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CX Path: Vendor Ratings, 2026

Nadia Ballard, Douglas Hayward, Tiffany McCormick, Eric Newmark, Aly Pinder — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides application vendor ratings by 14 application areas from IDC's 2026 CX Path program.

IDC's 2026 CX Path program polled 2,530 respondents across 12 countries to collect information on CX application and AI adoption, the CX buyer's journey, and CX vendor preferences and ratings.

Coverage includes application adoption, use of generative AI and/or agentic AI, deployment models, budget plans and replacement cycle timing, purchasing preferences and attitudes toward CX buying channels, pricing options, CX management platforms, ratings, spend, and advocacy scores for the following 14 functional application markets: advertising; marketing; sales; digital commerce; configure price quote (CPQ); product information management/experience management (PIM/PXM); contact center and customer service; voice of the customer (VOC); customer experience orchestration; content and experience management; customer data platforms (CDPs); customer and digital experience analytics; aftermarket service life-cycle management; and price optimization.

Hyland CommunityLIVE 2026: Platform Innovations for the Agentic Enterprise

Andrew Gens, Jordan Jewell — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note assesses the platform innovations Hyland Software introduced at Hyland CommunityLIVE 2026 in Orlando, Florida, held from May 30, 2026 to June 2, 2026. These are three industry-specific agentic solutions, Enterprise Context Engine, Enterprise Agent Mesh, and Agent Lifecycle Management, as well as a new headless mode for the Content Innovation Cloud. It examines how these announcements reposition Hyland Software as a governance and orchestration layer for AI agents in regulated industries and what it means for content management and digital asset management buyers over the next 12 to 24 months.

Identity Knows Who. Data Knows What. Agents Demand Both. Cyera Acquires Oasis Security

Emanuel Figueroa, Jennifer Glenn, Grace Trinidad — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

LTM BlueVerse: Inside LTM's Customer-Hosted Control Plane for Enterprise Agentic AI

Dina Capelle — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Vendor Profile examines BlueVerse, LTM's AI-native, customer-hosted agentic AI platform and ecosystem, launched in June 2025. It reviews the platform's strategy, capabilities, commercial and deployment models, security posture, and competitive position, drawing on analyst briefings, product demonstrations, and the company's public materials. It focuses on BlueVerse's strengths, the challenges it must overcome, and IDC's guidance for both LTM and prospective buyers.

SAP 2Q26: Solid Cloud Growth as SAP Bets on the Autonomous Enterprise

Bo Lykkegaard, Mickey North Rizza, Robert Parker — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note reviews SAP’s 2Q26 results, reviews the key events of the quarter, analyzes quarterly details by region, and discusses SAP’s performance and outlook.

“SAP’s 2Q26 proved its own resilience with strong cloud growth in the midst of macroeconomic uncertainty and regional conflicts. It is transforming itself, including its product stack, R&D road map, consulting approaches, and pricing strategies, to become a leading platform for agentic AI,” said Bo Lykkegaard, associate vice president, Software Research Europe at IDC.

“SAP continues to advance despite the issues of geopolitical strife and wars, inflationary aspects across regions, and the AI-native markets,” said Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software and Agents at IDC. “It is clear SAP customers recognize the value of the systems they have and the updates they need to survive in the AI digital world and are investing in a vendor that is helping them make this transformational shift.”

Self-Service, Commerce Graphs, and Criteo GO’s Expanding Reach

Roger Beharry Lall, Ananda Chakravarty, Alex Holtz, Margot Juros — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note discusses how Criteo GO extends the self-service, budget-in-goal-out model pioneered by Google and Meta into the open web, backed by two decades of commerce-graph data. Onboarding friction has genuinely eased, and Drive Discovery makes a real, testable bet on prospecting rather than just retargeting. Criteo’s footprint is expanding quickly across retail media, CTV, and conversational AI, including early moves into local broadcast and LLM-based discovery that remain largely uncontested for now. The deeper story, and the one likely to matter most over the next several product cycles, is a marketwide trade-off between reach and data ownership: Only the walled gardens hold both, and every other vendor in this category, Criteo included, is really choosing which half to prioritize and how honestly to describe that choice to buyers.

“While Criteo successfully addresses an onboarding gap, the self-service tool is just a starting point. The true shift in GO’s competitive position hinges on Drive Discovery and its ability to attract new advertising users and use cases.” — Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications, IDC

Zycus Horizon SEA 2026: Zycus Bets on Autono mous Procurement Outcomes

Patrick Reymann — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Zycus Horizon SEA 2026 showcased its shift from traditional S2P to governed, outcome-driven agentic AI. The launch of Merlin Agentic Sourcing extends autonomy into strategic category work, while the company replaces isolated AI agents with integrated workflows spanning intake, negotiation, sourcing, and savings recovery. Zycus positions APAC as highly ready for adoption, emphasizing executive sponsorship, data quality, governance, and phased change management as prerequisites for scalable deployment.

Google Introduces Health Guardian for Wearables to Monitor for Emergencies and Potential Illnesses

Ramon T. Llamas — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its Made by Google event in New York City, Google introduced Health Guardian, a feature built into Google Health that identifies changes from a user's baseline data that — if unchecked — could develop into more serious conditions. Health Guardian also acts as an emergency button for SOS-type situations and informs users of urgent episodes of elevated heart rate activity. In addition, Google introduced the new Pixel Watch 5, the debut of its Google Pixel Tag, and an improved Pixel Buds Pro 2.

The new devices show incremental gains, but it is Health Guardian that highlights Google's intentions to bring more health-centered features into the company's wearables lineup, connecting data with health to deliver actionable information. This is key as the competition attempts the same, and Google strives to shape and guide the market.

Google Unleashes Gemini Intelligence on New Pixel Smartphones

Francisco Jeronimo, Ramon T. Llamas, Nabila Popal — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its Made By Google event, Google introduced its new Pixel smartphones featuring the latest and top-of-the-line hardware. The real star of the show was the company's Gemini Intelligence, aimed at saving users time and effort by taking over multistep tasks involving multiple applications. In addition, the event marked the debut of Rambler, HiLight, and a peek at its solution for hearing-impaired users (see The Android Show 2026: Google's Googlebook and Gemini Intelligence on Android Signal a More Unified Platform Strategy, lcUS54552826, May 2026).

IDC Market Glance: Conversational AI Tools and Technologies, 3Q26

Hayley Sutherland — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance is intended to visually depict a concise current-state view of the worldwide conversational AI software market. Worldwide conversational AI software reached $8.9 billion in 2025, up 31.4% year over year, as generative and agentic capabilities deepened the category’s share of mainstream enterprise budgets. Vertical-, channel-, and language-specific specializations are emerging as durable technical differentiators, while core language technologies are consolidating as infrastructure.

Business executives, product managers, and market insights or analyst relations professionals can use this information to understand the structure of the overall market or ecosystem to assess market, business, and partnership opportunities and to help identify where their organization fits into the competitive landscape.