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Esri’s founder Jack Dangermond claims that the future of analytics is GIS, which can be substantiated by the fact that ultimately we have to manage our sole and finite resource – the Earth. Let’s see what news Esri User Conference 2026 has delivered to support this claim.
Esri’s user conference showed GIS connecting street sweepers, Italian railways, and barley farms to enterprise data. CIOs who leave GIS out of their AI and data strategy are working from half the picture.
At AWS Summit DC 2026, Amazon Web Services unveiled new AI modernization and security automation tools built for federal agencies with classified cloud infrastructure and billions of dollars in credits, with thousands of engineers embedded on top. The pitch is speed.
Info-Tech has already provided a brief summary of updates to Agentic Data Cloud announced by Google in April 2026. Here’s a closer look at some of the updates important from the perspective of Data and Analytics.
The emerging transactional and analytical data platform convergence does not result in one universal database, but in fresher operational data through governed data planes, workload-specific engines, and replication, federation, or shared storage.
Databricks is moving into cybersecurity and marketing technology, adding AI agent management on top of its existing data business. The pitch: one platform for everything. Databricks opened up the data layer and the catalog, so the switching cost shifted to the operational layer: the workflows and security rules built on the platform, and the agents running on top of them.
SAP’s recent acquisition activity should be viewed as building a three-part stack: Dremio for open lakehouse and business context, Reltio for trusted master data, and Prior Labs for AI models purpose-built for structured business data.
Building fast on the Enterprise AgentStack (a toolkit for building, deploying, and managing AI agents) released in January, Teradata followed with the Autonomous Knowledge Platform in May – a unified system spanning cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
Oracle’s 2026 Analyst Relations Summit showcased how their three platforms – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, AI Data Platform, and Fusion Data Intelligence – unified by shared governance and semantics, could facilitate building an enterprise-scale agentic AI platform.
mimik’s mimOE Studio is an early but credible device-first option for enterprises that want to limit cloud token spend and keep sensitive data off third-party infrastructure by running agentic AI on their own hardware.
Snowflake’s announcement about Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code is quite in line with the general trend among major software vendors to build agentic AI platforms with control planes.
Boomi, long known as a tool for connecting business software systems, is shifting its focus to making enterprise data trustworthy enough for AI to use. Most failed AI projects don’t fail because the AI is bad. They fail because the data underneath is inconsistent, poorly defined, or scattered across systems that don’t agree with each other. We look at how Boomi’s data and governance tools address that problem, and what technology leaders should weigh when evaluating integration platforms in the AI era.
Deterministic AI offers a new option that falls between “manually” made reporting and analytics and LLM-based solutions prone to hallucinations.
Databricks spent years as a quiet data infrastructure company. It did not chase security headlines. It built the platform where enterprise data lives. Databrick’s Lakewatch, launched in March 2026, is what happens when you stop treating security as a separate application and run it directly inside that platform instead. For existing Databricks customers, this is not a new vendor decision. It is a question of whether the infrastructure they already own can replace a tool they are probably overpaying for.
IBM's approximately $11-billion acquisition of Confluent is less about Apache Kafka itself and more about owning the enterprise-grade, real-time data layer that supports modern analytics and AI workloads. For organizations already running IBM platforms, this has meaningful architectural and commercial implications. For cloud-native organizations, the practical impact is narrower than the announcement suggests.
CLAIRE Copilot has become a collection of specialized agentic copilots, but it’s still a far cry from becoming a platform for deploying and managing business process–oriented enterprise AI agents.
Zoho has quietly built a global footprint that most tech leaders underestimate. It isn't midmarket anymore, operating in 150+ countries, serving over a million businesses, and supporting 150 million users. Zoho’s partner-led go-to-market strategy has led to its widescale adoption across industries, including manufacturers, automotive franchises, banks, logistics networks, and healthcare systems.
At ZohoDay26, Zoho previewed AppOS – a shared architectural foundation intended to unify data, workflows, identity, governance, and application services across the Zoho ecosystem. AppOS will be generally available in H2 2026. Organizations should interpret this announcement as directional, signaling Zoho’s longer-term consolidation and AI enablement strategy. The broader consideration for CIOs will be whether AppOS aligns with their architectural direction toward consolidation or federation.
Salesforce Data 360 and Snowflake seem to belong to the same category – analytical data store – which raises the question: which one should be used? At a closer look, we can see significant differences that may lead to a decision to use both.
1) AI will ensure data quality – so much needed for AI. 2) Traditional business intelligence tools will start fading away. 3) “Ontology” will become the buzzword of the year.
Ardoq is moving from being a traditional Enterprise Architecture (EA) modeling tool to an AI-driven platform that focuses on business results and governance. Its roadmap includes automation, knowledge graph-based reasoning, and compliance features to help organizations manage both AI adoption and EA practices. CIOs and CTOs should review these enhancements in the context of modernization, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency.