The Middle East Conflict – The Impact on the ASEAN ICT Market

by Alfie Amir, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate, Mobilize, Secure
A smiling man in a suit and tie, with short hair, against a white background.
A. Amir

Summary Bullets:

• Within the ASEAN enterprise ICT market, the conflict has no direct impact, but indirect effects are becoming increasingly apparent due to the higher crude oil prices and rising electricity costs.

• The industry can expect lower ICT spending, higher operational costs for telcos, and slower AI momentum.

The conflict in the Middle East has entered its third week and is expected to continue for several more weeks. Its impact can already be seen globally across multiple sectors, as discussed in detail in GlobalData’s The Middle East Conflict – Executive Briefing, March 10, 2026.

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Voice Reimagined: Orange Wholesale and ng-voice Bring Voice Services into the Cloud Era

by Brendan Swan, posted in Cloud Enable, Internet of Things
Professional headshot of a man smiling, wearing a black suit and a pink shirt, against a neutral gray background.
B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

  • Orange Wholesale together with ng-voice to launch its IMS-as-a-service, offering a cloud-based alternative designed to remove the complexity of traditional IMS deployments.
  • The new solution will deliver voice services with a lower cost of ownership while removing the operational complexity of maintaining its own IMS infrastructure.

As international voice margins continue to decline, wholesale carriers are under growing pressure to reinvent a revenue stream that has been in continual decline for years. Orange Wholesale has teamed up with ng-voice, to launch an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS)-as-a-service offering designed to modernize how telecom operators deploy and manage their voice services.

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Iranian Attacks on GCC Data Centers Put Tech Infrastructure Investment Risks into Sharp Focus

by Ismail Patel, posted in Big Data
A person with a beard speaking into a microphone at a conference, with an audience in the background.
I. Patel

Summary Bullets:

• Military strikes by Iran damaged AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, highlighting vulnerability of the region’s data centers.

• Foreign investors, local tech decision makers, and insurance firms are now revisiting the calculus of risk in the data center boom.

Earlier this week, AWS data centers – two Availability Zones (AZ) in the UAE and another in Bahrain, all part of the AWS ME-Central-1 Region – suffered physical damage in escalatory strikes by Iran. The attacks disrupted 73 core services in the Bahrain AZ; at the time of writing, as per information shared by the AWS Health Dashboard, AWS stated that only 33 services were resolved. In the UAE, of the 112 impacted AWS services, only three have been resolved while others still face severe disruption or degradation. AWS strongly advised customers to enact disaster recovery plans and migrate workloads to unaffected AWS Regions in Europe, APAC, and the US.

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RingCentral Strengthens Two Contact Center Offers, Courtesy of OpenAI

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Big Data
A smiling man with glasses, wearing a light-colored shirt, with a warm expression.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• The infusion of OpenAI Frontier models into AIR and AVA marks a meaningful step for RingCentral in the contact center space.

• The announcement suffers some blemishes despite the positives. RingCentral should deliver functionality faster and provide adequate supporting detail.

RingCentral is infusing OpenAI Frontier models including GPT-5.2 into two voice-centric contact center offers: RingCentral AI Receptionist (AIR) and RingCentral AI Virtual Assistant (AVA). OpenAI Frontier is an enterprise platform introduced in February 2026 that enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage AI agents that access internal systems, share context, and execute inter-departmental workflows.

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AMD and Meta’s Deal is One of the Most Significant AI Infrastructure Partnerships This Year, but Will It Deliver?

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data
A professional woman with brown hair, wearing a black blazer and a teal top, against a light blue background.
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• On February 24, 2026, AMD and Meta announced a partnership to deploy AMD Helios racks, optimized for Meta’s workloads.

• The shipments, starting in H2 2026, will cover successive generations of silicon over several years and be equivalent to 6 gigawatts of power.

