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.

Chinese Cloud Giants Close Enterprise AI Platform Gap with Global Hyperscalers, but Execution Lags

by Alfie Amir, posted in IT Leader
A smiling man in a formal suit and red tie, set against a white background.
A. Amir

Summary Bullets:

• Chinese providers are catching up with global leaders in three areas: generative AI, operationalized solutions, and agentic AI, giving enterprises broader options to diversify their AI partners.

• However, gaps in go-to-market, professional services, and model development remain large – crucial areas to drive adoption and accelerate deployments.

AI demand continues to grow rapidly. GlobalData Market Opportunity Forecasts to 2030: Artificial Intelligence (published on June 30, 2026) forecasts the global AI market to increase at 48.2% five-year-CAGR to reach $1.3 trillion in 2030. This is also reflected by 88% of the 3,069 global enterprises interviewed by GlobalData, who increased their AI budget this year (source: GlobalData ICT Customer Insights Survey 2026. Asia-Pacific shows a similar trend with a 48.6% CAGR, accounting for 36.2% of the global AI market in 2026. While growth is reported across the stack from the GPU to the application layer, cloud-based enterprise platforms remain crucial to drive adoption by providing broad and flexible capabilities to develop, govern, and scale AI deployments. GlobalData’s recent updates on Cloud-Based Enterprise AI Platforms: Competitive Landscape Assessment (September 17, 2026) shows that global hyperscalers (Google and Amazon) continue to lead the market, followed closely by Microsoft and IBM. However, Chinese players including Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent are closing the gap. This is important especially in markets like Asia where these players already have a strong presence. This gives enterprises broader options to diversify their AI partners, but also attracts cost-sensitive customers through their cost-leadership strategy.

The Competitive Landscape Assessment report also analyzes vendors’ capabilities, competitive comparison, market assessment, market drivers, buying criteria, and vendor recommendations. It covers 10 vendors: Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Dataiku, DataRobot, Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Tencent Cloud.

Gaps Getting Smaller

Chinese providers are catching up with global leaders in three areas: generative AI (GenAI), operationalized solutions, and agentic AI. In the report, Alibaba is rated Very Strong in GenAI, the same as Amazon and one level behind the leader, Google. Alibaba’s latest Qwen family lets users toggle reasoning on and off, supports over 200 languages and dialects, and includes the agent-focused Qwen3.7-Max. Meanwhile, Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent are rated Strong. Baidu’s ERNIE 5.1 and Qianfan platform combine in-house models with DeepSeek, Kimi, and GLM. Tencent’s Hunyuan 3D and video models have over 3 million Hugging Face downloads, and Huawei has open-sourced a version of Pangu as OpenPangu.

Operationalized solutions are the clearest convergence. Alibaba and Huawei are both rated Very Strong, matching Amazon and ahead of several others. Alibaba offers vertical portfolios in finance, education, transportation, and retail while Huawei supports over 400 prepackaged AI applications across 500 industrial scenarios. Rated Strong, Tencent’s Productivity Agent Suite spans more than 20 verticals. Tencent is also extending into physical AI with its Hy-Embodied models, Tairos platform, and Unitree partnership, although deployments remain early. Industry-specific solutions are becoming more important for enterprises exploring the technologies as well as when moving from PoC to production.

The gap in agentic AI is closing more slowly. Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are rated Strong while Huawei is Competitive. Alibaba offers AgentRun, AgentTeams, and Agent Sandbox. Alibaba also offers a Skills portal, which converts cloud capabilities into MCP-compatible formats. Tencent has ADP 4.0 which is compatible with OpenAI’s Agents SDK) while Huawei offers AgentArts and AgentSphere. This shows not only serious investment by these players, but also increasing initiatives to support open standards rather than build closed ecosystems. However, their development platforms and tooling are rather new and less proven compared to global players.

This growing momentum is underpinned by their vertical integration strategies with investment in infrastructure such as Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips, the 1,024-card Atlas 950 SuperPod, Alibaba’s Zhenwu M890, and Baidu’s Kunlun chips. This is also reflected in their financial performance. Huawei reported $7.5 billion in AI chip revenue, Alibaba claimed 11 consecutive quarters of triple-digit AI revenue growth and over 290,000 GenAI customers, and Tencent said its AI cloud revenue doubles every year.

