rssitbuyer

Accenture FY 4Q26: Bookings Recovery and Full-Year Revenue Above Guidance Point to Sustained AI Transformation Demand; OT Security Platform Now in Market

Lars Goransson — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Revenue was $18.7 billion for the quarter, up 7%. By type of work, Consulting was up 7% to $9.3 billion, and Managed Services was up 7% to $9.4 billion. For the full fiscal year, revenue was $74.2 billion, up 5%, with Consulting up 3% to $36.9 billion and the faster-growing Managed Services up 6% to $37.3 billion. With acquisitions contributing an estimated 2 percentage points of full-year growth, organic growth was approximately 3%. Accenture estimates that its U.S. federal business reduced full-year growth by approximately 1 percentage point.
All three geographic markets grew 7% in the quarter. Communications, Media & Technology led the industry groups with 11% growth, followed by Health & Public Service (9%), Financial Services (6%), Resources (6%), and Products (4%).
GAAP operating margin for the quarter was 15.3%, 20 basis points above adjusted operating margin a year earlier, and gross margin was 32.0%, up 10 basis points. GAAP diluted EPS rose 46% to $3.29. Full-year adjusted EPS was $13.97, up 8%. Free cash flow was $2.8 billion for the quarter, down from $3.8 billion, and $11.6 billion for the year. Days services outstanding rose to 50 from 47.
New bookings were $22.2 billion, up 5%, with a book to bill of 1.2 (Consulting 1.0, Managed Services 1.4). Managed Services bookings of $12.8 billion were a record. The quarter included 37 clients with bookings above $100 million, bringing the full-year count to a record 141, 12 more than in fiscal 2025. Full-year bookings were $84.5 billion, up 3%, with a book to bill of 1.1.
Head count rose approximately 5% to 814,000. Fixed-price work, including outcome-based contracts, now accounts for more than 65% of bookings. Accenture said revenue per person increased in fiscal 2026 and that it expects to keep hiring in fiscal 2027, at a lower rate in part because of AI, including at entry level.
Fiscal 2027 outlook: revenue growth of 3–6% in local currency, including 2–2.5 percentage points from acquisitions; operating margin of 15.9–16.1% (10–30 basis points over FY26 adjusted); and diluted EPS of $14.39–14.81. Accenture will hold an Investor Day on October 14.

Broadcom's VMware Private AI Cloud Makes Agent Governance the Default

Adam Reeves, Matthew Flug — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective shares an overview of VMware Explore 2026, where Broadcom consolidated infrastructure, data, and security announcements under a new VMware Private AI Cloud banner, applying one governance pattern, identity verification, policy enforcement, and audit logging across three separate control points: the Tanzu Platform AI gateway, the standalone AgentMinder product, and a still-planned VCF-level gateway. Enterprise IT leaders evaluating this stack should treat governance depth, not governance claims, as the deciding factor; confirm what is actually shipping before committing budget; and assign clear ownership across Broadcom's overlapping control points before agentic workloads reach production scale.

"The interesting move here isn't any single control point; it's that Broadcom is holding one governance pattern, identity verification, policy enforcement, and audit logging, constant across three different layers of the stack: the platform gateway, the identity and governance layer, and the infrastructure layer beneath both. That's a deliberate choice to make governance look the same no matter which layer an enterprise is touching, rather than letting each layer define governance on its own terms," says Adam Reeves, research director, PaaS for Developers of Modern and Edge Applications, IDC.

IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Discrete Manufacturing Organization Worldwide, 2026

Jeffrey Hojlo, Nigel Wallis, Claudia Medina — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents results from IDC’s MaturityScape Benchmark AI Survey, released worldwide in May 2026, drawing on a discrete manufacturing subsample of 162 organizations from the 1,900 organizations surveyed. It is the updated edition of IDC’s inaugural discrete manufacturing benchmark (see IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Discrete Manufacturing Organization Worldwide, 2025, IDC #US53335025, May 2025) and applies the framework set out in IDC MaturityScape: AI-Fueled Organization 2.0 (IDC #US54450625, April 2026). The most significant change this year is the elevation of governance to a distinct fourth dimension alongside strategy, people, and technology. Note: Because the underlying survey methodology and question set were revised for 2026, year-over-year figures are not directly comparable to the 2025 discrete manufacturing benchmark, and this document does not present numeric comparisons against prior-year results.

Discrete manufacturers post a marginally higher overall AI maturity score than the worldwide average (mean of 2.44 versus 2.43), led by governance (at 2.61, the most advanced of the sector’s four dimensions, echoing the global pattern), while technology, at 2.28, remains the least mature, reflecting persistent data and platform readiness gaps even as manufacturers digitize factories and connected assets.

“Discrete manufacturers show the most progress on governance, and this is not a coincidence; decades of investment in quality management, traceability, and safety certification gave the sector a head start on the discipline that governance requires,” says Jeff Hojlo, vice president, IDC Manufacturing Insights. “But governance leadership does not offset a comparatively immature technology foundation. As manufacturers work to unify data from connected assets and processes and move from generative to agentic AI, the sector’s data and platform readiness, not its governance approach, will determine how quickly AI-fueled transformation can scale.”

“This is consistent with the sector’s growing quality and safety compliance requirements: Discrete manufacturers can face costly recalls, warranty liabilities, and safety certification setbacks tied to governance and traceability failures, giving them a strong incentive to mature AI governance ahead of the other dimensions.”

IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Energy Organizations Worldwide, 2026

Roberta Bigliani, Gaia Gallotti, John Villali, Nigel Wallis, Claudia Medina — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents results from IDC’s MaturityScape Benchmark AI Survey, released worldwide in May 2026, drawing on an energy subsample of 139 organizations out of 1,900 organizations surveyed.

“Energy organizations built their reputation on moving deliberately, treating caution as a virtue that could be sustained indefinitely. What has changed is not their appetite for risk but the realization that the world they are operating in, from volatile fuel and power markets to aging infrastructure to a workforce that is retiring faster than it can be replaced, no longer allows the old way of doing things to function, and AI adoption has shifted from an option worth considering to the only viable path forward,” said Gaia Gallotti, research director, IDC Energy Insights.

This is consistent with the sector’s regulatory exposure: energy organizations, particularly utilities, can face significant penalties, and in severe cases, mandated remediation for reliability and safety failures tied to grid or pipeline operations, giving them a strong incentive to mature AI governance ahead of the other dimensions.

IDC MaturityScape Benchmark: AI-Fueled Life Sciences Organization Worldwide, 2026

Nimita Limaye, Nigel Wallis, Claudia Medina — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents results from IDC’s MaturityScape Benchmark AI Survey, released worldwide in May 2026, drawing on a life sciences subsample of 112 organizations out of 1,900 organizations surveyed.

“Life sciences, the sector that once resisted technology, now leads the world in AI governance. Irony lies in the fact that its greatest strength can’t rescue it from its greatest weaknesses. Data foundations don’t care how mature your policies are, while technology debt and a lack of interoperability slow down progress,” says Dr. Nimita Limaye, research VP, Life Sciences R&D Strategy and Technology, IDC.

IDC PlanScape: Coordinating ADMS, Grid DERMS, and Edge DERMS as the Utilities’ Grid Coordination Plane

Gaia Gallotti, John Villali, Jean-François Segalotto — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PlanScape treats ADMS, grid DERMS, and edge DERMS as three core coordinated pillars of a single grid coordination plane, as the value compounds considerably when the three share a common data foundation, a deliberate sequencing decision, and unified governance. The How Can My Organization Take Advantage of a Coordinated Utilities’ Grid Coordination Plane? section of this document lays out nine sequential phases, from mapping existing architecture to pricing the cost of the status quo to measuring whether the projected value actually materialized. The Advice for Technology Leaders section closes this IDC PlanScape with guidance specific to the technology vendor relationship.