AMD and Meta are deepening their collaboration to align their GPU and CPU silicon, systems, and software roadmaps with Helios rack clusters running on ROCm software. As part of the agreement, AMD is also giving Meta warrants that could convert into a 10% stake in the company. Meta can only cash the warrants if it buys all the agreed chips, and AMD’s share price triples. For AMD it’s a massive validation of its AI computing roadmap and for the wider industry it has broad implications as it can mean lessening overreliance on a single supplier, potentially accelerating innovation. It gives Meta greater bargaining power as it gains pricing leverage and potentially reduces the risk of supply bottlenecks. In other words, Meta avoids being completely locked into NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem.

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MWC26: Telcos Vie for Limelight in Digitization Space

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data
Close-up portrait of a smiling woman with blonde hair and earrings, set against a blurred background.
C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Telcos are increasingly repositioning themselves as cloud and AI providers, targeting the digital transformation opportunity from an infrastructure-led perspective.

• Strategic partnerships between telcos and hyperscalers are likely to drive the most successful business transformations.

Telcos have an important agenda during this week’s high-profile technology conference, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They are going after the digital transformation space from an infrastructure perspective, addressing enterprises’ desperate need for improved operational provisioning, an issue largely ignored by cloud platform providers.

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Cloud Wars Shift to AI Wars: Archaic Code is a New Target of Opportunity

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data
Close-up portrait of a smiling woman with blonde hair and earrings, set against a blurred background.
C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Google will release a broadly backed commerce protocol this quarter that threatens Amazon’s behemoth e-commerce marketplace

• Anthropic Claude Code includes new features that help developers bypass the complexities of COBOL, threatening IBM’s massive mainframe business.

The cloud wars have quickly morphed into the AI wars among leading platform services rivals, which have invested heavily in LLMs in recent years. By leveraging agentic AI, platform services providers are elevating their competitive threat in their quest for dominance in both e-commerce markets and among enterprise developer communities.

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IBM X-Force Threat Index 2026: Adversaries Use AI as a Weapon in Scaling Attacks

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure
A professional headshot of a woman with long blonde hair, smiling softly while wearing a black blazer and a light-colored turtleneck.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• New research from the IBM X-Force threat intelligence team said the most sweeping developments in cybersecurity are threat actor exploiting exposed systems, gaps in supply chain defenses and fissures in interlinked application and cloud ecosystems to increase the volume and effectiveness of their attacks.

• IBM X-Force saw a dramatic rise in the number of active ransom groups, noting that cybercriminals are employing leaked tools and playbooks while using AI to automate attacks.

It is no secret that the enterprise is under threat from ambitious and aggressive cybercriminals, and that these threats have been escalating. Recently published research from IBM X-Force bears that out, highlighting the fact that adversaries are quick to exploit some major vulnerabilities to breach their targets. Compiling data from incident response, penetration tests, the dark web, and other intelligence, the newly published X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2026 uncovered that the most common entry point for bad actors is publicly-facing applications. Citing the increasing complexity of applications and the frequency of misconfigurations, these applications are easily breached. There was a 44% increase in the number of publicly facing applications breached this year versus last.

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The AI Boom and Unintended Consequences

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate, Secure
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Service providers, tech companies, and enterprises are under extraordinary pressure to develop and deploy AI solutions.

• Enterprises will need to re-evaluate their goals for the rest of the year, considering cost increases and possible delivery delays.

In the late 1930s, Sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote about unintended consequences, where some of the outcomes of purposeful action are not predicted or intentional. He proposed three types of unintended consequences – unexpected benefit, unexpected drawback, and perverse result. In the first, there is a positive benefit, something good happened that wasn’t foreseen. In the second, an unforeseen detriment occurs. In the third, the result makes the problem worse, a contrarian result.

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Cisco Research Finds AI Is Revolutionizing the Privacy Landscape

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• The overwhelming majority of organizations say they are benefiting from privacy investments in a myriad of ways, including helping increase customer trust.

• But most acknowledge data localization efforts increase the cost and complexity – and risk – to cross-border data transfers.

Data privacy is top of mind for most organizations, and not just because of a stormy geopolitical climate that is putting pressure on businesses to meet stringent regulatory requirements around data residency. Security concerns about protecting both customer data and intellectual property have companies expanding privacy programs. There is also growing recognition that customers place a premium on knowing their data will be protected.

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