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AEO Tools, Strategies, and Tactics for Large Enterprise

Gerry Murray — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective looks into the impact of AEO tools, strategies, and tactics on enterprises. Answer engine optimization requires extensive redesign of content marketing strategy, tactics, and technology. Success requires continuous prompt auditing, broad content distribution, and leveraging third-party validation. Emerging AEO tools and services support prompt infrastructure, semantic intelligence, and content automation. Optimizing both owned and external sources, including social and influencer content, is essential to ensure brands are cited in AI-generated responses, demanding new content supply chain speed, depth, and breadth.

"LLMs powered answer engines will increasingly disintermediate brand-buyer relationships on the open web and digital marketplaces," said Gerry Murray, research director, Marketing and Sales Technology. "IDC recommends immediate action to implement the new answer engine optimization (AEO) tools and content marketing strategies necessary for prime visibility in this dynamic new channel."

B2B Marketplaces in Manufacturing: Analysis of Marketplace Models, Key Trends, and Success Factors

Mark Casidsid, Stefanie Naujoks — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines B2B marketplace models (horizontal, vertical, and branded) for manufacturing, including key capabilities, suitability factors, adoption drivers, examples, and emerging trends. It also offers strategic recommendations for manufacturers evaluating and participating in these platforms.

“B2B marketplaces are evolving from transactional hubs into strategic data ecosystems that redefine how industrial manufacturers manage sourcing, collaboration, and risk. As AI-driven discovery, data standardization, and interoperability mature, these platforms will emerge as core infrastructure for supply chain resilience and ecosystem-based growth. However, success depends on manufacturers’ ability to balance control with openness — aligning marketplace participation, partner engagement, and data governance to turn digital networks into lasting competitive advantage,” said Senior Research Analyst Mark Casidsid, AI-Enabled Business Commerce, Partner Relationship, and Ecosystem Management, IDC.

Best in Future of Customer Experience Winner Award Profile 2025

Abhishek Kumar — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective discusses the nomination details of the Future of Customer Experience winner from the IDC Future Enterprise Awards 2025 in the Asia/Pacific region on how data-driven transformation can impact CX initiatives for organizations moving forward.

"Prior to embarking on their AI journeys, one of the first things businesses need to do is ensure that they have a modern data foundation with a unified and single source of truth for customer data, which allows for real-time decision-making. This will support next-gen CX initiatives, such as hyper-personalization and predictive analytics. The goal has to be in maximizing value for all key stakeholders, both internal and external, going beyond customers to include employees, partners, investors, and more," says Abhishek Kumar, associate research director, IDC Asia/Pacific.

Competitive Blind Spots in Financial Applications, 2026

Kevin Permenter — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study examines how the basis of competition in financial applications is structurally shifting. Buyers are prioritizing measurable labor elimination, faster time to value, embedded monetization, and audit-safe automation over traditional feature depth. The deck outlines emerging blind spots and provides a diagnostic framework for assessing competitive resilience in the financial applications market.

IDC Market Glance: Cloud-Native XDR and Artificial Intelligence Security Analytics, 1Q26

Christopher Kissel, Monika Soltysik — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study offers a visual snapshot of the extended detection and response (XDR) and artificial intelligence security analytics market. It defines key segments, outlines the competitive landscape, and provides an illustrative list of participating vendors. The overview covers security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), firewall automation, network detection and response (NDR), XDR, and threat intelligence.

IDC Market Glance: Customer Analytics, 1Q26

Tapan Patel — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance provides a view of the current makeup of the customer analytics landscape, including the segments, structure of the market, and an illustrative set of vendors. Customer analytics is a core component of the broader customer experience (CX) technology market, supporting marketing, digital, commerce, sales, service, advertising, social, influencer marketing, answer engine optimization (AEO), and voice-of-the-customer use cases.

The market is shifting from insight generation to contextual intelligence and decision execution. Customer analytics software is moving beyond just delivering insights to translating signals and context for automated decision-making. As AI agents increasingly participate in customer interactions, analytics must also evaluate automated decisions, elevating the importance of governance, transparency, and accountability.

Generative AI capabilities are quickly becoming expected, shifting differentiation toward domain expertise, embedded decisioning, and measurable business impact. In this next phase, customer analytics will be judged less by the volume of insights produced and more by its ability to influence revenue, retention, and lifetime value.

IDC Market Glance: Data Control Plane, 1Q26

Stewart Bond — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance describes the core technologies required to implement a data control plane, an architectural framework within the data management ecosystem designed to coordinate and govern data assets across complex, multi-environment landscapes, mapping representative software vendors offering solutions in this market.

"The data control plane provides the data intelligence, governance, and engineering capabilities required to enable an organization with data in the context of delivering an enterprise intelligence strategy, taking control of highly distributed, diverse, dynamic, and dark data for the purpose of synthesis with analytical and AI models and supporting data-driven business activities," said Stewart Bond, vice president, Data Intelligence and Integration Software at IDC. "As data shifts from a byproduct of business activities to a strategic enterprise asset managed as a product, holistic control becomes essential. This transition is reshaping the market, with new entrants focused on unstructured data control, strategic partnerships between structured and unstructured data vendors, and acquisitions aimed at expanding data control portfolios."

IDC Market Glance: EMEA Financial Applications, 1Q26

Charles Aladesuru — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance is a taxonomy document that visually depicts a concise current state view of EMEA financial applications as of February 2026. The vendor mix highlights a finance stack that comprises full-suite platforms and specialist applications for record-to-report, order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and treasury use cases, with compliance and risk controls moving deeper into day-to-day finance workflows.

IDC Market Glance: Event-Driven Automation and Analytics, 1Q26

Giovanni Cervellati — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance provides an overview of the event-driven automation and analytics market, spanning the full event-driven technology stack both from the automation and analytics perspectives, and IoT software platforms. The automation layer includes messaging middleware and event brokering, whereas the analytics layer includes event origination, real-time data capture, stream processing, and intelligent analytics. It identifies the participating vendors across each layer of this architecture and illustrates how the market is segmented and structured to support scalable, resilient, event-driven environments across enterprise and industrial use cases.

Together, these technologies provide the continuous ingestion, correlation, and analytical frame required for automated execution in real time. They are critical infrastructure for agentic AI systems that depend on persistent event streams, contextual processing, and coordinated action to operate autonomously at scale.

IDC Market Glance: Travel and Expense Management, 1Q26

Kevin Permenter, Jordan Steele — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study provides a glance at the current makeup of the travel and expense software landscape, illustrates the participating vendors, and depicts the segments and structure of the market.