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IDC TechScape: Worldwide Frictionless Experience-Enabling Innovation in Air Travel, 2026

Dorothy Creamer — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC TechScape maps 24 technologies shaping the frictionless airline traveler experience in 2026, organized across transformational, incremental, and opportunistic adoption phases. The study covers the full passenger journey, from booking and pre-trip planning through security, in-flight experience, luggage handling, and post-trip engagement, as well as the crew- and operations-facing technologies that directly determine whether travelers encounter a friction-free journey or a frustrating one.

“Passenger and traveler demands are at an all-time high and the opportunities for disruption and frustration lurk at every digital touch point. The airlines and travel providers that are working to support travelers with proactive and predictive engagement and operational strategies will win with contextualized and frictionless experiences every time,” says Dorothy Creamer, senior research manager, Hospitality and Travel Digital Strategies, IDC. “The constraint separating leaders from laggards in air travel is no longer which vendor relationships they hold; it is whether their data estate is mature enough to let these technologies work together and deliver on their promise.”

IDC's Worldwide: Dedicated Cloud Infrastructure and Services Taxonomy, 2026

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides a detailed taxonomy for the dedicated cloud infrastructure and services market. The document covers the definitions of various building blocks and provides a top-level overview of dedicated cloud segments. IDC is retiring the term private cloud and replacing it with the term dedicated cloud, but the definition remains the same: environments in which IT resources are dedicated to a single organization and managed and delivered to end users utilizing cloud attributes. The growing availability of commercial and open source cloud platforms enables the increasing adoption of dedicated clouds by enterprises, while the proliferation of infrastructure management platforms for managing resources across multiple environments drives the expanding growth of hybrid IT environments.

"Dedicated cloud infrastructure as a service has become the defining ground for the enterprises seeking operational control over data placement, compliance posture, or workload governance," said Jasdeep Singh, research manager for IDC's Cloud and Infrastructure Services. "As OEM vendors, cloud service providers, and managed service providers compete in this market, the conversation has shifted from who can build the cloud to who can govern it, on the customer's terms, at the customer's choice of location, and in compliance with their regulatory and AI risk realities."

Market Forecast: Worldwide Enterprise Resource Management Applications Forecast, 2026–2030 — AI Creating Value

Mickey North Rizza — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

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

“AI is the accelerant creating value for the enterprise resource management market. Embedded AI in tasks, workflows, and processes is driving innovation and enabling the future with AI assistants and AI agents. Organizations are in the midst of shifting to Agents as Apps, dynamically reshaping the market and creating new software operating models. This shift increases the organization’s dependency on AI-powered enterprise resource management software as it moves to an agentic market.” — Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software at IDC

Market Share: Worldwide Enterprise Performance Management Shares, 2025

Megha Kumar — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation examines the 2025 market shares of the leading vendors in the enterprise performance management (EPM) software market.

"The EPM market continues to grow to meet the need for decision velocity, consistent reporting, and adhering to compliance requirements. As vendors introduce AI capabilities, especially AI agents, expect an increased focus on data readiness, explainability, and governance in evaluations moving forward," says Megha Kumar, research vice president, Analytics and AI, IDC.

Medidata NEXT London 2026: AI Moves from Pilot Purgatory to Platform Scale

Silvia Piai — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Medidata Solutions’ (Medidata) NEXT London 2026 marked the shift from AI experimentation to enterprisewide agentic deployment, anchored by the commercial launch of Medidata Plus and the full rollout of Dot. Key innovations include AI-driven simulation workspaces for protocol and enrollment planning, a proprietary Patient Burden Index, GenAI-powered site selection, and an expanded patient engagement platform that integrates continuous sensor data. Customer evidence, including a 37% enrollment uplift in atopic dermatitis trials and up to 70% reduction in budget build times, confirmed operational impact. Medidata also presented its “orchestrated intelligence” vision, extending clinical research intelligence across the life sciences value chain through partnerships with Anthropic, NVIDIA, and Mistral.

Clinical organizations should prioritize data standardization, adopt simulation and site selection tools early in protocol design, and evaluate contract research organization (CRO) partners on AI readiness. Medical device companies navigating the evolving regulatory environment in 2026 should treat early platform engagement as a strategic opportunity.

“Medidata NEXT London 2026 showed an industry moving from AI ambition to AI accountability. The evidence is real. Enrollment gains, faster builds, smarter site selection, and platform models such as Medidata’s offer one indication of how these capabilities can move from pilots to enterprise scale. For medical device companies, the moment to start engaging is now while both the underlying platforms and regulatory landscape are still being defined,” says Silvia Piai, research director, IDC.

