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Evaluating Business Office Operations and Services Vendors for the Media Industry 2026

Alex Holtz — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how media companies are converging production, distribution, monetization, media orchestration, and business operations data into a single agentic orchestration layer that surfaces variance in real time and routes corrective action back to back-office ERP systems. It assesses where agentic AI use cases in media stand in 2026, the human-in-the-loop governance that separates durable vendor deployments from stalled pilots, and the road map toward ERP convergence and cross-pillar autonomous orchestration by 2030. This document also profiles the ERP incumbents and media-native and AI-native specialists — including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Workday, Salesforce, Mediagenix, TwelveLabs, AWS, Dalet, and Vizrt — building this agentic layer and offers guidance for technology leaders on sequencing data, governance, and vendor selection decisions.

“The media companies that win the next five years won’t be the ones running the most AI pilots — they’ll be the ones whose agents see the whole business cycle and act on it in the same breath. When a production delay, a distribution cost spike, and a monetization shortfall all speak the same language to the same ERP, media stops reconciling its plan after the fact and starts steering it in real time,” said Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies, IDC.

IDC Innovators: AI-Native/Enabled Sustainability Software Across the Product Life Cycle, 2026

Amy Cravens — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

For a decade, sustainability software meant reporting: dashboards that counted carbon after the fact and tools built for the annual disclosure cycle. That era is ending.

This IDC Innovators presentation profiles eight companies embedding AI directly into the decisions that create environmental impact, from how a grocer orders produce to how an aluminum plant blends recycled scrap, from the fate of a returned sweater to which carrier moves a container. Afresh, Alternew, carbmee, Kaizen Circularity AI, LiquiDonate, Packgine, Refiberd, and VesselBot look nothing alike, yet all treat sustainability and profitability as the same optimization problem.

Who made the cut, what makes each genuinely AI native, and where incumbents are most exposed: this document has the answers.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Forensics Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

Alison Brooks, Ph.D. — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates seven digital forensics platform vendors — Cellebrite, Magnet Forensics, MSAB, OpenText (EnCase), Belkasoft, Exterro (FTK), and ADF Solutions — on the capabilities and strategies that determine how well their solutions address the demands of modern investigations. The assessment evaluates each vendor across the investigative workflow, from acquiring data off increasingly locked-down devices, through to maintaining an unbroken chain of custody, to synthesizing large data volumes and producing findings that hold up in court.

Priorities have shifted considerably since IDC last evaluated this market. Getting data off a device remains hard and is getting harder, but the volume of acquired data now overwhelms the capacity to make sense of it, and AI-assisted analysis has moved from novelty to working tool. That shift raises an important question: whether an AI-surfaced finding can be explained and defended under cross-examination. AI governance maturity varies more across these vendors than almost any other capability assessed.

This IDC MarketScape is intended for forensics unit commanders, digital investigations leads, and law enforcement technology officers evaluating platform investments. It is designed to help buyers match a vendor's demonstrated strengths to the stage of the workflow where their own caseload is most constrained.

"For a forensics unit, the solution is only as good as the evidence it can defend in court, not simply the speed at which it processes a device," said Dr. Alison Brooks, IDC Research VP, Worldwide Public Safety. "The vendors pulling ahead are the ones treating defensibility and AI governance as part of the product, rather than a compliance afterthought. As caseloads grow and AI enters the workflow, agencies are having to re-evaluate their priorities."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Trade Finance Systems 2026 Vendor Assessment

Maria Adele Di Comite — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents the assessment of 12 vendors for 2026 that provide trade finance solutions to the corporate banking sector: Adria B&T, Aurionpro, BT Systems, CGI, China Systems, Finastra, ICSFS, Infosys Finacle, Intellect Design Arena, Newgen, Oracle, and Surecomp. This research is a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the features of different solutions, along with other characteristics that define vendors' ability to support trade finance activities, streamline bank and corporate operations, and facilitate interactions with the ecosystem. The evaluation is based on a standardized, comprehensive framework and a set of parameters identified as most conducive to success in providing trade finance services in the short and long term. This year's assessment places particular emphasis on the extent to which vendors have moved AI, generative AI, and agentic AI capabilities from road map ambition into production use, alongside their readiness to support the accelerating shift toward electronically recognized trade documents. Evaluation also considers features to support risk management and regulatory compliance evaluations, as well as the ability to address emerging needs in a challenging and fast-evolving market, in times of uncertainty.

"In 2026, trade finance vendors are facing three key challenges: proving that their AI claims hold up under customer scrutiny, preparing for a trade ecosystem that is steadily shifting from paper to electronically recognized documents, and proving they have strong governance to meet tightening regulatory requirements and support advanced risk management. Across this assessment, vendors show meaningful progress on each of these fronts, though the pace and depth of progress vary across the vendor landscape," said Maria Adele Di Comite, senior research director, IDC Financial Insights.

IDC PeerScape: Practices to Overcome DevSecOps Challenges

Sam Abadir — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC PeerScape examines practices to overcome DevSecOps challenges.

"DevSecOps has been well established for quite some time within the industry, yet implementing it effectively is still a challenge. Overcoming that requires good cooperation and adherence to best practices," says Nick Kirtley, adjunct research advisor, IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP).

