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Agentic Orchestration Checks In: The Opportunity for Media Networks Has Arrived for Financial Services

Alex Holtz, Dorothy Creamer — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective explores how agentic orchestration and the rise of financial media networks are reshaping advertising as margin compression and credit tightening drive card issuers, payment networks, and fintech wallets toward first-party data monetization. With the emergence of programmatic access to authenticated transaction data, operators such as Chase, American Express, Mastercard, and PayPal are pioneering closed-loop, high-intent advertising surfaces. The document details the architectural, operational, and measurement challenges and opportunities as financial media networks formalize, offering a blueprint for stakeholders to capture non-endemic brand demand and sustainable growth.

"As margin compression pushes card issuers and payment networks to rethink their revenue mix, financial services emerges as the fastest-growing frontier for commerce media," says Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Commerce Media and Advertising Strategies, IDC. "The closed-loop infrastructure that transformed retail, and then travel, is now redefining how brands reach authenticated, high-spend audiences through banks, card networks, and fintech wallets. The question isn't if this shift will happen — it is who will own the loop, and how quickly they will build before the market consolidates."

CIO Peer Perspective — From IT Expertise to AI Readiness: Closing the Skills Gap Through Workforce Transformation

Leonardo Freitas, Martina Longo — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Artificial intelligence is transforming the technology skills challenge from a talent acquisition issue into a workforce transformation imperative. While technology talent shortages remain a top concern for both CEOs and CIOs, organizations are increasingly discovering that workforce readiness, rather than technology readiness, is the primary constraint on scaling AI initiatives. This IDC Perspective explores how leading organizations are responding by augmenting employees with AI, redesigning roles and workflows, embedding continuous learning into day-to-day operations, and building new capabilities around governance, orchestration, and AI oversight.

"Organizations have entered a new phase of the skills challenge. The objective is no longer simply to close talent gaps through hiring. Instead, leading CIOs are rethinking how work gets done and combining AI augmentation, targeted upskilling, and new operating models to build sustainable workforce readiness," says Leonardo Freitas, research manager at IDC.

Don't Judge a Beach by Its Shoreline: Saviynt's Zuma and the Real Test for AI Agents

Emanuel Figueroa — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

From Software Consumer to Software Producer: A Framework for Deciding When Finance Should Buy, Extend, or Build

Kevin Permenter — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective presents a framework for finance leaders deciding when to buy commercial software, extend a platform they already own, or build a targeted application in-house. As AI coding tools make it possible for finance professionals to build working software in days rather than months, the decision that used to sit with IT alone now belongs to the CFO as well. IDC recommends that CFOs adopt a repeatable, criteria-based framework for this decision, along with lightweight governance for anything finance builds in-house.

“The most innovative finance organizations, over the next five years, won’t necessarily buy better software. They’ll get better at creating their own. The CFOs who win this shift won’t be the ones who build the most; they’ll be the ones who know exactly when to buy, when to extend, and when to build,” says Kevin Permenter, research director, Enterprise Applications at IDC.

HPE 3Q 2026 Results: Building Momentum Across the AI Infrastructure Stack

Matthew Eastwood — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IBM Quantum Unveils Nighthawk r2, Boosting Circuit Throughput Over Qubit Count

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IBM Quantum's Nighthawk r2 demonstrates that quantum computing performance is increasingly about maximizing useful computation, not simply increasing qubit counts. For enterprises, the ability to execute more circuits, increase sampling, and complete experiments faster within a given allocation could improve resource efficiency and the economics of quantum computing while accelerating the transition from experimentation to more sophisticated workloads.

Market Forecast: EMEA Enterprise Resource Management Applications Software Forecast, 2026–2030

Bo Lykkegaard — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides the five-year forecast for the enterprise resource management (ERM) applications software market and delivers insights into the drivers and inhibitors of growth.

“The agentic AI is a golden opportunity for back-office application vendors to add more value for their customers. IDC research shows that customers are looking to their SaaS application providers for AI-related automation and insights. The application vendors own the data and process context, which is crucial for AI to deliver high-quality and reliable results.” — Bo Lykkegaard, associate VP, Software Research Europe, IDC.

Navigating Programmatic Convergence: How Brands Should Invest as Holdcos, Platforms, and Services Collapse

Roger Beharry Lall — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective reframes the programmatic buying decision for a market in which the old categories no longer hold. Demand and supply platforms are merging, retail data and streaming inventory are arriving as a single product, holding companies are operating as technology platforms, and services firms are building agentic delivery of their own. A brand that once asked which category to buy now faces a different question: How to design the path its budget travels, who it transacts with, how many intermediaries sit between spend and impression, who owns the data behind the decision, and whose software acts on its behalf? This document maps the boundaries that are dissolving, replaces category selection with a small set of recurring decisions, and frames advertising technology as an enterprise choice that the CMO, CIO, and CFO make together, rather than a media line item marketing settles alone. AI runs underneath all of it as the accelerant, compressing intermediaries and turning proprietary identity data into a durable advantage. The through line is that convergence buys efficiency and costs independence in the same motion, and the brands that come out ahead are the ones that keep re-deciding the trade rather than settling it once.

“The question is no longer which platform to buy, because the platforms are becoming one another. It’s how to design the path a budget travels, and to keep the right to change this path when the market shifts under you,” says Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications at IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Datacenter Facilities Management Software 2026 Vendor Assessment

Luis Fernandes, Mary Johnston Turner — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study leverages the IDC MarketScape methodology to evaluate several major datacenter facilities management software providers worldwide. IDC identified a plethora of significant players in this market and analyzed their current offerings as well as planned updates.

"Gaps in monitoring, automation, and orchestration constitute a major hindrance in today's management of datacenter facilities," according to Luis Fernandes, senior research manager, Cloud and Datacenter Research at IDC. "By choosing a best-in-class software solution to manage their datacenter facilities, IT and OT managers are effectively choosing a path of less resistance, with fewer instances of unforeseen incidents which, in turn, lead to overall better human resource management, reduced total cost of ownership, and less unplanned downtime."

IDC Survey: SAP Infrastructure View 2026 — Executive Summary Pt 1: SAP Infrastructure Landscape and SAP HANA Trends

Max Pepper — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey is the first part of the executive summary of IDC’s 2026 SAP Infrastructure BuyerView Survey findings. It explores the complexity organizations face in managing SAP’s evolving product demands and how that and other factors impact SAP deployments and infrastructure requirements. The survey examines where SAP workloads run today and how that’s shifting, including a detailed analysis of ERP and data management trends. Finally, the survey examines SAP HANA migration trends and deployment characteristics.