Category: IT Leader

IT Leader provides insight and guidance on issues impacting information technology and telecommunications professionals, focusing on overall market trends, strategic issues, and advice on supplier activities.

Lack of AI Agent Oversight Brings Dueling Approaches

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in IT Leader
C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Fast-growing use of agentic AIs within organizations has triggered agentic orchestration/governance prioritization among platform providers

• Controversy remains over two distinct approaches to orchestration: control plane construct or orchestration frameworks

Enterprises deploying AI in 2026 are turning their attention from deployment of agentic AIs to the management of growing numbers of agents being released across organizations. Companies are struggling with how to manage the hundreds or thousands of individual agents built within their organizations–agents built by different teams, running on different platforms, with inconsistent security and governance. This is problematic, considering most organizations lack visibility into agent inventory, purpose, and authorization.

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EU Proposal for MSS Spectrum Seeks to Balance Bloc’s Commercial and Sovereignty Aspirations

by Ismail Patel, posted in Communicate, Internet of Things, IT Leader, Network
I. Patel

Summary Bullets:

  • The EU’s MSS 2 GHz proposal strengthens regulation, security, and competition, but implementation through 2027–2029 will be phased, not immediate.
  • Small spectrum block sizes favor IoT, messaging, emergency services; large-bandwidth applications face bottlenecks.

When the European Commission unveiled its plan late last month to reassign the 2 GHz mobile satellite service (MSS) spectrum at EU-level, it initiated more than a regulatory proposal. With the dust now settled on the announcement, it is clear that this represents a geopolitical and commercial realignment. Signals in the market suggest the framework is firming up around core principles: sovereignty, security, restricted eligibility, spectrum caps, and wholesale access. But beneath those pillars lies a battlefield of interests that will define not just who wins licenses, but which services Europe values the most – IoT or in-flight broadband, messaging or full-fledged device-to-device (D2D) connectivity.

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Remote Desktops/VDI – A Persistent Bad Idea

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in IT Leader
Close-up of a man with a bald head, glasses, and a styled beard, smiling at the camera.
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• The nature of the problems changed from local to network, requiring expensive network support rather than using PC technicians.

• It’s important to remember that many concepts in modern enterprise IT come up again and again cyclically, only to be characterized as ‘paradigm-changing’ by enthusiastic marketing teams.

The idea of remote desktops or streaming an employee’s Microsoft Windows desktop to a more affordable device or even in a window on a remote employee’s self-owned hardware has been around for a long time. The reasons were simple – less spending on desktop computers, easier support both on-site and particularly for remote, better security, and remote desktops worked particularly well for temporary or project-based access for outsiders. Citrix and VMware both made hay with remote desktops, especially in the era where PC hardware and Microsoft Windows itself were considerably less reliable than today.

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You Can’t Look Away From IT

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in IT Leader
Close-up portrait of a balding man with glasses and a distinctive mustache, smiling warmly.
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Agentic AI could have been rolled out more gradually, with actual cybersecurity protection, including data protection, regulatory compliance, and responsibility tracking.

• AI and agentic AI are here to stay, but it’s up to customers to pump the brakes and ensure they don’t implement a technology that leaves them vulnerable to attack in ways that even AI’s creators can’t fully envision.

RSAC 2026 concluded last week, and it was a firestorm of AI and agentic AI announcements, products, services, and marketing. The mood on the show floor was positive, the majority of people crowding around interesting demos and informational sessions. And of course, good booth prizes and tchotchkes. Cybersecurity vendors and service providers paid out for lavish booths and even the smaller booths were mostly cleverly decorated/marketed.

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8×8’s New Customer Experience Capabilities are Contemporary but Confusing

by Gregg Willsky, posted in Communicate, IT Leader
A smiling man wearing glasses, with short dark hair, against a blurred background.
G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• 8×8’s latest capabilities reflect an ongoing pivot from collaboration occupying its core to customer experience (CX) assuming its central identity.

• While 8×8 is generating market momentum with the new capabilities, the offer structure is confusing.

A few years ago, 8×8 undertook a fundamental pivot, shifting from a company with communication and collaboration at its core to one with CX making up its central identity. Concurrently, 8×8’s ‘XCaaS’ platform – housing an integrated mix of unified communication, customer experience, and CPaaS capabilities – is now known as the 8×8 Platform for CX.

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Sparkle and VDPC Redefine Infrastructure Partnership; Barracuda Swims Between Italy and Spain

by Brendan Swan, posted in Communicate, IT Leader
B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

• Sparkle has teamed up with VDPC and private equity firm Teset Capital will build the Barracuda Subsea Cable, a high-capacity subsea cable connecting Spain to Italy.

• Sparkle will acquire the Valencia-Genoa infrastructure and Valencia co-location, boosting its connectivity across the Iberian Peninsula.

In today’s interconnected world, subsea cables are the unseen arteries that power global communications with underwater cables carrying approximately 99% of the world’s internet traffic across continents. As operators collaborate to expand their network infrastructure, the recent announcement between wholesale network provider, Sparkle and Spanish telecommunications provider, Valencia Digital Port Connect (VDPC) highlights how strategic collaborations between infrastructure players continue to shape the future of digital connectivity. But as ownership of Sparkle is about to change, could this influence its long-term role in global infrastructure?

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2026 Enterprise Predictions: Expect New Heights for Vibe Coding and Retaining Tribal Knowledge

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in IT Leader
C. Dunlap
Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Agentic AI will help document dwindling tribal knowledge

• Vibe coding will become mainstream

The industry should expect a lot more formalization of vibe coding capabilities leading to greater opportunities among non-coders across enterprise business units. Interesting applications resulting from agentic AI will help enterprises solve age-old problems such as the loss of institutional knowledge among an aging workforce. Plus, traditional automation platforms will get a major boost from agentic AI advancements. These are among just some of the 2026 GlobalData Predictions within the category of agile automation.

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I’ve Got a Lot of Problems With You People

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in IT Leader
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

  • The technology industry can do better.
  • Let’s just hope that the uneasy feeling about the AI bubble everyone is experiencing is just a bit of leftover holiday undigested beef, blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of an underdone potato (with apologies to Dickens).

Festivus took place on December 23, 2025, but despite being late, there are grievances to air in regard to the technology industry as it relates to enterprises in 2025. So, let’s start. “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people!”

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Slow Your Roll on AI

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader
S. Schuchart

AI has been the rage for at least three years now, first just generative AI (GenAI), and now agentic AI. AI can be pretty useful, at GlobalData we’ve done some very cool things with AI on our site. Strategic things, that serve a defined purpose and add value. The use of AI at GlobalData hasn’t been indiscriminate – it has been thought through with how it could help our customers and ourselves. Even this skeptical author can appreciate what’s been done.

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Is Liquid Cooling the Key Now that AI Pervades Everything?

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• Data center cooling has become an increasingly insurmountable challenge because AI accelerators consume massive amounts of power.

• Liquid cooling adoption is progressively evolving from experimental to mainstream starting with AI labs and hyperscalers, then moving into the colocation space and later enterprises.

As Generative AI (GenAI) takes an ever-stronger hold in our lives, the demands on data centers continue to grow. The heat generated by the high-density computing required to run AI applications that are more resource-intensive than ever is pushing companies to adopt ever more innovative cooling techniques. As a result, liquid cooling, which used to be a fairly experimental technique, is becoming more mainstream.

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