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15 Key Trends Shaping EMEA Partnering Ecosystems in 2026

Stuart Wilson, Andreas Storz — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation discusses 15 key trends that will shape EMEA partnering ecosystems in 2026 and beyond. The document describes how accelerated AI innovation and adoption, buying behavior, and changing competitive dynamics reshape partner business models, vendor ecosystem strategies, and go-to-market models across the region.

2026 Strategy for Software Delivery: Mandates, Tactical Priorities, and Tech Investment Areas

George Mironescu — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation discusses the key software engineering mandates and technology investment areas for 2026. The presentation draws on insights from over 1,000 decision-makers surveyed from November 2025 to January 2026 for IDC's AI and Cloud-Native Software Delivery Survey.

The presentation provides insights into the thinking of various roles involved in shipping software, including application development, solution architecture, infrastructure and platform engineering, security, and IT leadership.

Drawing from 2025 initiatives and areas where delivery gaps persist, the presentation informs senior IT leaders about the most important tactical and strategic priorities shaping the agenda in 2026 and beyond.

Adobe 1Q26 Earnings: Enterprise AI Is a Resilient Moat

Gerry Murray — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Adobe announced its FY 1Q26 earnings results on March 12, 2026, reporting continued growth across its three audience segments: business professionals and consumers, creators and creative professionals, and marketing professionals. The results highlight how generative and agentic AI capabilities are increasingly embedded across Adobe's product portfolio, enabling enterprises to accelerate digital content production, streamline marketing workflows, and deliver personalized customer experiences (CX) at scale.

Agentic AI Adoption in Asia/Pacific: From Experimentation to Enterprise Scale

Deepika Giri, Shashank Nigam — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation explores how Asia/Pacific enterprises are moving decisively from AI pilots to enterprise-scale implementation. The emphasis is on agentic AI orchestration, unified platforms, and establishing AI-ready data foundations. Organizations are strengthening infrastructure, enhancing data quality, and transforming their workforce to enable automation, augment decision-making, and unlock business value. Effective change management, governance, and leadership are essential for scaling agentic AI. IDC recommends building resilient foundations, preparing talent, and redefining value metrics to ensure secure, trustworthy deployment and sustained innovation.

"Asia/Pacific enterprises are rapidly advancing AI adoption by making data excellence, infrastructure readiness, and workforce transformation top strategic imperatives. Achieving scalable business impact demands not only robust governance and agile leadership but also a culture that champions agentic AI as a catalyst for enterprisewide innovation and competitive advantage," says Deepika Giri, associate VP, IDC Asia/Pacific.

Amazon Connect Innovations Remove Agent Friction to Enable Meaningful Customer Relationships

Oru Mohiuddin — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At AWS re:Invent 2025, Amazon Connect unveiled innovations focused on removing agent friction and enabling meaningful customer relationships through agentic AI. Key launches included QuickSuite for AI-powered workforce automation and enhanced CX capabilities (e.g., real-time guidance, workflow automation, and unified customer insights). AWS's approach allows organizations to adopt AI at their own pace, with built-in governance and scalable infrastructure. The most sustainable value lies in AI augmenting, not replacing, human agents — improving speed, consistency, and personalization while keeping humans central to oversight and relationship-building. Amazon Connect's progressive AI, infrastructure strength, and flexible economics position it as a strategic enabler for enterprisewide transformation beyond the contact center.

Buyer Trends: HR as a Data Lead and Rethinking Performance as an Outcome

Zachary Chertok — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective discusses buyer trends — HR as a data lead and rethinking performance as an outcome. HR, IT, and people leaders are rapidly growing as responsible and accountable strategists for how AI is configured, gated, and deployed for everyday use. The elevation of HR and IT as tandem leads means that solution value narratives need to become more holistic and inclusive of end-user enablement and augmentation aggregated into performance context directly embedded in business metric outcomes. Ecosystem alignment and data readiness are now as important as feature depth, with HR and IT leaders prioritizing HCM platforms and specialized data solutions that can plug into enterprise data strategies, support cross-functional governance, and sustain AI-driven context and personalization in the flow of work.

"The definitional framework of 'workforce performance' is changing to focus more on accessible measured outcomes and less on standard, evaluative processes for engagement," says Zachary Chertok, senior research manager, HCM Applications and Agents at IDC, "The evolution means that performance insights are increasingly forming the core of HCM ecosystem considerations with data, context, insights, and trends feeding how AI personalizes employee enablement and drives collective reporting to influence business performance planning. Consequently, HR, IT, and the line of business are taking on new stakeholder roles in how HCM ecosystems take shape."

