Awards categories
In its 10th year, the IDC Future Enterprise Awards continues to redefine business transformation, aligning its categories and selection criteria to reflect how organizations can successfully transform into an AI-fueled business.
Best in Artificial and Generative Intelligence
Spotlight Awards – ‘Best in X‘Best in Artificial and Generative Intelligence
This award category recognizes organizations that have solved their critical business or technical problems by the innovative solution design orchestrating AI/GenAI technologies and other enterprise IT systems. As AI/GenAI tech market grows rapidly, the complexity of orchestrating various AI/GenAI technologies to avoid hypes but to meet the strategic requirements is getting bigger. The award honors organizations that combined both the realistic evaluation of AI technology and the radical problem-solving approach for their business.
The winner of this category must demonstrate:
- Gap analysis. The entry project must have adopted the chosen AI/GenAI technologies based on critical evaluation of their existing IT resources and their business problems.
- Solution design. The entry project must have customized and orchestrated various technical components, including AI/GenAI and other enterprise IT systems, to build a new, innovative system to solve the given business problems. This also presupposes that the entry project tackles a big question that requires a complex solution design.
- Generative AI adoption: Deployed Generative AI solutions across at least two functions at scale in production.
- Organizational strategy. The entry project needs to show how organization supports its success and evaluate it with relevant KPIs or other metrics, and to an extent how the project is a part of the organization’s long-term AI roadmap.
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
Best in AI-Ready Digital Infrastructure
Spotlight Awards – ‘Best in X‘Best in AI-Ready Digital Infrastructure
This award recognizes that digital infrastructure provides the platform for agile business using dedicated and public cloud compute, storage, network, edge, management, automation, and lifecycle services to help the business scale, adapt, and compete in a software and data intensive world. This award recognizes the organization that is leading the use of digital infrastructure to transform their business, engage customers and employees, and accelerate business innovation.
The winner of this category must demonstrate that their organization has any one or more of the following attributes apart from cloud-centric computing which is a MUST HAVE requirement:
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- AI Ready Infrastructure – best in class investments in designing and implementing digital infrastructure strategies to accommodate emerging business priorities enabled by data intensive workloads, particularly for AI use cases.
- Autonomous Operations – best in class use of infrastructure automation, observability and analytics, including AIOps to transformation operations, improve security and modernize the IT Ops workforce.
- Hybrid & Multicloud Interoperability – Best in class use of interoperable public cloud services and/or dedicated cloud infrastructure platforms and unified management approaches to transform business capabilities and deliver on top priority business outcomes.
- Edge Optimized – best in class infrastructure deployments that extend digital enterprise business capabilities, remote infrastructure support and automated data management across edge locations including work from home and mobile devices as well as factory, lab and retail locations.
- Center of Excellence Governance – best in class use of collaborative policy-led decision making approaches to align digital infrastructure investments, FinOps, sustainability strategies, and operating models that reflect the shared views of IT, Cloud, Data, DevOps and LOB stakeholders
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
Best in AI-Ready Platform
Spotlight Awards – ‘Best in X‘Best in AI-Ready Platform
This award category recognizes organizations that have made transformative changes to their enterprise’s business by applying AI based innovation across multiple areas of business, to remain competitive, innovate better and enhance customer experience to its end clients.
The winner of this category must demonstrate that their organization has any one or more of the following attributes:
- AI Strategy: A well-defined robust enterprise wide AI strategy, along with a use case roadmap.
- AI deployments at scale: deployed AI at scale across five or more use cases within a single business process or multiple business processes. Demonstrate AI adoption across a minimum of 3 business functions, for ex: supply chain, ITOps, Finance etc.
- Generative AI adoption: Deployed Generative AI solutions across at least two functions at scale in production.
- AI Ready Enterprise Data Platform: Data from across the enterprise is integrated, cleaned, synthesized and transformed to power AI systems.
- AI Ready Infrastructure – best in class investments in designing and implementing digital infrastructure strategies to accommodate emerging business priorities enabled by data intensive workloads, particularly for AI use cases.
- Built in Security: Security of data must be ensured through guardrails and other security features that protect data and ensure governed access.
