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IDC MarketScape: North America Public Cloud Object Storage 2026–2027 Vendor Assessment

Dave McCarthy, Jasdeep Singh — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape evaluates providers of public cloud object storage in North America, scoring durability and resilience architecture, performance, security and access control, life-cycle and tiering mechanics, data services, and the commercial structures through which capacity is consumed.

The assessment finds that capacity and 11 nines of durability are no longer differentiating. Competitive separation now comes from two places: whether the storage layer actively participates in the workloads that read from it and whether the commercial model remains legible as data grows.

"Object storage stopped being a commodity the moment workloads started reading from it directly," said Dave McCarthy, group vice president at IDC. "When analytics queries, training pipelines and agents all operate against the bucket rather than a copy staged somewhere else, the storage layer starts determining query performance, accelerator utilization and how much data engineering a workload needs before it can run at all. That is a platform decision, not a capacity purchase, and providers no longer converge on the same answer."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide eSIM Management Platforms 2026 Vendor Assessment

John Gole, Alejandro Cadenas, Jitesh Bhayani, Jason Leigh — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape evaluates vendors providing eSIM management platforms to communications SPs worldwide. These platforms help communications SPs manage eSIM provisioning across consumer devices, travel eSIM services, and IoT, going beyond provisioning to deliver the orchestration and digital connectivity enablement, including integration with operators' business systems, that each segment requires. The study analyzes vendors' capabilities, strategies, and positioning, giving communications SPs a structured framework to assess offerings across these layers and segments.

"The eSIM market is entering a critical period of acceleration, with midmarket devices, travel eSIM services, and SGP.32 all raising volumes and expectations at once. Provisioning remains the foundation, but orchestration and digital enablement are where communications SPs will win or lose, and the platforms that prove themselves in production now will define what comes next," said John Gole, Director, IoT and Mobility at IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Augmented Identity Security Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment

Emanuel Figueroa — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC MarketScape evaluates vendors of augmented identity security solutions (AISS), software that acts on identity risk while access is in use, not only when it is granted. Vendors were assessed against five pillars (identity coverage, continuous risk scoring, automated enforcement, bidirectional interoperability, and observability and delegation governance) using capabilities generally available on August 14, 2026. The assessment reflects a market where AI agents have moved identity from deciding who has access to governing what happens next. No single platform covers every customer's needs, and platforms and specialists now aim at the same target: to discover, control, and act on the risk AI agents pose. This document discusses each vendor's strengths and challenges and gives buyers guidance on visibility, ownership, enforcement evidence, pricing, and piloting.

"Identity has been practiced for decades, and enforcement was largely implied: Control was assumed, and remediation was someone else's job. Agents change the arithmetic. They are far more numerous and far less predictable than people or service accounts, so the asymmetry is volume: Actions arrive in seconds, and discovery still runs in weeks. Judge vendors by what they fix, not only what they find," said Emanuel Figueroa, senior research analyst, Identity Security, Worldwide, IDC.

The AI in Sovereign AI: Are National AI Models Strategic Assets Worth Investing In?

Alessandro Perilli, Melih Murat, Deepika Giri, Ewa Zborowska, Daeil Chun — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines whether national AI models are strategic assets worth investing in. It looks at how broad reliance on foreign-controlled AI models can create systemic dependency, and what happens to an economy when access is cut off for political or technical reasons, particularly in mission-critical industries. It then reviews national AI model investments across regions and countries and gives IDC's perspective on what has worked, what has not, and who benefits from these investments, including nations, technology vendors, end-user organizations, and investors. The document closes with recommended actions for policymakers, technology solution providers, investors, and technology buyers.

"AI can raise a nation's GDP while leaving the technology sustaining that growth under foreign control," said Alessandro Perilli, vice president, Research, AI Economics, IDC. "Countries invest in defense, nuclear, and space programs because the long-term implications of dependence can outweigh the effort required to build domestic capability. AI sovereignty warrants the same calculation. More than 350 national AI model releases occurred outside the United States and China from March 2024 to September 2026. Yet very few have become competitive, widely adopted alternatives, even in the world's 10 largest economies. Governments and the private sector must now choose: Make the sustained investment strategic AI capability requires or let others set the terms."

