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Broadcom Mainframe AR Forum 2026: Agentic AI Comes to the Mainframe on the Platform's Own Terms

Jim Mercer — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At its 2026 Analyst Forum in Boston, Broadcom's Mainframe Software Division (MSD) laid out an agentic AI strategy anchored in the idea that AI capabilities belong within products customers already license, not in separate AI-branded SKUs that require new procurement cycles. The company unveiled an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server road map spanning its DevOps, Data Management, and AIOps value streams, with several tools already in beta under existing entitlements. Broadcom also reaffirmed Open Mainframe Project Zowe's role as the open source integration layer enabling both modern developer tooling and MCP-based AI connectivity.

EXL Investor and Analyst Day 2026: Data, Context, AI, and Trusted Execution as the Foundation for Sustained Business Outcomes

Jennifer Hamel, Sreenivas Duvvuri Venkata, Jennifer Eaton, Lars Goransson — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note provides an overview of EXL’s 2026 Investor and Analyst Day, held in New York City on May 13, 2026. At the event, EXL detailed a strategic framework of data, context, AI, and trusted execution, operationalized through three proprietary agentic platforms — EXLdata.ai, EXLdecision.ai, and EXLerate.ai — and an increasingly outcome-based commercial model. IDC analysts assess how EXL’s positioning maps to broader market dynamics and where its differentiation will need to hold as competition intensifies.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Customer Data Platforms for B2C Users 2026 Vendor Assessment

Tapan Patel — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study evaluates vendors of customer data platforms (CDPs) focused on B2C users and use cases. The CDP today sits at the center of how brands serve customers across marketing, advertising, commerce, and service, and increasingly across the AI agents acting on each side of the customer relationship. Customer expectations for personal, in-the-moment experiences keep rising; paid media costs keep climbing; and consent rules at the consumer scale keep tightening. AI is augmenting marketing from predictive campaigns toward semiautonomous decisioning, and personal AI agents are starting to research and compare and, in the future, will transact on consumers’ behalf. The result is a CDP decision that needs a longer horizon and a wider set of stakeholders. This study examines the buyer dynamics shaping the B2C CDP market, the forward-looking trends reshaping how CDPs are consumed by humans and AI agents alike, the use cases B2C organizations are building toward, and the buyer-side advice that determines whether the investment delivers.

“The next phase of B2C personalization will depend on whether the brand’s customer data and context are trustworthy enough for humans and AI agents to act on with the same confidence,” said Tapan Patel, research director, AI-Enabled Customer Data and Analytics, IDC. “The CDP is the layer that makes that possible, and the buying organization’s discipline around data readiness, operating model, and outcome measurement will also determine how much of that personalization the customer actually experiences and cares about.”

IDC Survey Spotlight: Are Partner Businesses Shifting from Resale to IP-Led?

Danielle Ibran — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

As partner businesses shift from resale to value creation, regional dynamics determine both the pace and the path of change. This IDC Survey Spotlight pinpoints where partner-created IP and services are gaining share, where resale-led motions remain resilient, and how these patterns diverge by region.

For technology suppliers building channel programs for 2026 and beyond, the strategic implications for partner engagement, program benefits, and economics are sharper and more actionable than topline global metrics suggest.

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Does GenAI Influence Your Organization's Decision for Using ERP and What Are the Most Important Business Outcomes You Want to Achieve with It?

Mickey North Rizza — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight discusses how generative AI (GenAI) influences organizations' decisions for using ERP. IDC's SaaS and Agent Path, April 2026, finds GenAI is a key business driver for ERP investments. Organizations are planning to replace their current ERP application if GenAI is not included. Business outcomes of operational efficiency, cost savings, and employee productivity underscore the need for GenAI in ERP.

Market Forecast: IDC Global DataSphere Forecast, 2026–2030

Adam Wright — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents a forecast for the IDC Global DataSphere for 2026–2030. It measures the size of the installed base of storage capacity, storage utilization (or data stored), and the amount of storage available each year. The IDC Global DataSphere is forecast by region, storage media type, consumer or enterprise-managed, location (core, edge, or endpoint), system type or application, and cloud/noncloud.

