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NATO Has Scheduled Its Quantum Tests But Not Its Quantum Migration

Alan Webber — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note examines NATO’s first Quantum Technology Roadmap, published in summary on September 29, 2026, and compares it with the 2023 Quantum Technology Strategy it implements. The document assesses the road map’s dated activities; its gaps on cryptography migration, investment screening, and funding; and its implications for Allied defense and intelligence agencies and for the technology suppliers that serve them. It provides guidance for quantum sensing, cryptography, and computing suppliers.

“NATO has told suppliers when it will test, evaluate, and report. The date for switching its own networks to quantum-safe cryptography is the missing piece, and the 2027 action plan update is the first place it could appear,” says Alan Webber, program vice president for National Security, Defense, and Intelligence at IDC.

Q3 2026 AI Announcements and What They Mean for Edge Operating Models

Olga Yashkova — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note reviews Q3 2026 AI announcements with implications for edge, including U.S. and EU policy, on-premises AI hardware, storage and security offerings, and Huawei’s device and robotics ecosystem. It draws on IDC’s EdgeView Survey 2026 and shows that edge is now business-critical and increasingly AI-funded, while operating models and governance lag.

“Edge has become business-critical faster than operating models have matured. Organizations that settle ownership and resilience, prove ROI, and plan infrastructure site by site before scaling AI will be best positioned to capture value,” said Olga Yashkova, Research Manager at IDC.

Salesforce Dreamforce 2026: Missionforce Turns One and What the Rest Means for Defense and National Security

Alan Webber — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note examines Salesforce's Dreamforce 2026 event through a defense and national security lens. Salesforce marked one year of Missionforce, reporting 80% year-over-year growth in defense revenue and new NVIDIA and OpenAI capabilities for classified and air-gapped work. The event's commercial architecture, including post-trained NVIDIA models in trust-boundary design and Salesforce's new governance stack, is what Missionforce is now extending into government. Near-term value for government buyers stays concentrated in rules-based administrative work, not autonomous decisions, and a midevent outage is a reminder that resilience is as important as capability.

"The most important number out of Dreamforce was that defense grew faster than any other part of Salesforce's business this year, which tells you where government AI spending is actually heading," says Alan Webber, program vice president for National Security, Defense, and Intelligence at IDC.

The AI Software Factory: What Application Platforms Must Deliver to Build, Deploy, and Govern AI Applications and Agents

Matthew Flug — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines what application platforms must deliver to build, deploy, run, and govern AI applications and agents. It identifies which platform capabilities carry over from conventional applications, which ones AI extends, and which ones are new across the three stages of the application life cycle: build; deploy and run; and manage, operate, and govern. The document positions the AI software factory as the layer that turns AI factory capacity into applications and agents running in production.

"AI has not changed what application platforms are for. They still exist to help teams build better applications faster. AI has changed how much work occurs after code is written, including evaluating nondeterministic outputs and governing what agents can do and on whose behalf. Vendors that compete on how quickly customers can build an agent, rather than how safely they can run one, will struggle to win production AI workloads," said Matthew Flug, research manager, Intelligent Application Modernization and Deployment Platforms, IDC.

Trends in Cloud Messaging and Integration

Rob Tiffany — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Tencent Cloud are evolving their cloud messaging and integration portfolios, covering message buses, queues, notifications, data streams, data connectors, APIs, and events. It identifies six trends: agents as clients, Kafka convergence, larger and smarter events, elastic economics, cross-boundary security, and open standards. It closes with guidance that helps technology leaders match workloads to services, protect portability, govern agent access, and control costs.

“Messaging used to be part of the architecture nobody discussed until it failed. In 2026, it is where AI agents, real-time data, and hybrid governance meet,” explains Rob Tiffany, research director, Cloud Infrastructure at IDC. “Tech leaders that treat it as a strategic platform will move faster and spend less than those who leave it to chance.”

UiPath FUSION 2026: Mapping the Future of Work Across Deterministic and Agentic Systems

Amy Loomis, Ph.D., Melinda-Carol Ballou, Andrew Gens — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note examines UiPath FUSION 2026, where the company organized its announcements around the Map of Work, a governed record of enterprise context at the center of a capture, build, run, and learn loop. UiPath positioned deterministic automation as a guardrail for agentic AI, paired its new Cartographer product with a named human role, and restructured Maestro. The document assesses the security, testing, and document workflow implications and what they mean for roles and teams. It identifies open questions on agent validation and release timing, and advises buyers to match automation to consequence, staff the map owner role, and require evidence of validation.