IBM TechXchange 2026: Governing Agents at Scale

Jim Mercer, Matthew Flug — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

IBM used TechXchange 2026 in Atlanta, the first held alongside HashiConf, to argue that the primary enterprise challenge in the agentic era has shifted from building agents to scaling and governing them. Announcements spanned agent identity, a cross-platform watsonx Orchestrate control plane, Terraform and Vault for agentic infrastructure, the Concert operations platform, Bob 2.0, and Z Atlas. IBM says only 25% of today's agents are enterprise ready, and its answer to scalability is a layered stack of identity, context, orchestration, and operations.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI Agents for IT Service Management Software 2026–2027 Vendor Assessment

Snow Tempest — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents a vendor assessment of the worldwide market for AI agents for IT service management software through the IDC MarketScape model.

"AI agents for IT service management are an emerging market, for which customer demands include not only agent capabilities but security, governance and accurate organizational and technical context," said Snow Tempest, research manager, IT Service Management at IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Service Providers for Large Capital Projects in Energy and Water 2026 Vendor Assessment

Gaia Gallotti, Jean-François Segalotto, Gaurav Verma — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates digital service providers supporting large capital projects in energy and water worldwide. It analyzes vendors’ capabilities, strategies, and positioning in a market undergoing structural transformation as owners face a capital investment cycle that outstrips the capacity of traditional, project-by-project delivery models and move toward governing capital programs as connected portfolios. The report provides energy and water companies with a structured framework to assess service providers across capital portfolio planning, project controls, engineering data and digital thread, construction and commissioning digitalization, IT/OT integration, advanced analytics, AI, and digital twins, and platform implementation and managed services.

“The volume of capital that energy and water owners must now deploy is so vast that the operating model behind large capital projects for the past several decades is simply no longer viable, and no amount of incremental effort will make delivering one program at a time scale to the size of this investment cycle. Owners need service providers capable of restructuring how capital is governed, funded, and executed across the entire portfolio, with shared data, standardized delivery patterns, and AI proven in production, because the old way of delivering large capital projects will not survive the demands now being placed on it.” — Research Director Gaia Gallotti, IDC Energy Insights

IDC TechBrief: World Models

Dan Everett — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC TechBrief defines world models, explains how they are being used, and recommends how buyers should evaluate models and suppliers. World models help buyers train AI on a wider range of scenarios, cut simulation cost, and reduce the need for human intervention in autonomous systems. Technology leaders should invest in use cases, not architecture, and guard against the risk that matters most: a simulation that looks realistic but gets the physics wrong.

"Wait on world models, and you risk falling behind. Overinvest before the technology is proven, and you risk compliance gaps and legal liability. Buyers with a clear view of the market that invest strategically in use cases and build expertise and adaptability through learning will be the ones that realize business value." — Dan Everett, research director, Spatial Intelligence and World Models at IDC

Sprinklr's Platform Push at CXUnifiers 2026 Rests on Social Data and Customer Context

Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel, Hayley Sutherland — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

At CXUnifiers 2026, Sprinklr launched a beta of six Marketing AI Agents and outlined a context graph and an open agent layer designed to unify its social, marketing, service, and customer feedback products into a single AI platform. The plan builds on the social and conversation data Sprinklr already collects, and its success will depend on published evidence that this context improves AI agent results and on winning over the IT and AI leaders who now take active role in choosing AI agent platforms for customer experience.

AI and Agentic-Enabled Managed Services: Pricing and Penalties

David Tapper — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 05:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses different pricing models that organizations prefer when procuring managed services using AI and agentic AI. The document also analyzes an array of market and industry factors influencing the optimal portfolio of pricing models that managed services providers (SPs) should target against the backdrop of types of operating models for AI. Factors assessed involve structuring defensible contracts, driving scalability of comparable outcomes, orchestrating external systems, adapting to changing inputs, adjusting to exogenous triggers, controlling cost structure and operating leverage, and managing financial downside.

"Effective use of outcome-based pricing for managed services using AI and agentic AI requires managed SPs to address a wide array of exogenous and endogenous factors shaping the risks associated with each type of pricing model, particularly outcome-based pricing," says David Tapper, program VP, Outsourcing and Managed Cloud Services at IDC. "Critical investments that managed SPs need to pursue involve building a robust governance structure, aligning use of pricing models across operating models, using portfolio risk management for pricing models, implementing repricing structure as a means of adapting to change, investing in an autonomous operations platform to assess pricing impacts, developing a road map to scale outcomes, structuring pricing arrangements with partner ecosystem, and architecting AI-enabled managed services based on risk to overall business."