"The IDC Global DataSphere is on a trajectory to surpass 700ZB by 2030, but raw volume tells only part of the story. What's more significant is where data is being created and why. It is increasingly created at the edge, by machines, and in the service of AI workloads that generate new data as a byproduct. Managing that feedback loop will define the next era of enterprise data strategy." — Senior Research Manager Adam Wright, IDC Global DataSphere and IDC Global StorageSphere, IDC

Octave Live OnTour Austin: A New Company Makes Its Case for AI-Driven Asset Lifecycle Intelligence

Brian O'Rourke, John Villali — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Octave Live OnTour further introduced the new spin-out company, with its emphasis on the Octave platform that focuses on the design, build, operate, and protect lifecycle of assets. Over the two-day event, Octave repeatedly returned to the problem of silos and the need to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to bear on data that too often goes unused within today's enterprise. The company will emphasize that message with additional events on three continents over the remainder of the year as it continues its inaugural year as a new, software-focused organization.

Photonic Computing Moves Closer to Commercial Viability: Q.ANT Demonstrates

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At ISC High Performance 2026, Q.ANT's second-generation photonic NPU ran both a generative AI diffusion model and NXAI's xLSTM-based TiRex for sequential prediction, the first time a diffusion model of this complexity has executed on photonic hardware. IDC views the demonstrations, alongside Q.ANT's PyTorch integration, first commercial orders, and European supercomputing deployments, as evidence that photonic computing is transitioning from research to early commercial platform, though system-level efficiency validation remains a key next step.

SAP Sapphire 2026: Moving to the Autonomous Enterprise

Bo Lykkegaard, Mickey North Rizza — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note discusses SAP Sapphire 2026, which marked a decisive step toward SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise vision. The consolidation of its AI, data, and platform layers into the SAP Business AI Platform, the launch of the Autonomous Suite with 50+ Joule Assistants, the repositioning of Joule as an operational gateway, and the intent to acquire Dremio and Prior Labs collectively represent SAP’s most coherent AI strategy to date. The shift to AI Unit consumption pricing removes adoption friction. Execution, customer change management, and cross-domain agent orchestration will determine if SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise vision translates to measurable enterprise outcomes.

“SAP is making the right moves architecturally and commercially,” said Mickey North Rizza, group vice president, Enterprise Software and Agents at IDC. “The question is execution speed and when the Autonomous Suite delivers measurable business outcomes — not just technical capability — at the pace customers need. IDC will be watching customer proof points closely through the second half of 2026 and into 2027.”

“The future of SaaS in the SAP ecosystem looks increasingly like an AI consumption model, not a user-seat model,” said Bo Lykkegaard, associate VP, Software Research at IDC. “This shift has profound implications for how organizations budget, how partners price services, and how SAP competes. The €100 million partner fund signals SAP understands it needs the ecosystem to move with it.”

The Emerging Partnerships Between Datacenter Facilities Providers and AI Infrastructure Leaders

Andrew Buss, Luis Fernandes, Mikhail Jaura — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides a view of key emerging partnerships between datacenter facilities vendors and leading AI infrastructure players across four key AI infrastructure categories. It provides a heatmap of the partner relationships, scored based on the presence and strength of a formal partnership, coupled with analysis on where the partnering ecosystem has developed most rapidly and where further development is likely in the future.

"The rapid development of AI infrastructure and solutions has resulted in a rapid increase in technology infrastructure power density, performance, and scale. Suitable datacenter capacity to house these systems at scale is becoming scarce and being sold at a premium," says Andrew Buss, senior research director and datacenter research lead, IDC. "Datacenter facilities service providers will be key partners to enable successful AI infrastructure deployments for many organizations, and the strength in breadth and depth of their partnerships with leading AI infrastructure providers will be core to their ability to service the most demanding customers."