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AWS in Asia/Pacific: Evolution of Agentic AI and the Push for Digital Sovereignty

Yih Khai Wong — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IDC recently attended an analyst briefing organized by Amazon Web Services (AWS), held in conjunction with its annual AWS Summit in Singapore. AWS delivers a portfolio of cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and security services to enterprises, governments, and developers worldwide, with a growing focus on agentic AI capabilities and regional digital sovereignty.

The briefing emphasized AWS’s shift toward agentic AI, its growth of the large-language model (LLM) ecosystem via Amazon Bedrock, and its focus on digital sovereignty in the Asia/Pacific region. AWS highlighted its platform’s ability to support various stages of AI development, from simple AI assistants that automate routine tasks to AI agents that manage end-to-end workflows and fully agentic AI systems that mimic human logic and reasoning. AWS also stressed that trust, accountability, and compliance are essential pillars for enterprise AI growth in this region.

Lumen to Acquire Pure-Play MCN Vendor Alkira, Signaling a New Phase of the MCN Market

Paul Nicholson — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The Audit Trail That Did Not Exist: ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 and the Case for Governed Autonomous Work

Frank Dickson, Grace Trinidad — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

ServiceNow used Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas to make a focused argument: that the same platform managing enterprise workflows is now the right place to govern the identities, assets, and AI agents operating across those workflows. The security and risk announcements collectively represent the first full integration of two major acquisitions into a production-ready platform. A less discussed but consequential shift runs through all of it: enterprise software is no longer exclusively deterministic. The governance frameworks enterprises built for rule-based systems do not automatically extend to AI agents that reason probabilistically, and Knowledge 2026 was in large part ServiceNow's answer to that gap.

Worldwide 1Q26 HDD Shipment Results and Four-Quarter Forecast Update

Edward Burns — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table provides worldwide unit and petabyte shipments and revenue for the hard disk drive (HDD) industry for the first calendar quarter of 2026, including supplier unit shipment and revenue market share. Also provided are HDD-equipped personal and entry-level storage shipment estimates by HDD form factor for the first calendar quarter of 2026. This IDC Pivot Table provides clients with worldwide HDD market data for market analysis and business planning and to assist in identifying the industry and market dynamics, trends, and opportunities for HDDs.

Worldwide Hard Disk Drive Component Quarterly Update: 1Q26 Summary and Four-Quarter Outlook

Edward Burns — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Pivot Table provides a summary of worldwide hard disk drive (HDD) component quarterly demand for 1Q26 and a four-quarter demand outlook. This Pivot Table provides insight into the demand for select HDD components by HDD form factor, HDD vendor, and various HDD component technology segments. The HDD components included in this Pivot Table are:

HDD disk media
HDD disk substrates
HDD head gimbal assemblies (HGAs)
HDD read/write recording heads and suspension assemblies

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

AWS Financial Services Industry Analyst Day: Resiliency, Modernization, and Agentic AI

Inci Kaya — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AWS' Financial Services Industry Analyst Day and the following AWS Financial Services Symposium in May showcased how financial institutions are leveraging AWS to address resiliency, modernization, and agentic AI adoption. The event stood out for its focus on real-world client implementations, with AWS and its customers providing concrete examples of value delivered through cloud, AI, and agentic architectures, rather than abstract product positioning.

Ant International Makes Clear Inroads on the Gaps in Global Payments Needs

Michael Sek Pheng Yeo — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Ant International's MoMents 2026 and associated International Media and Analyst briefing in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia held on the 23^rd of April 2026 positioned the company as a major infrastructure provider for the next phase of AI-driven commerce. Their new capabilities combine payments, global accounts, embedded finance and AI-led operational tooling into a consistent narrative on where the Ant International sees the future of commerce in. The event highlighted how Ant International is stitching its assets together in a broad merchant, wallet, banking and financial services ecosystem to provide cross-border interoperability, treasury intelligence and new standards for trusted agentic commerce.

The most important signal from this event was that Ant International is moving beyond its already very successful and well-integrated cross-border payments offering in Alipay+ and towards a more integrated and holistic commerce stack for enterprises and SMEs. Their strategy aims to directly address market realities including payment fragmentation, market volatility and uneven SME access, especially relevant in key markets in Southeast Asia. Beyond these areas, Ant International also demonstrated their commitment and investments in AI such as in using it for agentic commerce as well as security. By combining these offerings into a themed offering for businesses, they aim to tackle and solve common issues head on in a seamless manner.

Anthropic Expands Legal Tools with Deep Integrations — Harvey and Legora Officially on Notice

Ryan O’Leary — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

The darlings of the investment community, Harvey and Legora, have taken a shot across the bow as Anthropic unveils deeper tooling for lawyers. These tools will struggle to compete with the actual owners of the underlying models. This is especially true given the partnerships Anthropic has cultivated with Westlaw, Everlaw, Relativity, and others.

GRC Software as the IT Intelligence Fabric for Suppliers

Philip D. Harris, CISSP, CCSK — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective looks at GRC software as the IT intelligence fabric for suppliers. The GRC market is reaching an inflection point for GRC software technology suppliers. Traditional platforms still handle policies, controls, evidence, exceptions, and risk registers, but enterprise buyers now expect more: a live view of assets, data, services, models, and third parties, including ownership, criticality, control coverage, and business consequence. The market signal is increasingly clear that static inventories and periodic evidence exercises are no longer enough. Capabilities such as continuous control monitoring, CMDB enrichment, data mapping, classification, and AI-assisted analysis already exist across adjacent platforms, but they remain fragmented across separate tools and teams.

The strategic opportunity for suppliers is to move beyond disconnected control towers and build a trusted intelligence fabric that unifies context across assets, services, identities, data, controls, and risks. Done well, this fabric becomes a shared utility that enriches SOC triage, exposure prioritization, change management, IAM, data governance, AI governance, business continuity, audit, and leadership reporting. For suppliers, the key question is no longer how to collect more data, but how to reconcile partial truths, infer missing context, republish trusted insights into operational tools, and reduce manual reconciliation across the enterprise in a way that makes the platform materially more strategic to buyers.

“For GRC software technology suppliers, the future is not better record keeping; it is building the trusted intelligence fabric that turns fragmented enterprise signals into shared, decision-grade operational context.” — Phil Harris, research director, Governance, Risk and Compliance Solutions, IDC