IT, AI & Telecommunications

Online – October 31, 2026 -- Expansion ARR now accounts for 40% of total new ARR, up five points year on year, according to a 2025 Benchmarkit SaaS report cited at a ChurnZero webinar. The figure sharpens a decision facing customer success (CS) leaders planning for 2027: whether their teams own retention, expansion, or both.

Unanet ties CSM performance to net bookings across both revenue streams

Unanet's CS team owns retention and expansion, and CSMs are measured on a net bookings basis, said Jeff Davison, the company's Chief Customer Officer. His reasoning: accounts cannot grow unless the company retains them.

Global – October 31, 2026 -- Nearly two-thirds (63%) of customer success (CS) leaders have no consistent method to track AI performance, according to ChurnZero's 2026 Customer Success Leadership Study, which surveyed nearly 600 CS and revenue leaders.

Only 21% of CS leaders link AI to revenue, versus 57% in sales

Almost all respondents use AI to automate administrative work such as logging tasks, summarizing calls and researching accounts. Yet only 21% of CS leaders can tie AI to revenue outcomes, compared with more than half (57%) of sales leaders.

The gap carries an operational cost. CS teams that cannot measure AI impact are four times more likely to require manual sign-off on every AI recommendation, which leaves staff less time for strategic work. Without performance data, leaders also struggle to justify AI spend.

COLUMBUS – October 31, 2026 -- Vertiv Holdings Co. (NYSE: VRT) has completed its acquisition of Utility Innovation Holdings, Inc., which operates as UtilityInnovation Group (UIG), for about $1.45 billion in upfront cash. The deal also carries up to $1.15 billion in contingent cash consideration, tied to EBITDA targets over 12- and 24-month periods.

Upfront price equals 13x expected 2027 EBITDA

The upfront price represents approximately 13x expected UIG 2027 EBITDA. Vertiv expects the multiple to fall significantly if the full earnout is paid. The company expects the acquisition to be accretive to adjusted earnings per share in the first year after completion.

Columbus, Ohio – October 31, 2026 -- Vertiv Holdings Co. (NYSE: VRT) launched SmartIT, a factory-validated AI infrastructure platform that combines rack, power, liquid cooling and monitoring in one pre-engineered design, and made it available globally from day one.

The platform targets enterprises, research institutions and colocation providers. It deploys in existing facilities and new data centers. Vertiv says it also covers commercial spaces and hyperscale environments, in each case without redesign.

SmartIT integrates five infrastructure layers before shipment

The solution combines rack infrastructure, DC power conversion and distribution, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, in-rack cooling distribution and monitoring. Vertiv validates these systems at the factory, which limits on-site commissioning to facility power and cooling connections. The design was previously deployed with NVIDIA to support the NVIDIA DGX GB300 system.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – October 31, 2026 -- Vertiv Holdings Co. (NYSE: VRT) has completed its acquisition of King Environmental Services Ltd. (KES), extending its thermal and fluid management services into Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Financial terms were not disclosed, and Vertiv does not expect the deal to be material to its financial results.

KES adds fluid management and load testing for liquid-cooled data centers

KES is a Europe-based provider of fluid management, commissioning and load-testing services for high-density, liquid-cooled data centers. Founded in 2002, it is headquartered near Dublin, Ireland, and serves EMEA customers from hubs in North Dublin and Frankfurt.

Its service scope covers design review and feasibility studies, pipework flushing, filtration and water treatment, testing, adjusting and balancing (TAB), data logging and thermography, and large-scale thermal and electrical load testing.

Berlin – October 31, 2026 -- Vertiv and NVIDIA modeled up to 30% more cumulative token output in the first 12 months at equal installed capacity. The gain comes from a combined design-and-deployment approach for AI factories, introduced at NVIDIA GTC Berlin. Polar Data Centers is applying the factory-built element to the first 41 MW phase of its multiphase AI data center at Herøya, Norway.

The pitch targets sequential engineering of power, cooling and facility systems, which Vertiv says creates complexity and potential delays. The new approach starts from pre-engineered reference architectures. These are configured to site requirements, virtually validated, then built as factory-made infrastructure.

Global – October 31, 2026 -- CrowdStrike has extended Falcon Adversary OverWatch managed threat hunting to AI applications and autonomous agents monitored by Falcon Guardian, and added telemetry-driven hunting for Google Cloud, bringing its coverage of the three major public clouds in line.

OverWatch Cross-Domain now covers AI agent activity around the clock

Falcon Adversary OverWatch Cross-Domain now provides 24/7 proactive hunting across AI applications and agent activity monitored by Falcon Guardian. Hunters combine Guardian's runtime context with Falcon platform telemetry and frontline adversary intelligence to find manipulation, abuse and emerging tradecraft that automated detections may miss.

Global – October 31, 2026 -- CrowdStrike's Falcon Guardian now traces supported AI agent sessions from prompt to impact on the endpoint, scoring every agent from 0 to 100 and blocking dangerous actions at runtime.

The product targets a blind spot in network-based monitoring. A gateway sees the conversation, and a web gateway sees an agent connect to a trusted site. Neither sees what happens inside the machine, where a hidden instruction can become a shell command or a downloaded file can run with the user's access.

Agent Graph links the AI layer to the execution layer

Falcon Guardian runs on the existing CrowdStrike Falcon sensor, which already sees processes, files and network connections. It now also sees prompts, models, tools and skills. CrowdStrike Agent Graph connects each agent to the users, hosts, models, prompts, tools, skills, MCP servers, processes, files and detections it touches, and keeps those links current as agents act.

Global – October 31, 2026 -- The China-nexus adversary VAPOR PANDA used the agentic framework ARTEX to target more than 200 organizations worldwide, according to CrowdStrike OverWatch. The campaign paired the Chinese-developed DeepSeek large language model (LLM) with a second commercial LLM to run intrusions against multiple high-value targets in parallel. CrowdStrike calls it an escalation in China-nexus use of AI agents, from single intrusions to simultaneous engagements directed by one human operator.

Campaign reached at least 14 countries in 11 days

Exploitation activity began on October 17, 2026, from a single ARTEX controller linked to VAPOR PANDA infrastructure. Targets included foreign ministries in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. U.S. semiconductor, defense and think tank organizations were also hit, along with telecommunications providers in multiple regions.

Global – October 31, 2026 -- CrowdStrike researchers say they located software vulnerabilities by watching where a frontier AI model refused to answer, and their method was correct in 73 of 86 controlled test scenarios across five vulnerability classes.

The approach, called Guardrail-based Vulnerability Discovery (GbVD), began when a model declined to explain one function in a small C web server. It had explained every other function in the codebase. A single token in that function had been changed from a max to a min, creating an out-of-bounds write. The prompt asked only what the code does, with no mention of security, exploits or vulnerabilities.