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Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Harness and AWS Context: Managed Agentic AI Platform Services for Enterprise Developer Enablement

Adam Reeves — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Announced at AWS Summit, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore's managed harness and the preview of AWS Context extend AWS' agentic AI platform services with managed agent orchestration and organizational knowledge graph capabilities for enterprise developers. AWS asserts that the harness reduces the engineering cost of deploying production agents, and as PaaS continues its evolution toward agentic AI platforms, production deployments at scale will determine whether AgentCore emerges as the platform of record for enterprise agent development.

Emerging Forces in China’s AI Chip Market: Development of Key Start-Ups

Helen Chiang — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores the continuous expansion of AI and its market, as AI chips have become a key part of enterprise IT architecture. Under the influence of geopolitics and digital sovereignty, Chinese vendors are active in the development of independently-developed AI chips. Given this scenario, coupled with strong domestic demand, numerous local AI chip companies and start-ups have emerged, leading to a wave of IPOs that surged from 2025 to 2026, including Moore Threads, MetaX, Biren Technology, and Iluvatar CoreX. The China AI chip market is not a monolithic entity; it is composed of a diverse and competitive ecosystem of suppliers, each with distinct strengths, development strategies, and customer profiles. These AI chip vendors are not only striving for breakthroughs in computing power, but also focusing on software development, support for large models, and the establishment of stable operation and maintenance mechanisms, forming an important emerging force in the development of AI chips in China.

“Chinese AI chip start-ups are proactively building their technological strengths. Beyond leveraging chiplet-based architectures to circumvent advanced process constraints, they are stepping up investments in software platforms, interconnect technologies, and system-level solutions to address supply chain bottlenecks. Although the Chinese AI chip market remains constrained by a range of challenges and external restrictions, these pressures have also driven start-ups to accelerate the development of differentiated technologies and platform capabilities, thereby enhancing the resilience of China’s domestic semiconductor supply chain and ecosystem,” said Helen Chiang, research vice president, Semiconductors and Enabling Technologies, IDC.

From Connected to Intelligent: Industrial IoT in the Age of AI and Edge Intelligence

Gunjan Bassi — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines where industrial IoT scaling efforts are succeeding and where they are constrained. Industrial IoT has moved beyond connected operations. Most industrial organizations are already running AI-enabled applications in production, yet the ability to scale them consistently across sites, systems, and operational domains remains limited. Architecture, data contextualization, OT security, and talent readiness are now the factors separating organizations that scale from those that do not.

The most successful adopters share a common foundation: deliberate architectural choices made early, governance established ahead of need, and a clear understanding of how AI-driven insights connect to operational decisions.

"Most industrial organizations already have the data. What separates leaders is their ability to act on it at scale," says Gunjan Bassi, research manager, Worldwide Industrial IoT and Intelligence Strategies, IDC. "The organizations pulling ahead have aligned architecture, data contextualization, governance, and talent early. These are the factors separating the organizations that scale from the ones that stay stuck in pilot."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Mailroom Solutions and Services 2026 Vendor Assessment

Robert Palmer — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses the market for mailroom solutions and services among the most prominent global vendors and identifies their strengths and challenges. This assessment discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that position vendors for success in this important market. This IDC study is based on a comprehensive framework to evaluate mailroom solutions and services, including standalone capabilities suitable for self-managed environments and outsourced mailroom services.

"As enterprises accelerate their shift to hybrid work models, the mailroom is emerging as a critical enabler of digital transformation, moving from a back-office cost center to an intelligent intake hub that drives speed, compliance, and operational resilience," says Robert Palmer, research VP, IDC's Imaging Domain. "Organizations should partner with mailroom solutions providers that combine physical and digital mail capabilities with AI-driven automation, robust governance frameworks, and seamless enterprise integration to ensure secure, efficient, and auditable information flows across distributed workforces."

Measuring What Matters: A Data-Driven Cybersecurity Metrics Framework for the Age of AI

Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK, Frank Dickson — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective, Part 2 of a two-part series on cybersecurity metrics, presents a data-driven, three-tier metrics framework, governance, managerial, and operational, that enables organizations to measure what matters at every level of the enterprise. Cybersecurity metrics have long been misunderstood, reported as technical operational measures when what executives and board members need are strategic, risk-based insights tied directly to business outcomes.

The emergence of AI has fundamentally changed the metrics imperative on two fronts. On the offensive side, AI-weaponized attacks are accelerating in scale, sophistication, and speed, compressing the time available to detect and respond. On the defensive side, organizations are deploying AI into products, services, and decision-making faster than governance can keep pace, creating a new class of enterprise risk that traditional metrics frameworks were never designed to capture.

This document extends the three-tier framework with dedicated AI risk metrics, covering shadow AI, regulatory compliance posture, agentic AI risk, model IP protection, and SaaS-embedded AI. Organizations that implement GRC platforms with native AI governance capabilities, align metrics to business risk, and empower audience-specific decision-making with transparent, validated insights will be best positioned to lead with confidence in today's AI-driven threat and regulatory environment.

"The age of AI demands a fundamental rethink of how organizations measure cybersecurity risk. Reporting firewall blocks to boards while AI systems operate without governance, measurement, or accountability is no longer acceptable. Data-driven metrics, built on a consolidated intelligence platform and extended to capture AI-specific risk at every audience level, are no longer a best practice. They are a business imperative," says Philip Harris, research director, Governance, Risk, and Compliance Solutions, IDC.