“Agentic AI is changing the jobs people do as much as the tasks machines perform.” — Amy Loomis, PhD, group vice president, Future of Work, IDC

Worldwide Dedicated Private Cloud Infrastructure Market Overview, 2026

Shahin Hashim, Jevin Jensen, Gary Chen — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides IDC's overview and forecast for the worldwide dedicated private cloud infrastructure market for 2025–2030. The market covers single-tenant compute, storage, and network infrastructure, together with the system software that runs it, delivered under a cloud operating model with a cloud control plane. The presentation segments the forecast by hardware and software, by enterprise and service provider buyers, and by region. It examines how the global memory shortage has raised infrastructure prices, how sovereignty and resilience requirements are shaping buying decisions, and how the platform decision has reopened for organizations with large virtualized estates. It also sets out the market's drivers, inhibitors, and outlook, and offers guidance for technology suppliers.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Manufacturing ERP 2026 Vendor Assessment

Sarah Lee, Mickey North Rizza, Bo Lykkegaard — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents the IDC MarketScape assessment for worldwide AI-enabled manufacturing ERP applications, evaluating 16 vendors across strategies and capabilities specific to process and discrete manufacturing. The study finds the market separating into enterprise, midmarket, and SMB segments, with environmental health and safety functionality the widest point of differentiation and evidence quality, shipping and customer validated versus road map or aspirational, as important to assess as the AI capability itself. It discusses the most important criteria for manufacturers to consider when selecting a solution.

"Manufacturers should match the market segment: enterprise, midmarket, or SMB of ERP vendors to the complexity of their plant operations, not simply their company size, or risk paying for breadth they don't need or selecting capabilities that haven't been proven in a comparable environment," said Sarah Lee, global senior research director, Manufacturing IT Strategies, IDC Manufacturing Insights.

Live Content Translation and Localization in the Media and Entertainment Industry: 2026–2030 Market Analysis

Alex Holtz — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective sizes the market for live content translation and localization in media and entertainment from 2026 to 2030. It models a $430 million opportunity in 2026 growing to $850 million to $950 million by 2030 in the conservative planning case ($1.5 billion base case), examines the challenges and opportunities, and sets out a go-to-market playbook and enterprise adoption road map for technology suppliers.

"The decisive change is economic rather than technical. A single live production can now fan out into many addressable language products without duplicating the production and transport chain for each language," said Alex Holtz, research director, Worldwide Media and Entertainment Digital Strategies at IDC.

Beyond the Meter: How AI-Enabled Energy Management Became a C-Suite Mandate in 2026

Bjoern Stengel — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective examines how AI is reshaping energy management decisions across five enterprise leadership roles — the CIO, the CTO/CAIO, the CSO, the CFO, and the COO — and what each should do next to capture measurable value. Energy efficiency is IDC's fastest-growing AI-for-sustainability priority, with prioritization up 52% in two years, and conversations at Climate Week NYC 2026 confirm the same shift from the vendor side: sustainability value is becoming inseparable from the core AI return-on-investment (ROI) conversation. IDC's 2026 AI and Sustainability Survey finds a 26-percentage-point gap in realized AI value between the least and most mature organizations; that maturity gap, more than budget, separates organizations that capture real financial and sustainability value from those still treating energy management mainly as a compliance and reporting exercise. IDC data indicates that 93% of organizations report deriving some sustainability value from AI and 75% call sustainability important to AI planning and procurement. However, only 45% measure AI's financial and sustainability return in a single joint methodology.

For technology leaders, the practical takeaways are direct: fix the OT/IT data foundation before scaling AI; match the AI architecture to the energy use case rather than defaulting to one modality everywhere; build a single methodology that measures financial and sustainability return together; and assign formal, cross-functional ownership across IT, sustainability, finance, and operations rather than leaving one function to build the business case alone. Done well, AI-enabled energy management helps organizations meet ESG compliance and net-zero commitments while driving cost savings, operational resilience, and infrastructure modernization; the same investment serves both goals rather than forcing a trade-off between them.

"Energy management is where sustainability stops being a reporting exercise and starts being a shared mandate across the C-suite. The organizations pulling ahead have the CIO, the CTO, the CSO, the CFO, and the COO all pointed at the same number, and that alignment matters more than how well resourced any single sustainability team is," said Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability research and practice lead, Sustainable Strategies and Technologies at IDC.