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AMD validates the importance of world models for physical AI with the acquisition of World Labs

Dan Everett — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AMD's $8.2B all-stock acquisition of World Labs, about 64% above the $5B valuation reported for the company's February funding round, is a bet that physical AI is the next growth cycle and that spatial intelligence and world models are what make it work. Physical AI systems have to predict how physical objects move and what their actions will cause, and AMD is paying a premium to get a leading world model company and research team to address this need.

Acumatica 2026 R2: Intelligence for the Mid-market with Embedded AI

Mickey North Rizza — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Acumatica released R2 2026 today. The new GA product release brings Acumatica to the AI levels of many of their peers. While these AI updates may appear late, Acumatica clients find this new AI journey well timed, as told to IDC earlier this year. Many organizations, while trying AI, are leery of it and would prefer to walk before they run. With this next release, Acumatica is enabling their clients to do more at their own pace and with greater confidence.

The R2 2026 updates bring mid-market businesses embedded AI, modern analytics, a streamlined user experience and industry specific enhancements that are designed to help organizations improve productivity, make faster decisions, and scale more efficiently. The R2 2026 release brings forward new capabilities:

AI Assistant and AI Automation: Mid-size businesses will find a huge uplift with quicker and faster business answers, anomaly detection, the automation of repetitive tasks, and trigger prompt-driven workflows within Acumatica.

Modern user interface: As organizations move to R2 they will automatically transition to Acumatica’s modern user interface which provides a more consistent and intuitive experience across the Acumatica platform.

Modern Analytics for Faster Decision-Making: Acumatica R2 2026 lays the foundation for a unified, always-current view of the business with a high-performance governed data source that surfaces everywhere teams need it — in dashboards, financial statements, and now in the AI tools they already use. There are two advances anchoring this shift:

Native Data Warehouse: Reporting and analytics now run against a dedicated, performance-optimized copy of ERP data instead of the live transactional database, so reports don’t compete for system resources with day-to-day order entry, invoicing, and approvals. This foundational layer of centralized ERP data and performance optimization will be enhanced in future updates.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Connection: Organizations can securely connect Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other MCP-compatible AI tools directly to their Acumatica data without exporting, uploading, or duplicating information in a separate AI workspace. Role-based permissions, inherited security, and field level data masking automatically carry over, allowing teams to use the AI tools they already rely on while IT retains centralized governance and auditability for every query. Together with existing capabilities such as InsightXL, which connects live Acumatica data directly to Excel, these advances extend Acumatica's analytics so the same governed data reaches finance and operations teams through whichever surface the moment calls for — a dashboard, spreadsheet, AI assistant, or AI tool of their choice.

NATO's Quantum Technology Roadmap: Strategic Competition Does Not Wait for Technological Certainty

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

NATO's Quantum Technology Roadmap moves quantum beyond research priorities by establishing a structured path for evaluating, testing, securing, and integrating quantum capabilities across the Alliance. IDC expects this approach to accelerate demand not only for quantum technologies, but also for the broader infrastructure and integration capabilities needed to translate quantum advances into operational value.

2Q26中国竞争力分析报告——成像与打印外设市场（历史+预测）2Q26 China Compete Imaging ─ HCP Market Summary (Historical + Forecast)

Donna Wang — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IDC市场竞争报告对喷墨、A3&A4激光市场进行了详细分析，总结了打印外设数据收集的核心洞察。该报告包含高价值的营销洞见、市场核心趋势以及厂商市场份额分析。以下是报告涵盖的主要内容：

执行概要
市场综述
产品分析
竞争分析
细分市场分析
渠道分析
市场预测

本报告中引用的数据和观点来自IDC《全球打印外设市场季度跟踪报告》（2Q26）。

All Roads Lead to AI: What the NSSTS's Own Priority Map Actually Tells IT Vendors

Alan Webber — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines the August 2026 National Security Science and Technology Strategy (NSSTS) through the lens of IT vendors. It traces what the strategy actually changes — acquisition mechanics, research security, foreign investment screening, export controls, and the updated Critical and Emerging Technologies (CET) list — and provides an original analysis of the Appendix B mission alignment matrix, ranking each CET area by mission breadth to show where the government's own technology priorities concentrate. It closes with guidance for IT vendors, the Defense Industrial Base, and allied governments navigating this environment over the next 12–24 months.