Driving Operational Excellence with Digital Twins in Manufacturing

Sarah Lee, Carlos Gonzalez, Gunjan Bassi — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how digital twins are evolving from visualization tools into the simulation and orchestration backbone of physical AI on the shop floor. It distinguishes between the simulation role, which models processes and assets to support engineering and AI training, and the orchestration role, which coordinates physical systems, AI agents, and workers in real time. It examines divergent adoption patterns across process and discrete manufacturing and profiles the vendor landscape. It provides guidance for operations and plant leaders on sequencing investments, building data foundations, and pairing twin programs with workforce enablement.

"Digital twins are evolving beyond visualization to become the operational backbone of AI-enabled manufacturing. As manufacturers move toward autonomous operations, digital twins provide the simulation environment to train AI and the orchestration layer to coordinate assets, systems, and people in real time," says Sarah Lee, senior research director, Manufacturing IT Strategies at IDC.

"A digital twin may be technically secure yet still become operationally unreliable if its data, models, and assumptions drift from reality. Trust requires both protection and continuous validation," says Gunjan Bassi, research manager, Worldwide Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Intelligence Strategies at IDC.

"A digital twin is only as good as the data beneath it. Without a unified industrial data layer that mirrors real-world plant conditions, even the most sophisticated twin serves only as a virtual mirror. For real digital twins to evolve in the world of physical AI, real-time data analysis and automation must be in sync with digital twin simulation," says Carlos Gonzalez, research manager, Event-Driven Automation and Analytics at IDC.

Emerging Agentic Automation Patterns

Neil Ward-Dutton — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how AI agents are being applied to business operations, beyond early adoption in marketing and software development. Using IDC's Business Automation Blueprint, the document identifies four emerging patterns — agents as task actors, knowledge assistants, orchestrators, and designers/improvers — and explains where each fits alongside established deterministic automation technologies such as workflow tools, RPA, and integration platforms. It closes with practical guidance for technology buyers evaluating where and how to deploy agents within existing operations.

"As AI agents begin to be used within broader business automation initiatives, it's vital to understand the different roles that AI agents can play, and how those roles differ," said Neil Ward-Dutton, research VP, Agentic Automation and AI Technologies at IDC.

How Ukraine's Drone War Is Rewriting the Rules of Technology Development, and What That Means for Government Procurement

Alison Brooks, Ph.D., Alan Webber, Ruthbea Yesner — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses how Ukraine's drone war has compressed technology development from years to weeks: 3D-printed hardware, AI running directly on the aircraft, open source tools, and a feedback loop in which the engineer who built a drone learns of a battlefield failure within hours. This document examines how this happened — production up roughly 80,000% since 2022, strike success rates rising from 20% to 80% — and what does and doesn't transfer to Western defense and public safety procurement. Most of the conditions behind Ukraine's model — its data scale, its motivational proximity, and its open development culture — are specific to a country fighting for survival and cannot be replicated in peacetime. But the procurement lesson — that acquisition systems built for stability are mismatched to threats iterating weekly — transfers directly.

"Ukraine's drone war didn't just speed up development; it inverted who gets to set the pace. A police department or a defense program can borrow the discipline of fast iteration, but the wartime conditions that make Ukraine's model work — the data scale, the tolerance for field failure, and the total absence of classification friction — aren't something procurement reform can manufacture," says Alan Webber, program vice president, National Security, Defense, and Intelligence at IDC.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Virtual Client Computing 2026 Vendor Assessment

Shannon Kalvar, Filippo Vanara — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents a vendor assessment for the worldwide virtual client computing market. The VCC providers identified were evaluated using the IDC MarketScape model, and the process included information collected from the market and the providers themselves. Providers were measured in terms of their current capabilities and future strategies for delivering services to customers globally.

"VCC has matured from a localized hardware containment strategy into the definitive control plane for the modern digital workspace. By decoupling the operating system and enterprise data entirely from physical silicon, VCC provides global organizations with the ultimate architectural flexibility to handle volatile security landscapes and rapid AI deployment. In the current enterprise environment, treating endpoints as persistent corporate data stores is a severe operational risk; VCC neutralizes this liability, turning the distributed edge into a secure, predictable, and entirely stateless extension of the enterprise cloud," said Filippo Vanara, research manager, Worldwide enterprise client computing platforms at IDC.

Market Forecast: Worldwide Enterprise Performance Management Forecast, 2026–2030

Megha Kumar — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides the five-year forecast for the enterprise performance management (EPM) applications.

The worldwide enterprise performance management applications market is being reshaped by increasing demand for continuous planning and scenario analysis, process automation and modernization, and the growing adoption of AI-enabled and agentic planning capabilities that allow for efficiencies and decision velocity.

"The adoption of agentic AI in financial planning and analysis will intensify demand for cloud-based EPM platforms that support integrated data architectures, continuous planning cycles, and AI governance. Vendors will need to reinforce their commitment to responsible, transparent, and auditable AI to drive uptake." — Megha Kumar, research vice president, Analytics and AI