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AI's Environmental Reckoning: Vendor Strategies for Sustainable AI Infrastructure

Bjoern Stengel — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective discusses how AI is dramatically accelerating datacenter infrastructure expansion, driving global electricity consumption toward 915TWh by 2028 and increasing carbon emissions at a CAGR of 16.7% despite significant renewable energy investment. IDC's 2026 AI and Sustainability Survey (n = 1,570) reveals that enterprise buyers are embedding environmental criteria into vendor selection with growing rigor, and that buyer personas diverge significantly — requiring IT infrastructure vendors to develop differentiated engagement strategies by function. Vendors that invest in validated sustainability disclosures, persona-specific messaging, modular energy-efficient infrastructure, and circular life-cycle services will gain a competitive advantage as sustainable AI transitions from a reputational consideration to a procurement requirement.

"AI's environmental reckoning is not a distant policy challenge — it is unfolding now, in procurement offices and sustainability committees across the enterprise. IT infrastructure vendors that treat their products' energy efficiency and carbon intensity as competitive assets, not compliance obligations, are the ones that will define the sustainable AI infrastructure market." — Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability research and practice lead, Sustainable Strategies and Technologies, IDC

Hailing a Hotel: When Ubering Shifts the Demand Funnel, the SuperApp Answers the Call

Dorothy Creamer — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Link examines Uber's recent announcement of its partnership with Expedia Group integrating hotel booking, and ultimately vacation rental inventory from Vrbo, directly into the Uber app. Unveiled at Uber's sixth annual GO-GET event in New York City, the partnership provides a distribution channel for Expedia's inventory of more than 700,000 hotels worldwide while advancing Uber's stated goal of becoming an "everything app." The move is a meaningful step toward the hospitality and travel superapp model IDC has predicted and carries implications for hospitality and travel providers, online travel agencies (OTAs), and the technology and solutions providers that serve them. Ubering has already become synonymous with hailing in a public transportation context, but this announcement indicates the intent of Uber's leadership for the verb to become more omnipresent – when you can "uber" your entire journey, the demand funnel if not shrinks, shifts and the most seamless experience may win.

IBM Think 2026: Concert and the Shift from Observability Platform to Orientation Workspace

Shannon Kalvar — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IBM Think 2026, held on May 4–7 in Boston, introduced the IBM Concert platform to public preview. It combines the existing Concert, Instana, Turbonomic, SevOne, and CloudPack for AIOps under a single design paradigm, backed with the new Infragraph for shared contextual data. This consolidation moves IBM Concert toward becoming an orientation workspace, a surface where teams begin their workday already knowing what they need to do to shape the future rather than an observability platform that generates dashboards and alerts about the world's previous state.

IDC Office of the CDO Survey 2025: Leadership, AI, and Data Management Priorities

Stewart Bond — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AI has not merely expanded the data agenda; it has restructured it. This IDC Presentation draws on the IDC Office of the CDO Survey 2025, an annual primary research study of senior data and analytics leaders, to examine how the function is being reshaped by the demands of generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI deployment. The 2025 wave captured responses from 417 senior data leaders. The findings reveal an accelerating shift: data management has moved from a background discipline to the foundational layer on which AI outcomes, governance integrity, and business performance depend. The presentation covers the consolidation of leadership models, the rebalancing of executive time toward strategy and evangelism, and the rising dominance of data quality as the top investment priority. It assesses technical and organizational barriers, from skills shortages and ROI pressure to model reliability and data dynamics, and maps how operating practices are evolving across cloud deployments, open table formats, master data, and AI training-data sourcing. A data management performance scorecard segments organizations by performance level, revealing that high scorers achieve roughly three times the financial and operational KPI gains of their peers and are dramatically more likely to run high-performing data product practices and production-grade AI.

"Data management has become the defining capability of the AI era. The organizations pulling ahead are not simply investing more; they have built data quality, governance, and AI-readiness into a cohesive system, and they are reaping measurably better business outcomes as a result. For those still treating data as a back-office responsibility, the window to close that gap is narrowing fast," says Stewart Bond, vice president, Data Intelligence and Integration Software, IDC.

RSAC 2026: Takeaways for DevSecOps and Software Supply Chain Security

Katie Norton — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines the most significant vendor announcements from RSA Conference (RSAC) 2026, organized around the themes shaping the DevSecOps market, with recommendations for technology suppliers positioning for what comes next. If RSAC 2026 is any indication, agentic AI security will define enterprise security investment through 2027. The week's announcements, session programming, and Innovation Sandbox (ISB) finalists all pointed in the same direction: AI agents are now infrastructure in the software development life cycle, and the security market is rebuilding itself accordingly."Application security has spent years optimizing for human development velocity, and RSAC 2026 showed an industry pivoting toward something different," says Katie Norton, research manager, DevSecOps and Software Supply Chain Security, IDC. "Vendors are building for machine-speed development, continuous remediation, and agent-driven workflows; the question for buyers is which of those bets will translate into operational value."

What Vendors Must Build to Win the CFO Office in Business Continuity and Financial Planning

Heather Herbst — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

CFOs face unprecedented volatility stemming from geopolitics, climate, and regulatory shifts, exposing gaps in traditional financial planning tools. Vendors must build integrated solutions that connect real-time risk signals to financial models, enable scenario analysis outside planning cycles, and deliver actionable insights in CFO language. Workflow integration and translation layers are critical, while regulatory compliance should be positioned as a catalyst, not the core value. Consolidation and platform unification are reshaping the competitive landscape.

"When volatility is always-on, CFOs need scenario tools that move at the speed of risk — not the pace of the planning calendar," says Research Director Heather Herbst, CFO Buyer Insights, IDC.

AWS Singapore & APAC Analyst Summit 2026: Infrastructure Innovations Shaping the Region

Mikhail Jaura, Daphne Chung, Myeong Han Kim — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Anaplan's Strategic Positioning: Decision Infrastructure for the Enterprise

Heather Herbst — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Anaplan is positioning itself as an enterprise decision infrastructure platform for multifunction planning. Its March 2026 product release was centered on AI-driven scenario planning and analytics that connect finance, supply chain, sales, and HR, and was presented at the global Anaplan Connect series, which I attended in San Jose on April 22, 2026.

Developers See AI Differently Than the Headlines: Perspectives on AI and Jobs from IDC’s Developer Survey

Adam Resnick — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation draws on IDC’s 2025 Modern Software Development Survey, (n = 524), to examine how developers see AI’s impact on their roles, careers, and head count expectations, with empirical findings that push back on prevailing displacement narratives. This document provides a data-centered perspective for organizations to assess developer sentiment, calibrate AI workforce strategy, anticipate role recomposition, and identify roles facing growth or contraction.

Public discourse on AI and software jobs has run ahead of what developers themselves report, leaving organizations and vendors to make consequential decisions based on assumptions rather than evidence about how AI is actually reshaping developer work, hiring needs, and career outlook.

Exostar Selected by U.S. Army to Deliver Secure Enclaves for Defense Industrial Base Suppliers

Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Exostar's selection as a Verified External Service Provider on the U.S. Army's NCODE IDIQ contract reinforces its position as an Nth party supply chain risk management firm, extending its compliance and security infrastructure to small Defense Industrial Base suppliers who lack the resources to meet CMMC and NIST SP 800-171 requirements independently. Backed by CMMC Level 2 accreditation, FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent authorization, and an established DIB network, Exostar is well-positioned to scale this role — provided it can manage the operational demands of serving resource-constrained small businesses effectively.