EX Buyer Transformation Maturity, 1Q26: The HR-IT Partnership Becomes a Deeper Remit for AI Personalization

Leonardo Freitas, Zachary Chertok — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective explores how employee experience (EX) is continuing to mature and evolve well beyond its root themes in employee engagement and activation. From 2025 to 2026, the top concern for EX has shifted to prioritizing framing strategies for continuous talent placement as persistent and evolving skills gaps roadblock how the workforce can support adaptable business models. For technology vendors, shifting EX priorities into the data and insights orchestration layer is evolving HR as a deeper partnered stakeholder with IT to evaluate how new digital interaction points contribute value to AI training models, to personalization potential in the broader digital resourcing environment, and to employee enablement for seamless transition flows as their roles and task lists grow more fluid.

"Over the past five years, EX transformation has expanded to become tightly intertwined with the evolution and expansion of AI frameworks within organizations," says Zachary Chertok, senior research manager for HCM Applications and Agents at IDC. "Maturity growth is evolving the stakeholder set at the helm of EX transformation, rooting it more deeply in a better defined HR-IT partnership with stronger influences formalizing from the line of business including individual employee voices, feedback, and behavioral insights. As EX transformation maturity progresses, EX vendors must reframe their stakeholder appeal to each stakeholder layer to ensure that clients cannot see a path to personalized enablement without them and the insights they deliver."

Enterprise Networking Priorities, Automation Maturity and AI Readiness

Hyder Aftab — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation discusses how enterprise networking in the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META) region is undergoing a structural shift, driven by three converging forces: security, automation, and AI. According to IDC’s 2025 syndicated survey among enterprises in the META region, security dominates every layer of networking investment, ranking as the top AI use case, and being the most outsourced managed service. While AI’s impact on networking is widely anticipated (with over half of enterprises expecting significant transformation within two years), actual readiness lags behind ambition. Legacy infrastructure integration remains the single largest obstacle to scaling AI-driven networking, and most organizations operate in a fragmented “balanced mix” of manual and automated processes, with higher-judgment tasks like root-cause analysis and change management still substantially manual.

For service providers and telcos, the data points to a durable, multi-track commercial opportunity — not a single product cycle. Managed services demand is structural, driven by a persistent skills gap that enterprises cannot close internally. AI-ready networking is an active procurement cycle happening now, spanning automation platforms, security architecture, datacenter builds, and edge infrastructure. The vendors best positioned to win are those that bundle secure, automated, AI-ready networking into outcome-based and co-managed service models — addressing legacy integration with proven, multi-vendor expertise rather than greenfield promises. Edge computing represents a frontier where telcos hold a structural advantage and should move before hyperscalers establish dominance.

“Enterprises are not debating whether AI will affect networking — they are deciding how to prepare for it. The service providers who lead with security-integrated managed networking are building both the entry point and the retention mechanism in a single motion.” — Research Manager Hyder Aftab, IDC

From Compliance to Real-Time Tax Control: The Next Evolution of Indirect Tax Software

Kevin Permenter — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Indirect tax software has traditionally focused on calculating tax and supporting compliance reporting. Today, regulatory shifts and real-time reporting requirements are pushing tax closer to the transaction layer. As a result, finance leaders are prioritizing solutions that ensure tax accuracy at the point of transaction, reduce audit exposure, and support continuous compliance in increasingly complex regulatory environments.

"Indirect tax used to be about filing correctly. Now it's about not getting the transaction wrong in the first place." — Senior Research Director Kevin Permenter, Financial Applications, IDC.

From Expense Reporting to Spend Governance: The Next Evolution of Travel and Expense Platforms

Kevin Permenter — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective highlights the next evolution of travel and expense (T&E) platforms, from expense reporting to spend governance. Travel and expense platforms have long focused on automating expense reporting and reimbursement workflows. Today, finance leaders are looking beyond reimbursement efficiency toward stronger visibility and control over employee spending. As corporate card usage expands and discretionary spending receives greater scrutiny, T&E systems are evolving into tools that help organizations monitor spending earlier, enforce policies more consistently, and strengthen financial governance.

"Expense reports document spending after it happens. The next generation of T&E platforms will help finance control spending before it occurs," says Kevin Permenter, senior research director, Financial Applications at IDC.