% of advanced organizations report significant value from AI-enabled sustainability versus just 3.3% of beginners. With 82% of C-suite leaders calling AI critical to their sustainability goals and chief sustainability officers more than doubling their "critical urgency" ratings in a single year, the mandate for IT vendors is clear: engage customers across the full maturity spectrum with stage-specific, outcome-oriented, and responsible AI solutions.

"The sustainability maturity divide is no longer a future risk — it is today's competitive reality. The organizations capturing 26 times more business value from AI are not doing something fundamentally different. They are doing the same things at a fundamentally different level of integration, automation, and strategic commitment. IT vendors have both the capability and the commercial imperative to accelerate that journey for their customers." — Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability research and practice lead, Sustainable Strategies and Technologies, IDC