SD Times News Digest: IDC Quanta, CircleCI, Open AI – July 10, 2026
IDC Launches Quanta to Bridge the Gap Between Tech Intelligence, Enterprise Execution
IDC launched IDC Quanta to bring intelligence inside the tools people use at work. Quanta, which the company describes as “the technological intelligence fabric of the AI-enabled business,” provides IDC’s proprietary research, analytics data gathered from 60+ years of research and billions of data points.
“The ability to ask a question and get an insight that’s backed by specific, observed research is key to the tool,” said Eric Walk, VP of AI and Data Platform Services, Perficient, a beta customer of IDC Quanta. “It’s become another tool in my tool belt where my main workbench – the one I work on every day – can call out and bring back better research and better knowledge to power what I do.”
IDC Quanta combines IDC’s intelligence with customer data and history. It allows customers to upload content, data, and context to be aggregated and aligned with IDC’s certified data, supporting personalized, relevant responses, and an integrated view of data. Every response is verified against IDC’s proprietary data through a multi-agent system to ensure quality research before responding. IDC Quanta uses 15B data points to validate the answers. Once the answers are created, it’s easy to understand how the answers were created with an expandable logic panel and full traceability. Citations identify sources of information, giving users confidence in each answer.
CircleCI Introduces Merge Efficiency Ratio
CircleCI has released new data from more than 20 million software delivery workflows that show how development teams are using AI-generated code more effectively. Its Q2 Pulse report presents the Merge Efficiency Ratio (MER), which the company says “tracks how many validation cycles it takes to send a single change.”
The company said MER metrics link the speed of software delivery to cost, which it said is important as the volume of AI-generated code increases in volume and becomes a bottleneck for organizations to test and validate that code, let alone secure it. In its report, Circle CI found that the 20 elite organizations profiled grew by 72% year over year while reducing costs per change posted by 31%.
The full report says found here without registration required.
OpenAI announces the ChatGPT Project
The new ChatGPT agent can collect content from applications, files and workflows to create documents, spreadsheets and web applications. It is powered by GPT-5.6, the company’s new model family, which includes Sol, Terra and Luna.
The way it works is that the integrated plugins directory connects ChatGPT to tools used in daily work, such as Slack, Gmail, calendars and more. WIth Codex built-in, ChatGPT goes from simply answering questions to getting work done, even when users are away from their desktops or phones, through the new Scheduled Tasks user.
Key performance indicators include:
In the Final Agent Test, the GPT-5.6 Sol sets a new high of 53.6, surpassing the Claude Fable 5 (flexible) by 13.1 points. On average, it beats the Fable 5 by 11.4 points at about a quarter of the estimated cost. GPT-5.6 Terra and Luna also outperform Fable 5 by about one-sixteenths.
In the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, GPT-5.6 Sol sets the new state of the art at 80.0 points—2.8 more than Claude Fable 5—while using less than half the output tokens, taking less than half the time, and costing about a third.
In ExploitBench, a cybersecurity eval that measures progress in accessing vulnerable code through arbitrary code execution, it scores 73.5% compared to GPT-5.5’s 47.9% for a comparable token budget.
In code agent tasks, GPT-5.6 Sol with large logic outperforms Claude Fable 5 while using 54% fewer output tokens. That advantage extends to the entire family: in its highest-priced configuration, the GPT-5.6 Terra edges Claude’s Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Luna outpaces the Opus 4.8, each at about one-fifth the cost of API and one-third the time.
In a professional long-term workflow, the GPT-5.6 Sol outperforms the Fable by 9.1 points at almost one quarter of the API cost. Terra and Luna also outperform the Legend at about a sixteenth of the cost.