- AI Ready Governance: Bring all the stakeholders together to ensure a comprehensive well rounded governance model, not just the data integrity portion, in alignment with overall AI strategy.
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
Best in Connectivity
Spotlight Awards – ‘Best in X‘
Best in Connectivity
The enterprise pursuit of connectedness is only growing more complex as organizations embrace a multipronged strategy to increase business and operational agility. This award recognizes organizations that has transformed with a modernized network operations strategy, staffing, and skills for the cloud-first world, highlighting improvements in the end goal of operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity.
The winner of this category must demonstrate at least one of the following:
- Performance and/or operational benefits from solutions (i.e. using connectivity technologies like SDWAN/SASE, 5G, virtual private networks, satellite, IoT, and mobility) that improve human-human and human-machine interactions.
- A scalable, secure network environment that allows access anytime, anywhere and delivers pervasive experiences using connectivity and/or networking solutions that provide for employees, customers, and partners.
- A connected environment that is intelligent, dynamic, and secure, while being independent of a physical place or specific time of day, enabling access to corporate resources and supporting collaboration with an agile and dynamic approach.
- A pervasive and reliable connectivity strategy that allows the enterprise to maintain business operations in accordance with SLAs. This includes resiliency in light of disruptive events including cyberattacks, pandemics, and natural disasters.
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
Best in Digital Innovation
Spotlight Awards – ‘Best in X‘
Best in Digital Innovation
This award recognizes that the modern enterprise must transform itself from a software consumer into a large-scale software innovator. A winning organization shows that a project or initiative can source, augment, develop and/or distribute software IP (intellectual property) that delivers differentiation, disrupts the market through external products or services, or has significant positive impact on internal operations.
IDC’s Digital Innovation framework defines the following four areas that are interconnected. To qualify, entrants must demonstrate strategic decision making as part of their project in at least two of these four areas:
- Planning. The nominated project is tied to and driven by business goals from the earliest ad-hoc stages
- Sourcing. Rather than comprising solely top-to-bottom internally created resources, the nominated project relies also on external code, libraries, apps, algorithms, microservices, platforms and so on.
- Development. The nominated project makes use of agile and secure, full-cycle DevOps practices and methodologies, allowing for rapid release and pivoting based on market intelligence and customer/user feedback
- Distribution. The nominated project makes full use of third-party development delivery ecosystems (e.g. downloads or API access from the organization’s website would constitute distribution). Please note that distribution can also be internal only (i.e. first party distribution) where it is used in your own products/services and/or business processes.
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
Best in Security and Trust
Spotlight Awards – ‘Best in X‘
Best in Security and Trust
This award recognizes an organization that exemplifies the ability to maintain and build trust amid the evolving needs of its customers. Historically, the role of IT in fostering trust has centered on preventing cyberattacks and data breaches, while ensuring regulatory compliance. However, as the age of digital transformation unfolds, trust has expanded to encompass initiatives that prioritize exceptional customer experiences, empathy at scale, enterprise and ecosystem intelligence, smart and autonomous devices, and more. These efforts bring both new opportunities and challenges in managing trust.
The winner of this category must demonstrate the ability to design and execute strategies that build and sustain trust through at least one of the following:
- Effective risk assessment and management (enhancing visibility and preparedness)
- Regulatory compliance to ensure adherence to industry standards and laws
- Robust security management to protect stakeholders’ interests
- Advocacy for privacy to respect and safeguard personal data
- Commitment to ethics and social responsibility, fostering goodwill and accountability
- Transparency and good governance, ensuring openness and integrity in operations
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
Best in Sustainability
Spotlight Awards – ‘Best in X‘
Best in Sustainability
This award recognizes the organization that demonstrates the commitment to embed sustainability within the business. This organization aims to address sustainability in a holistic manner, where the goal is for sustainability to become an integral part of the overall business strategy as its underlying foundation. IDC believes that purpose-driven sustainability can deliver long-term impact to any organization and its strategy, operations, employees, customers, and ultimately, bring new innovations into the market it serves.