Salesforce Connections 2026: Short-Term ROI on Marketing AI to Drive Long-Term Transformation

Gerry Murray, Heather Hershey, Douglas Hayward, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective summarizes Salesforce Connections 2026 and its implications for CMOs and marketing technology buyers. The document covers Salesforce's Agentforce Marketing and Commerce announcements, including the pipeline generation agents Piper and Hunter, the Contentful acquisition, the Agentforce Marketing Goals Agent, and Headless 360 MCP campaign management capabilities.

"The road to scaling agentic marketing is ultimately an organizational, process, and technological transformation proposition, each step of which will have to pay its way," says Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents, IDC. "By forming its go-to-market strategy on this principle, Salesforce aligns itself with CMO agendas and CFO requirements for funding enterprise-scale investments, which expands account TAM and accelerates Salesforce's ability to capture share of the agentic infrastructure spend."

Schneider Electric comes one step closer to a software-defined datacenter with agreement to acquire Cognite

Andrew Buss, Mikhail Jaura, Luis Fernandes — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Schneider Electric announced an agreement to acquire Cognite, a Norwegian industrial AI software company, for $3.1 billion in an all-cash transaction. Founded in 2017 with 800+ employees, Cognite offers a cloud-native industrial knowledge graph platform, agentic AI capabilities (Atlas AI), and a workflow layer (Cognite Flows) that contextualize and activate industrial data at scale. The deal is the next step in Schneider's long-running strategy to build an end-to-end industrial intelligence platform through its AVEVA subsidiary, following the 2018 merger with Schneider's industrial software business and the 2021 OSIsoft acquisition. Completion is expected within the coming quarters, pending customary regulatory approvals.

The Agentic Enterprise Is Here: A Retail Lens on SAP Sapphire 2026

Ananda Chakravarty — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses SAP Sapphire 2026 in Orlando (May 11–13), where SAP repositioned itself from an ERP vendor to a business AI company, recasting the application layer itself as an agentic stack. The day 2 keynote — led by CEO Christian Klein, with Member of the Executive Board Muhammad Alam, CTO Philipp Herzig, and COO Sebastian Steinhaeuser — rested on a blunt thesis: 80% accuracy may suit a consumer chatbot but fails in finance, supply chain, and HR. SAP’s answer was the SAP Business AI Platform. Governance runs through the SAP AI Agent Hub; trust is anchored by Anthropic’s Claude and NVIDIA’s secure runtime; and industry depth spans 26 industries, including retail’s Autonomous Unified Commerce, backed by a new RISE with SAP migration accelerator. Customer proof gives the vision weight. The recurring theme is that the rapid advancement of agentic AI is overtaking market forces, and a framework and an accompanying infrastructure will be necessary to leverage the modern business.

“Enterprise AI agents have advanced faster than almost anyone predicted. Agents can now reason, decide, and act across multistep workflows that were manual a year ago. But advancement isn’t the same as readiness. The accuracy tolerable for a consumer chatbot is nowhere near what finance, supply chain, customer experience, or HR demand, where ‘almost right’ carries real costs. The next phase belongs to organizations that pair agent autonomy with the data quality, grounding, and governance to make decisions trustworthy at scale,” says Ananda “Andy” Chakravarty, VP research at IDC Retail Insights.

Unified AI Platforms — Platformized or Compositional Architectures: Understanding the Differences

Kathy Lange — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how enterprise AI complexity is outpacing most organizations’ ability to manage it. As AI systems grow more autonomous, the architecture of the platform that governs them matters. This document examines two distinct architectural strategies in the unified AI platforms market: platformized architectures, where the platform owns and enforces the AI life cycle natively, and compositional architectures, where organizations assemble this life cycle themselves from APIs, SDKs, and external tooling. Neither is inherently superior, but they differ materially in who bears operational responsibility and how governance is enforced. Organizations that understand this distinction before evaluating vendors will be better positioned to choose an architecture that fits their engineering capacity, risk tolerance, and production-scale ambitions.

“Enterprises evaluating unified AI platforms are making a consequential architectural choice,” says Kathy Lange, research director, AI, Data, and Automation Software at IDC. “The line between platformized and compositional offerings is not always visible in vendor marketing, but it determines who owns the complexity of governing and operating AI at scale.”

Japan IT Spending Forecast by Vertical Segment, Company Employee Size, Company Revenue, and Region, 2026–2030

Hitoshi Ichimura, Ko Shikita — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents the Japan IT market actual IT spending in 2024 and 2025, and the IT spending forecast from 2026 to 2030 by industry segment, company size, and annual turnover. This study also analyzes IT spending by dividing the industries into 21 categories, company size and product segments into five categories, and annual turnover into four categories; and discusses IT spending trends observed in each industry segment.

Despite the increasing uncertainty in the Japan economy, many Japanese companies are making full-scale efforts toward digitalization and digital business. In particular, large and medium-sized enterprises are advancing existing system renewals and infrastructure modernization projects, and therefore, IT spending is forecast to expand steadily. On the other hand, while small and medium-sized enterprises have needs for digitalization, their initiatives remain limited due to factors such as deteriorating business performance or a shortage of personnel with expertise in digitalization, which has also led to stagnation in IT spending growth rates. "IDC believes that IT suppliers' further focus on supporting the digitalization of small and medium-sized enterprises, centered on AI utilization, will contribute to stable growth in the IT business going forward," says Hitoshi Ichimura, senior research manager, Software, Services, and IT Spending at IDC Japan.

This is the English translation of the Japanese document (IDC #JPJ53503626).