"The NSSTS Appendix B is a relevance map, not a resourcing map. It tells vendors where a technology matters to the government, not how much money follows it," said Alan Webber, program vice president, National Security, Defense, and Intelligence at IDC. "Vendors who read the matrix as a funding signal will misjudge their own pipeline."

Ericsson 2026 Analyst Event: The Network as a Participant in AI Use Cases

Ahmad Latif Ali, Denise Lund, Paul Hughes, Brandon Butler — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Ericsson's 2026 Analyst Event made it clear that the network is no longer just infrastructure for AI — it's becoming a co-participant in it. Ericsson is repositioning the network from infrastructure to a trust layer for AI, monetizing identity, location, and quality signals that pure-play CPaaS rivals can't replicate. The risk: Value scales only as fast as operators expose these APIs, and developers still expect open flexibility over network lock-in.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Embedded Payment Applications in Treasury Management Workflows 2026 Vendor Assessment

Jordan Steele, Kevin Permenter — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study assesses vendors offering embedded payment capabilities inside treasury workflows, covering cash aggregation, multi-horizon forecasting fed by AP and AR data, treasury-grade payment execution, and FX and liquidity risk monitoring. The study evaluates how well vendors extend forecasting and cash visibility from a broader finance platform into a genuine treasury capability rather than a bolt-on reporting layer.

"Cash aggregation across banks and accounts has become table stakes, so the real differentiation in treasury now comes from how forecasting draws on live AP and AR data instead of static exports," said Jordan Steele, research manager, Financial Applications, IDC. "Agentic AI adoption in treasury is still uneven across the vendors we evaluated, and that gap is likely to define the next round of competitive separation in this workflow."

IDC Survey Spotlight: For Whom and for What Purposes Is Carbon Management Software Most Effective?

Amy Cravens — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines how effectively carbon management software performs across business functions and use cases. Drawing on IDC's April 2026 Sustainability Software Survey of 816 organizations, spanning 10 business personas, IDC finds that enterprise-wide adoption has outpaced enterprise-wide value delivery: effectiveness ratings rarely climb above one-third for any use case, even as carbon management tools now touch nearly every function. Confidence gaps diverge sharply by role, signaling that there is an opportunity to close functional and persona-level gaps.

"Carbon management software has achieved broad adoption, but broad adoption is not the same as broad value. The capabilities used most confidently today are backward looking, reporting on emissions that already happened, while the persona closest to where emissions are created and the tools that model what happens next are the weakest links. As we move into the next era of carbon management, there remains a gap to close between where these tools are deployed and where they actually change decisions." — Amy Cravens, research manager, Sustainability and ESG Software, IDC

IDC Survey Spotlight: Where Are Organizations Geographically Deploying Colocation for Edge IT, and What Are Their Spending Plans for the Next 12 Months?

Olga Yashkova — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the worldwide distribution of enterprises that use colocation for their edge IT and their spending over the next 12 months, drawing on IDC's August 2026 EdgeView Survey (n = 650). Respondents represent organizations with 500+ employees that are currently using at least one form of edge computing and are director-level or above decision-makers across IT, line of business, and operations who are knowledgeable about their organization's edge infrastructure and strategy.

The survey covers edge computing strategy, drivers, industry-specific use cases, partner ecosystem, deployment challenges, and spending, including colocation-specific edge data points.

"Edge colocation has quickly become the venue of choice for enterprises moving from evaluation to production, backed by interconnection ecosystems and operational maturity that other venue types have yet to match," said Olga Yashkova, research manager, Edge AI Strategies and Hosting and Colocation Services at IDC.

IDC Survey: A View of the Cloud Edge in Asia/Pacific

Daphne Chung — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines how edge computing is evolving across Asia/Pacific and where organizations expect it to run next. The region is committed to near-term edge expansion, although most organizations remain early on the deployment curve, indicating that intent is running ahead of operational maturity rather than tracking alongside it.