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IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Private Cloud Infrastructure Software Platforms 2026–2027 Vendor Assessment

Shahin Hashim, Phil Goodwin — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents a worldwide assessment of private cloud infrastructure software platform providers through the IDC MarketScape model. It evaluates thirteen vendors (Broadcom, Canonical, HPE, IDT System, Mirantis, Nutanix, OpenNebula, Platform9, Red Hat, Sangfor, SUSE, VergeIO, and Virtuozzo) against a structured framework of capability and strategy criteria, drawing on vendor briefings, product documentation, a customer reference survey, and independent IDC research. Private cloud infrastructure software has moved from a stable, mature layer of the datacenter into one of the most actively contested decisions in enterprise IT. Three converging pressures are reshaping it: the disruption of the incumbent virtualization stack, the arrival of AI as an on-premises and increasingly sovereign workload, and a sharpened focus on data sovereignty and cost. The market is now bifurcated between broad full-stack providers and focused challenger platforms, and the historical line between virtualization and container platforms is blurring. This study is intended to help infrastructure and platform engineering leaders match a platform to their own workload profile, migration realities, sovereignty and certification requirements, and multiyear modernization plans, rather than default to a reflexive renewal.

"Private cloud infrastructure software is no longer a settled market. A forced migration away from the dominant incumbent, the pull of on-premises and sovereign AI, and renewed pressure on cost and control have turned the platform choice into a multiyear strategic decision, and buyers are rewarding vendors that deliver on their commitments over those with the longest feature list," says Shahin Hashim, associate research director, Storage and Data Management, Enterprise Infrastructure, IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Talent Acquisition for Enterprise 2026 Vendor Assessment

Abhinav Shrivastava — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides an assessment of talent acquisition vendors that primarily serve enterprise buyers. The research finds enterprise buyers dividing along a suite versus standalone architecture choice, where vendors embedded in a broader HCM system are weighed against purpose-built recruiting platforms on configurability and integration depth. Agentic AI has become the dominant vocabulary across nearly every profile, though vendor maturity varies widely in governance, auditability, and human oversight. Skills-based matching and candidate fraud detection are emerging as baseline enterprise requirements rather than differentiators. Buyers are advised to weigh platform maturity against their own hiring complexity and to treat AI governance evidence as a deployment prerequisite.

"Talent acquisition has moved from a people function to becoming a strategic revenue activation function for enterprises, and the buyers in the segment do not judge talent acquisition vendors by the count of AI agents or features," said Abhinav Shrivastava, research manager, Talent Acquisition and Strategy, IDC. "The vendors that can help buyers drive hiring and talent placement efficiency, empowered by transparent and auditable AI capabilities, will define enterprise hiring for the next cycle."

IDC ProductScape: Worldwide Data Intelligence, 2026 — Technology Supplier Solution Functionality

Stewart Bond, Marlanna Harrington — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC ProductScape offers a comprehensive guide on the key functionalities of data intelligence, featuring products from Actian, Alation, Ataccama, AWS, BigID, Cloudera, Collibra, DataGalaxy, Experian, IBM, InterSystems, Precisely, Qlik, Quest Software, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. The status of each functionality is categorized as fully supported, partially supported, partner provided, road map, or not supported, aiding technology purchasers in quickly identifying which vendors align with their changing requirements.

IDC Survey: The State of the Connected Business — A Worldwide Perspective — Connectivity Budgets, Procurement, and Investment Trends by Region and Business Size

Paul Hughes — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey presentation is one of a series of documents that analyze data from IDC's 2026 Enterprise Connectivity Infrastructure and Services Survey. This presentation looks at enterprise connectivity budgets, procurement, and investment trends by region and business size.

Key topics include connectivity maturity and strategy, budget trends, the impact of AI on network traffic and spending, adoption of emerging connectivity technologies, and the role of managed service providers and technology partners.

IDC's 2026 Enterprise Connectivity Infrastructure and Services Survey was conducted in August/September 2026, capturing responses from 878 IT and line-of-business decision-makers across 19 countries, and across a broad mix of vertical sectors and business sizes.

Addressing Critical Data Challenges in Retail: Fast-Evolving Data Management Roles and Strategies for Successful AI

Cristiano Quattrini, Margot Juros — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how retailers are accelerating investment in AI, but IDC’s 2026 Global Retail Survey shows that scaling AI depends heavily on the maturity of the underlying data environment. While 42% of retailers identify digital skills and talent as the largest individual barrier, poor data synchronization and integration at 34%, limited access to real-time data and analytics at 34%, and insufficient operational and customer data visibility at 29% form a significant cluster of structural constraints.

The same pattern appears in individual retail functions. Real-time network-wide inventory visibility remains a leading operational challenge, while difficulty personalizing at scale highlights persistent customer data fragmentation. Retailers therefore need to treat data integration, semantic consistency, ownership, real-time information, governance, and observability as core elements of their AI strategies.

