Tech leaders struggle to identify which technology solutions will solve their operational problems. Vendors’ marketing messaging and a lack of standardization in the market amplify the challenge. Although there are standard market categories for tech, there have been no universal rules for the functions each category provides — until now. This report outlines Forrester’s Function-First Tech Buying Framework, which creates standards for the functionality included in each of the AI for IT operations (AIOps) and overlapping tech market categories.

Volatility is now the baseline, and the gap between AI leaders and laggards is widening rapidly. Technology leaders struggle to focus amid the increasing number of distractions. If you lack focus during your budgeting process, you risk funding yesterday’s portfolio while competitors institutionalize AI advantage. AI compounds this miscalculation faster than ever before. Avoiding this requires explicit decisions about what to scale, what to kill, what to avoid altogether, and what to experiment with next. This report provides a data-rich and research-backed game plan for what tech leaders need to do in the next 12 months.

You can use AIOps platforms to safeguard business continuity with proactive resilience, impact the bottom line with leaner and smarter operations, and minimize firefighting to empower IT teams to focus on high-value work. But to realize these benefits, you’ll first have to select from a diverse set of vendors that vary by size, type of offering, geography, and use case differentiation. Tech leaders should use this report to understand the value they can expect from an AIOps platforms vendor, learn how vendors differ, and investigate options based on size and market focus.

Cloud operations are shifting from managing infrastructure to running digital services under constant change in hybrid and multicloud estates. Observability and automation are evolving from fragmented tools and scripts into standardized telemetry pipelines, correlated incident response, and guarded autonomy that can act safely at operating tempo; governance and cost management are moving from periodic reviews to continuous controls in delivery and ops workflows. This report sets expectations for cloud ops in 2026 in eight capability areas and provides a path to reduce risk and toil, standardize reliability and change discipline, and expand autonomy in bounded high-confidence scenarios.

Atlassian’s Team ’26 event highlighted how AI, agents, context, and workflows are reshaping enterprise work.

Technology leaders are operating in an environment defined by constant and accelerating disruption. AI adoption, geopolitical volatility, mounting technical debt, and unrelenting cost pressure demand that IT steps up for its business partners. Simultaneously, the tolerance of IT and CIO failures is waning as quickly, forcing a vision and strategy that goes beyond incremental improvement […]

The convergence of AI disruption, geopolitical instability, mounting technical debt, business competition, and constant budget pressure requires IT to be at its best. For CIOs to drive meaningful business outcomes, they must achieve excellence in the technical capabilities crucial to their company strategy. They will need to make strategic investments in technology to achieve this, and unlocking the right level of investment requires a trusting, tight partnership with business leaders. This report provides technology executives with a framework for combining technical excellence and business confidence to drive results — what we define as high-performance IT.

Cloud support tiers optimize for self-service enablement and prioritized, efficient support. But that’s just for starters: They deliver outcomes, improve quality, and strengthen governance. This report outlines a five-tier model — from self-service to external vendor support — and offers guidance on how enterprises can optimize cloud support for better CX while reducing operational costs and accelerating resolution times.

To deploy AI safely and profitably at scale, CIOs must cut through AI hype and focus on IT capability maturity. Learn how in this preview of a new report.

CIOs are drowning in AI market hype. While massive infrastructure investments and speculation about artificial general intelligence (AGI) dominate boardroom conversations, most firms lack the IT maturity to deploy AI safely or profitably. Vendor-driven fear of missing out fuels premature rollouts that destroy more value than they create. With or without AGI, AI will continue to advance — but successful AI deployment hinges on mature IT capabilities rather than better AI technology. To cut through the hype and retake control, this report shows CIOs how to use Forrester’s high-performance IT (HPIT) model to assess their maturity and build the alignment, adaptivity, and trust required to deploy AI safely at scale.