Where Gaps Remain

The widest gap is go-to-market. Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent are all rated only Competitive. While they have a strong presence in China supported by various references, their global footprints are relatively small: Alibaba has 32 regions in 17 countries, Huawei 34 in 16, and Tencent 21 in 10. All four have a predominantly Asia-centric or China-centric customer base. Geopolitical headwinds are a structural constraint, particularly in North America and Western Europe.

Another key area is professional services. Rated Competitive, these players still lack professional and managed services as well as partner ecosystem, which is crucial in helping enterprises with deployments, but also lag in ethical and governance frameworks. IBM’s 21,000 data and AI consultants and Google’s ecosystem of over 220,000 GenAI-enabled partner consultants set the benchmark.

The third is model development. Chinese providers have end-to-end tooling, such as Alibaba’s PAI, Huawei’s ModelArts, and Tencent’s TI Platform, but the experience is less unified. Tencent’s tooling, for example, is fragmented across TI Platform, ADP, and TokenHub. Global players are also ahead in the governance and monitoring tools that enterprises need to move from PoC to production.

Under Pressure to Demonstrate AI ROI, Too Often Organizations Come Up Short

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in IT Leader
Close-up portrait of a woman with blonde hair, wearing a black jacket and light-colored sweater.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• Concerns about missing the AI boat have many corporate executives pushing AI application development mandates.

• However, research indicates that far too few organizations are realizing the kind of expected dividends in terms of cost savings, revenue generation, productivity gains, and innovation. What can they do differently to make the most of their investments?

To say artificial intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous is almost an understatement. Just under 90% of all enterprises today use AI to support at least one corporate function, according to consulting firm McKinsey and Company, with 56% of all organizations applying the technology across three or more discrete tasks. This pace of adoption is unprecedented. Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index Report says 53% of the global population had been using generative AI (GenAI) within three years of widespread availability. For comparison’s sake, it was 12 years before the personal computer reached 40% of the population.

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Despite Meta’s $17.1 Billion Lawsuit Settlement, Questions Linger About Reducing Negative Social Media Effects for Children

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in IT Leader
A professional headshot of a woman with blonde hair, wearing a black jacket and a light-colored turtleneck sweater, smiling towards the camera.
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• In August, Meta admitted liability regarding social media’s addictive qualities on children, reaching a $17.1 billion settlement with US states and the District of Columbia.

• While seen as a victory by critics, the settlement is insufficient to introduce the sweeping changes needed to have a measurable effect.

Just weeks after Meta, the parent company of social media giants Instagram and Facebook, promised to restrict access to some of the more controversial features of its platform to settle a multi-billion dollar lawsuit, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill tightening social media controls for children. The California law, which goes into effect in 2028, mandates social media accounts for users under age 16 be private, limits algorithmic feeds for minors, masks children’s location data, and turns off overnight notifications for underage users. Unlike similar legislation passed by other states like Illinois, the California law allows parents to amend social media restrictions. Newsom also signed a bill that requires AI companies to reveal to minors whether they are communicating with a non-human entity. The legislation also prevents children from accessing risky content on subjects like self-harm.

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A New Breed of Conversational AI is Leading to Voice Resurgence in Customer Service

by orumohiuddin, posted in Big Data, IT Leader
Oru Mohiuddin

Summary Bullets:

• Conversational AI is driving a major voice resurgence in customer service by improving the IP voice experience.

• Long call queues on account of human agents being thinly stretched across large call volumes have led to customer frustrations and poor CX, but modern versions of conversational AI are set to change that by taking away the frictions associated with voice.

It was believed that voice would diminish in value as digital channels started to emerge as an alternative to the voice channel. While messaging and chatbots offer cost and scale advantages, GlobalData’s research shows that voice continues to remain a vital channel for connecting with customers despite the frictions. Voice provides instant gratification and tends to be more straightforward to use as it does not involve navigating through messaging channels, websites and so and having to type messages. While the elderly demography tends to prefer voice due to greater familiarity, voice is seen to be popular even with the younger generation.

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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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