Successful AI will depend less on the volume of data a retailer owns and more on its ability to provide trusted, timely, semantically clear, and appropriately governed information to humans, applications, and increasingly autonomous AI systems.

“Retailers are discovering that scaling AI is often less about finding a better model and more about giving this model a reliable representation of the business. Data synchronization, real-time access, and visibility sit immediately behind talent among the main barriers to AI execution. As AI moves closer to inventory, customer decisions, fulfillment, pricing, and store operations, data management becomes part of the operating model itself. Retailers that treat integration, inventory visibility, customer data unification, and governance as core AI capabilities will be much better positioned to move from experimentation to scalable business value,” says Cristiano Quattrini, senior associate advisor, IDC Retail Insights.

From the AIforce Interface to the Platform: A Retail Lens on Salesforce's Dreamforce 2026

Ornella Urso — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective presents the retail-related key takeaways from Salesforce's Dreamforce 2026, held on September 15–17 in San Francisco. Salesforce reframed its CRM framework as an interface layer, backed by new AI models, governance capabilities, and role-specific agents. The report includes a selection of retail use case stories on commerce, order management, and retail media capabilities.

"Dreamforce 2026 showed Salesforce's ecosystem and intelligent layer strategy aimed at serving agents, businesses, and ultimately shoppers," said Ornella Urso, research director at IDC. "For retailers, the harder questions are once more foundational: whether commerce and service data are unified, who owns routing and escalation rules, and how governance is enforced before an agent checks out an order or issues a refund."

IDC Market Glance: Warehouse Applications, 3Q26

Stephanie Krishnan — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance is a taxonomy document that provides a concise, current-state view of warehouse applications in 3Q26. It outlines the major segments supporting the market: warehouse and inventory management, order management, workforce management, automation, and yard management.

IDC Market Glance content is current on the date it is published. The representative content contained in this presentation reflects a qualitative snapshot that is regularly refreshed. Company logos are illustrative only and do not reflect an exhaustive view of the market.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Adobe Professional Services 2026 Vendor Assessment

Douglas Hayward — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study represents a vendor assessment of the AI-enabled Adobe professional services ecosystem through the IDC MarketScape model. This assessment discusses both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that explain success in the AI-enabled Adobe professional services market. This IDC MarketScape covers a variety of vendors participating in the Adobe professional services space. The evaluation is based on a comprehensive and rigorous framework that assesses vendors relative to the criteria and to one another and highlights the factors expected to be the most influential for success in the market in both the short term and the long term.

"Marketing is in transition, driven both by AI's promise of revolutionizing the customer life cycle and by demand from CEOs and CMOs for CMOs to drive profitable net-new revenue growth after years of disappointing returns on enterprise martech investments," says Douglas Hayward, senior research director for Customer Experience Services and Strategies at IDC. "To drive that new revenue growth using AI-enabled Adobe technology, CMOs and CIOs must work with CX services vendors that understand the intersection of marketing and new AI technologies, who can credibly model and then deliver business results for their clients."

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Smart Conference Room Hardware for Hybrid Meetings 2026–2027 Vendor Assessment

Gala Spasova — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses 12 vendors of AI-enabled smart conference room hardware for hybrid meetings, evaluating them on their capabilities and strategies across key parameters of performance. It provides insights into the strengths and challenges of each of the 12 vendors included: Barco, Biamp, Cisco, Crestron, HP Inc., Jabra, Logitech, Neat, Sennheiser, Shure, Yamaha, and Yealink.

"Meeting-room AI divides into a perception layer that belongs to the device and a reasoning layer that belongs to the meeting platform," says Gala Spasova, senior research manager, Intelligent Workplace and Management at IDC. "Buyers that understand that division buy the right thing from the right supplier. Those that do not tend to pay for generative features they would have received anyway, while accepting whatever audio the room happens to deliver into them."

IDC Survey: Early Adopters of Functional Agentic AI — Education Leading Adoption, But Skills and Governance Gaps Persist

Matthew Leger, Nigel Wallis — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey presentation examines how early adopters in the education sector are approaching agentic AI adoption across sourcing strategies, governance models, business priorities, and vendor selection. It evaluates how the sector is moving from early deployment into enterprise-scale operations, and what factors are shaping the pace, structure, and success of that transition.

“Educational institutions are deploying agentic AI into production faster than all-industry peers across nearly every sourcing approach, but governance, skills, and enterprise coordination have not kept pace,” says Senior Research Manager Matt Leger, IDC Public Sector, Worldwide Education and EdTech Digital Strategies. “The production lead creates a narrow window of advantage. Institutions that use it to establish oversight frameworks covering workflow ownership, audit trails, and tiered agent autonomy will set the compliance and procurement standards that shape the sector for years. Those that delay will inherit frameworks designed by others or face retroactive governance costs when accreditors and regulators catch up.”