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Broadcom Mainframe AR Forum 2026: Agentic AI Comes to the Mainframe on the Platform's Own Terms

Jim Mercer — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its 2026 Analyst Forum in Boston, Broadcom's Mainframe Software Division (MSD) laid out an agentic AI strategy anchored in the idea that AI capabilities belong within products customers already license, not in separate AI-branded SKUs that require new procurement cycles. The company unveiled an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server road map spanning its DevOps, Data Management, and AIOps value streams, with several tools already in beta under existing entitlements. Broadcom also reaffirmed Open Mainframe Project Zowe's role as the open source integration layer enabling both modern developer tooling and MCP-based AI connectivity.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Customer Data Platforms for B2C Users 2026 Vendor Assessment

Tapan Patel — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates vendors of customer data platforms (CDPs) focused on B2C users and use cases. The CDP today sits at the center of how brands serve customers across marketing, advertising, commerce, and service, and increasingly across the AI agents acting on each side of the customer relationship. Customer expectations for personal, in-the-moment experiences keep rising; paid media costs keep climbing; and consent rules at the consumer scale keep tightening. AI is augmenting marketing from predictive campaigns toward semiautonomous decisioning, and personal AI agents are starting to research and compare and, in the future, will transact on consumers’ behalf. The result is a CDP decision that needs a longer horizon and a wider set of stakeholders. This study examines the buyer dynamics shaping the B2C CDP market, the forward-looking trends reshaping how CDPs are consumed by humans and AI agents alike, the use cases B2C organizations are building toward, and the buyer-side advice that determines whether the investment delivers.

“The next phase of B2C personalization will depend on whether the brand’s customer data and context are trustworthy enough for humans and AI agents to act on with the same confidence,” said Tapan Patel, research director, AI-Enabled Customer Data and Analytics, IDC. “The CDP is the layer that makes that possible, and the buying organization’s discipline around data readiness, operating model, and outcome measurement will also determine how much of that personalization the customer actually experiences and cares about.”

Octave Live OnTour Austin: A New Company Makes Its Case for AI-Driven Asset Lifecycle Intelligence

Brian O'Rourke, John Villali — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Octave Live OnTour further introduced the new spin-out company, with its emphasis on the Octave platform that focuses on the design, build, operate, and protect lifecycle of assets. Over the two-day event, Octave repeatedly returned to the problem of silos and the need to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to bear on data that too often goes unused within today's enterprise. The company will emphasize that message with additional events on three continents over the remainder of the year as it continues its inaugural year as a new, software-focused organization.

Photonic Computing Moves Closer to Commercial Viability: Q.ANT Demonstrates

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At ISC High Performance 2026, Q.ANT's second-generation photonic NPU ran both a generative AI diffusion model and NXAI's xLSTM-based TiRex for sequential prediction, the first time a diffusion model of this complexity has executed on photonic hardware. IDC views the demonstrations, alongside Q.ANT's PyTorch integration, first commercial orders, and European supercomputing deployments, as evidence that photonic computing is transitioning from research to early commercial platform, though system-level efficiency validation remains a key next step.

From Sequencer to Platform: Outreach Makes Its Agentic Argument at Unleash 2026

Michelle Morgan — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note examines the announcements from Outreach's Unleash 2026 conference, where the company positioned itself as a shipped agentic revenue platform rather than a sales engagement tool. The analysis weighs genuine product progress against two open questions: whether the integration advantage is durable and whether revenue teams will adopt the capability fast enough to realize the outcomes that Outreach cites.

HPE Discover 2026: From AI Infrastructure to the Agentic Enterprise

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

HPE Discover 2026 marked a meaningful step in HPE's shift from an AI infrastructure provider to an enterprise AI operating platform. The event centered on operationalizing AI at scale through a more unified architecture spanning GreenLake, Private Cloud AI, networking, storage, security, and financial services. HPE positioned GreenLake Intelligence as an emerging control plane for agentic operations. Private Cloud AI also expanded its focus to governance, data readiness, and production AI workflows. Networking emerged as one of the most strategically significant themes of the event. Following the Juniper acquisition, HPE is positioning networking as both an enabler of AI infrastructure and a beneficiary of AI-driven automation. Self-driving networking was another major theme, reinforced by deeper Aruba–Juniper integration across campus, datacenter, edge, and AI Factory environments. HPE also sharpened its infrastructure economics story through Morpheus, VMware migration offers, HPE Financial Services (HPEFS), and new ecosystem partnerships. Collectively, the announcements position HPE around governance, autonomous operations, networking intelligence, sovereignty, and AI-era economics.

IDC Survey: Early Adopters of Agentic AI Use Cases Within the Finance Function, 2026

Kevin Permenter, Heather Herbst — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines how early adopters within the finance function are deploying agentic AI in 2026. Drawing on responses from finance leaders piloting and scaling autonomous AI agents, it identifies the highest-value use cases, common implementation patterns, and early performance outcomes. The findings offer a benchmark for CFOs, controllers, and finance technology buyers evaluating where agentic AI delivers measurable impact across core finance workflows.

IDC TechBrief: AI-Enabled IT Service Management

Snow Tempest — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC TechBrief on AI-enabled IT service management highlights the technology’s outcomes as well as adoption considerations for achieving those outcomes and reducing risk.

“IT service is a top area where organizations are implementing AI, but they need to plan and prioritize to get it working effectively and achieve their goals,” said Snow Tempest, research manager, IT Service Management, IDC.

Infor Innovation Summit 2026 — Simplifying the Path to AI Value and ROI: Asia/Pacific

Mickey North Rizza — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note looks at the Infor Innovation Summit, held in Atlanta, Georgia, in mid-April 2026. In Asia/Pacific, 66.0% of CEOs agree that AI will reinvent their business models in the next three to five years. But currently, AI technology is advancing faster than enterprise readiness. Infor, a cloud enterprise software provider, is a vendor that can help the region. This document brings forward the Asia/Pacific challenges and opportunities and puts them in the context of the Infor suite of products announced at the Infor Innovation Summit.

“73.0% of Asia/Pacific businesses state that a centralized, platform-specific strategy is necessary for implementing AI, especially agentic AI. Infor is a vendor that can provide a partnership to assist Asia/Pacific businesses,” said Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software and Agent, IDC.

Ivalua Launches IVA Studio: IVA Is All Grown Up — a Polished and Powerful Showcase for the Ivalua AI Strategy

Patrick Reymann — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Ivalua has formalized the general availability of IVA (Intelligent Virtual Agent) and its underlying agentic engine, IVA Studio, marking a decisive step beyond the chatbot era into fully agentic, autonomous procurement execution. Built on a 100% organically developed, unified S2P data platform, IVA is architected as a true cross-platform single agent, capable of taking action across the entire S2P life cycle from supplier onboarding and sourcing through contract management, eprocurement, and accounts payable, eliminating the hassle of today's agent swarm with governance enforced at every step, LLM portability, and a compounding skills framework that converts organizational expertise into reusable, auditable AI behavior. IVA is not a bolt-on or an API-connected overlay; it is a platform that acts with intelligence, and it is ready from day 1.