The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:
- Early successes in its sustainability initiatives, fostering greater commitment to a purpose-driven strategy
- Commitment to embed sustainability goals in enterprise wide business objectives and solve society’s ‘wicked’ problems faced by organizations in the Asia/Pacific region through long-term, sustainable innovation
- Ability to derive business value from current and future investments supporting sustainability goals
- Ability to integrate digital transformation and other technology investments with sustainability goals, setting the foundation for sustainable innovation
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
CIO/CTO of the Year
Special Award for Customer Experience
Special Awards
Special Award for Customer Experience
This award recognizes an organization that is able to rethink and effectively transform the way customer-related initiatives are done in the organization (e.g. customer engagement, customer experience, customer service). The Future of Customer Experience (FoCX) is characterized by the changing and shifting nature of the relationship between customers and brands through a lens or prism of technology. IDC has defined the FoCX as an empathetic relationship between customers and brands built on what the customer wants and how they want to be treated through the technology lens of awareness, engaging, learning, and, measuring.
The winner of this category must demonstrate the delivery of empathy at scale through at least one of the following areas:
- Ability to attain predictable communications with customers. Communication is the foundation for every interaction and every engagement between a brand and a customer during all steps of the customer journey, and the key is that it is predictable for the customer and for the brand.
- Ability to deliver lifetime value. Delivering lifetime value requires an organization to ensure the product or service is directly tied to the experience the customer receives.
- Ability to leverage applied intelligence. Intelligence about the customer, the market, and the world that can then be used to customize and hyper-personalize the experience for the customer.
- Ability to engender mutual trust. The customer wants to be able to trust a company with their data.
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
Special Award for Smart Cities – Best in Connected City
Special Awards
Special Award for Smart Cities – Best in Connected City
This award recognizes the Government organization that has transformed and digitalized their states/cities/provinces to enhance the lives of citizens, ultimately resulting in progressive societal outcomes. Such smart city transformations highlight performance and efficiency improvements from seamless human-machine interactions, and experiences, and demonstrate an intelligent and dynamic environment unbounded by time or physical space.
Connected cities, as part of the Smart Cities initiative, aim to interconnect various citizen-services aspects, supported with related infrastructure, harnessing the power of technologies, to result in citizen experience enhancement.
The winner of this category must demonstrate at least one of the following:
- Performance and/or operational benefits from citizen-centric solutions that improve human-human and human-machine interactions.
- A scalable, secure smart city environment that allows access anytime, anywhere, and that delivers pervasive experiences using connectivity and/or networking solutions that benefit citizens, such as Intelligent transportation, and smart water.
- A connected environment that is intelligent, dynamic, and secure, enabling access to public resources and supporting collaboration with an agile and dynamic approach such as Data-driven policing and Next Generation Emergency services.
- A pervasive and reliable connectivity strategy that allows the Government organization to be resilient in light of disruptive events including cyberattacks, pandemics, and natural disasters.
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.
Future Enterprise of the Year
Enterprise Award
Future Enterprise of the Year
This award recognizes the organization which is working towards becoming a Future Enterprise to lead in the digital-first world. A Future Enterprise is a digitally determined organization where digital is achieved at a scale across its operations; innovating at a pace that is an order of magnitude greater than traditional businesses. It is driven by a customer-centric and empowered workforce that embraces experimentation and risk-taking as it seeks to continuously improve its products, services, and experiences. Technology and data are its lifeblood, fueling more efficient operations, new revenue streams, and heightened customer loyalty. To put simply, the Future Enterprise is the gold standard of how organizations must organize and invest to participate in digital-first markets.
The winner of this category must demonstrate the following:
- An enterprise wide imperative with a single digital strategy in place with established implementation roadmaps, which the organization is using to ensure digital would be embedded across the business.
- Resoluteness to make the required organizational and cultural changes across the entire organization in the areas of culture, data, customer experience, operations, and work.
- A long-term investment strategy based on the principle that digital is inherently valuable to the business.
- A single digital platform to scale technology innovations, focused on enabling digital capabilities at speed, scale, and agility.
Ready to nominate your organization and be part of our prestigious circle of winners?
Deadline for nominations is on June 15, 2026.