“Treating ADMS, grid DERMS, and edge DERMS as three separate procurements and systems is a holdover of a utility landscape that no longer exists. As the industry now operates in an electrifying, decarbonizing world, procurement, deployment, and execution processes need to evolve to coordinate all three systems and solve energy transition problems that are already here today,” says Gaia Gallotti, research director, IDC Energy Insights Europe. “Utilities that get ahead in this transition will be the ones that sequence deliberately, govern rigorously, and hold their vendors to the same standard of coordination they are asking of their own organization.”

IDC TechBrief: AI-Powered Shopping Assistants in Conversational Commerce and the Compression of Retail Purchase Paths

Ornella Urso — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AI-powered shopping assistants are compressing the discovery-to-decision stage of the retail purchase path from a multi-day, multi-tab search process into a single conversation, while the final checkout step has proven far harder to compress and mostly still resolves back to the retailer. That unevenness is, on balance, reassuring: The part of the relationship retailers worry most about losing has largely stayed with them.

The less visible shift is what happens to brand trust once a third party starts narrating the product. An assistant's judgment can already override a brand's own claims often enough to change outcomes, the mechanism by which that happens is largely invisible to the brand, and the retail systems built to serve human browsers do not map cleanly onto agent behavior in inventory, fraud, session state, or the org chart. None of these are reasons to wait. They are reasons to treat conversational commerce as a brand-trust and architecture program with a conversational interface attached, sponsored jointly by ecommerce, data, legal, and marketing leadership, rather than a chat/video interface with a data problem underlying it.

IDC’s 2026 CX CSAT Awards

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation provides an overview of the results from IDC’s 2026 CX CSAT Awards. This award program recognizes the leading CX vendors in each application market that receive the highest customer satisfaction scores based on IDC’s CX Path Survey.

IDC’s CX Path Survey is a global survey of over 2,500 organizations across all geographic regions and company sizes, where customers are asked to rate their vendor on more than 30 different customer satisfaction metrics.

Managing Risk, Security, and Compliance in Application Modernization

Peter Marston — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective highlights growing priorities for application modernization and argues that success hinges upon embedding risk management, security, and compliance not only into each phase of modernization but also in ongoing operations. IDC survey findings and interviews have revealed that aligning business and IT strategy, addressing data security, and managing the expanding risk surface — especially with cloud, AI, and low-code adoption — are critical. Organizations that treat governance as foundational, not an afterthought, achieve better outcomes and minimize costly disruptions during modernization.

"Modernizing applications has grown to be a top enterprise priority, and many organizations have begun modernizing their applications portfolios to build agility and achieve business objectives. Yet, achieving success with modernization remains elusive for many organizations. By leveraging key disciplines for managing risk, compliance, and security, organizations can avert pitfalls and strengthen value outcomes for their modernization initiatives," says Peter Marston, senior research director, IDC's AI-Powered Application Services.

The Open Lakehouse Becomes Asia/Pacific's Default AI Substrate: Engineering Context for Agentic AI

Deepika Giri — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines why agentic AI in Asia/Pacific is stalling at the data layer and how the open lakehouse is emerging as the region's default AI substrate. It argues that engineered context, assembled from open table formats, real-time operational-analytical convergence, vector memory, and knowledge graphs, is what makes autonomous agents trustworthy, and that governance and cost, not capability, now form the ceiling on scaling. Drawing on IDC's 2026 Asia/Pacific surveys, it maps the demand, the four pillars of the context engine, the vendor landscape, and the actions technology leaders should take now.

"AI does not fail in the model; it fails in the context. In Asia/Pacific, the winners are re-architecting data as a governed, real-time context engine on an open lakehouse, treating vectors and knowledge graphs as first-class citizens," says Deepika Giri, associate vice president, AI and Data Research, IDC Asia/Pacific.