Nobody’s Model, Everybody’s Standard: AI Governance in Financial Institutions

Sam Abadir — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses AI governance in financial institutions. The U.S. model risk regime just excluded the AI systems that financial institutions worry about most. SR 26-2 replaced 15 years of guidance in April 2026 and, in the same stroke, waved generative and agentic AI out of its scope. Financial services didn’t wait to find out what comes next. Drawing on IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey (FERS Survey) across 2025 and 2026, this document finds financial services moved earlier than any other industry to build a formal AI governance structure, still cites a lack of external frameworks as its leading barrier, at 1.6x the rate of other industries. This framework isn’t actually missing everywhere. Duty-of-care regimes already in force in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Australia, and Singapore, plus the U.S. Treasury and Cyber Risk Institute’s Financial Services AI Risk Management Framework, already define what accountable AI risk management looks like, and none of them got there through a model risk channel. This document argues that financial services should build to that standard now, not wait for model risk guidance to catch up, and makes the case that AI governance itself won’t last as its own category: It’s the shape operational risk management takes on its way to just being called governance.

“Financial services didn’t fail to prepare for AI governance. It built the organizational side faster than any industry, then watched its own regulators step back from the one risk category it was most worried about. The standard it’s missing isn’t missing everywhere. It’s just missing from the one place financial services were trained to look for it,” says Sam Abadir, research director, Risk, Financial Crime, and Compliance at IDC.

Right to Audit in the Modern TPRM Environment: How Technology Buyers Can Work to Overcome Structural Disadvantages

Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK, David Clemente — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explains why right-to-audit (RTA) programs under-deliver and where buyers should focus their limited onsite audit capacity. RTA clauses remain an essential control mechanism in enterprise third-party risk management, but exercising them through onsite audits often reveals operational and logistical friction that limits program effectiveness.

This document examines the structural disadvantages of onsite audits; evaluates how TPRM software providers are closing the gap through continuous monitoring, AI-driven evidence validation, and consortium models; and outlines the emerging inside-out audit opportunity. It offers guidance for technology buyers that want more effective right-to-audit programs.

David Clemente, IDC research director, European Security, says “Right-to-audit clauses are meant to give organizations contractual leverage, but the reality is regular friction and delay to onsite audits. Closing that gap will take more than better questionnaires. We encourage TPRM buyers to invest in offerings that gather continuous, verifiable evidence, an inside-out model that could redefine audit assurance.”

The Cyberinsurance Squeeze: What Buyers Need to Know as AI Reshapes Risk and Coverage in 2026

Karen D. Schwartz, David Clemente, Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK, Grace Trinidad — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how cyberinsurance has been an important protection mechanism for organizations for several years, and the need for coverage has never been greater. More sophisticated ransomware and the rise of AI lead the list of reasons why organizations need coverage. At the same time, insurers are pushing back, raising premiums, increasing requirements and exclusions, and even requiring companies to use insurer-vetted incident, negotiation, and recovery services.

Finding the right policy and renegotiating it over time is complicated, but understanding your company's needs and risks, initiating continuous compliance with the help of a verified security framework, understanding the risk AI poses, and asking a lot of questions can make the difference.

"Cyberinsurance is quickly evolving in terms of requirements, exclusions, and controls," said Karen D. Schwartz, adjunct research analyst with IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP). "This requires organizations to take stock of current cybersecurity controls, bolster those that aren't strong enough, and thoroughly scrutinize potential policies, pushing back on exclusions and sublimits when necessary."

Trends in Cloud Security

Rob Tiffany — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective compares how Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Tencent Cloud are evolving their cloud security postures in 2026, against a backdrop of agentic AI adoption, CNAPP market consolidation, and hardening data sovereignty rules. It finds that every provider is converging on AI-native security and machine identity governance as a top investment priority, even as their architectures, regulatory footprints, and third-party ecosystems continue to diverge sharply. For technology leaders, the document offers a practical framework centered on identity mapping, zero trust verification, tested posture management, and jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction sovereignty checks for cutting through vendor security marketing and making an evidence-based platform decision.

“Buyers keep asking us which cloud is ‘most secure.’ This is the wrong question in 2026, as every leading provider can point to real investment. The right question is whose architecture, sovereignty posture, and machine-identity controls actually match the workload you’re about to move,” explains Rob Tiffany, research director, Cloud Infrastructure at IDC.

Crossing the Agent Economy’s Cost Governance Gap: A Challenge for Tech Leaders

Rick Villars, Jevin Jensen, Shari Lava — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines the governance gap opening beneath tech leaders with the rapid rise of agentic AI. It shows that most enterprises already have agent workflows in production, but they are limited in breadth of use and sophistication. This will change dramatically in the next several years, putting greater pressure on agent spending levels and governance requirements. This IDC Perspective maps five structural risks and opportunities now surfacing across non-human identity, production reliability, open agent runtime security, pricing volatility, and workforce trust.

“The agent economy has already crossed the adoption threshold in enterprises, and now it’s testing whether governance can keep pace. Enterprises that treat identity, cost, and reliability as one connected risk, rather than three separate line items, will navigate this transition with the most confidence,” said Rick Villars, group vice president, Market Intelligence and Business Strategies, IDC.