IDC Research Types
Analyst
Analyst Profile
Provides complete background information on an IDC analyst. Each profile provides a biography, a notable quotation, a frequently asked question relevant to the particular analyst's focus, and a list of research authored by that analyst.
Team Profile
Lists the analyst members of a topical team. Outlines general areas of coverage and any specialties.
Briefs
Vendor Profile
Provides a concise, hard-hitting profile of an emerging vendor. A profile will highlight new players and technologies and the potential paradigm shifts or disruptions a vendor represents.
IDC Perspective
The IDC Perspective is a flexible doc that seeks to help business and tech buyers assess their business and IT strategy and/or associated business processes, especially as it relates to the use of technology. The document can be used in areas such as:
- Strategy and planning
- Trends and observations
- IT spending and investment
- Vendor conferences and announcements
IDC TechBrief
The IDC TechBrief helps the technology or business executive get smart about a single technology in the context of the business by answering 6 business critical questions about the technology:
- What is the technology?
- When should I adopt it?
- What can it do for my business?
- What are the critical success factors?
- What are the risks?
- Who are the suppliers?
Market Note
The Market Note is a flexible doc that provides IDC analysis and point of view on an industry event, new product or service, or a company announcement or development or fast breaking news.
Market Perspective
The Market Perspective is a flexible doc that analyzes key changes and developments happening in the market. This flexible research type can be used to analyze areas such as:
- Competitive Environment
- Innovation & Market Opportunity
- New Business Models
- Partner & Channel Strategy
- Enterprise Strategies (targeted to supplier)
- Regulation
- Socioeconomics
Event Proceedings
Event Proceeding
Provides published slides, audio, and other materials from IDC and Insights Web conferences, briefings, forums, or other events.
Events
Conference
Delivers dependable, relevant, and high-impact data and insight to help organizations make sound business and technology decisions. eBusiness executives, IT professionals, IT suppliers, and services suppliers benefit from the strategic insight and networking opportunities IDC conferences offer. Generally, all presentation slides are available online, and for most conferences, streaming audio of key discussions is available as well.
Web Conference
Focuses on significant trends and paradigm shifts. Each Web conference will provide attendees with leading-edge market information that will enable them to make smart business decisions. For those unable to attend in person or those wishing to review the content presented, these synchronized multimedia presentations are available online.
IDC DecisionScapes
IDC FutureScape
Serves as a framework for IT/tech professionals' IT strategy and planning for the next one to three years. It lists IDC's top 10 worldwide technology trends for the coming one to three years in a given research area and includes related drivers, projected IT/business strategy impact, and guidance.
IDC MarketScape
Helps IT/tech professionals develop a short list of suitable suppliers when selecting a vendor. Provides an unbiased assessment of tech suppliers in terms of offerings, strategy, capabilities, and other important factors in a given technology area.
IDC MaturityScape
Describes five stages of "maturity" or capability for a particular technology area, helps IT/tech professionals understand where their organizations fit within those stages, and provides guidance on key components for planning successful improvements to a tech initiative.
IDC MaturityScape Benchmark
Helps IT/tech professionals to benchmark their maturity against peers, develop a business case for a tech initiative, and build consensus about where critical IT investments should be made. Presents quantitative research results that show the market distribution for a given tech initiative across the five stages of maturity presented in the related IDC MaturityScape. Shows the results and components of particularly successful initiatives.
IDC PeerScape
Gives IT/tech professionals insight into best practices (and practices to avoid) by providing specific use case examples implemented by peers. Identifies practices that have the most impact on the success of a tech or business initiative, and provides actionable guidance for each practice.
IDC PlanScape
Helps IT/tech professionals to justify and plan a business and/or technology investment or opportunity by exploring why, what, who, and how (these are also the main section headings). Presents key players, critical success factors, risks, and actions to consider for a designated technology and/or business management area.
IDC TechScape
Helps IT/tech professionals with developing IT strategic plans and evaluating emerging technologies in terms of their risk to the business. Shows the adoption curve and risk levels over time for a specific emerging technology. Sorts technologies into three "adoption model" categories (transformational, incremental, opportunistic) to help tech leaders determine the potential impact for their organization.
IDC Links
IDC Link
Provides timely context and insight around important market trends and events in a short opinion piece. IDC Links provide IDC's point of view on:
- Financial announcements
- Product announcements
- Mergers and acquisitions or divestitures
- Events
- Response to news
IDC Blink
IDC Blink
Provides timely context and insight around important market trends and events in a short opinion piece with a 2-minute audio clip. IDC Blinks provide IDC's point of view on:
- Financial announcements
- Product announcements
- Mergers and acquisitions or divestitures
- Events
- Response to news
Pivot Tables
Pivot Table
Presents an interactive spreadsheet tool for analyzing trends and activities in a specific market segment. These tables are available only through an annual subscription service.
Presentations
IDC Survey
Presents a hypothesis about what is happening in the market backed by the results of a demand-side or supply-side survey. The focus is on interpreting and analyzing the survey results and providing a strong point of view along with actionable advice.
IDC Survey Spotlight
Answers a timely question and provides a strong opinion backed by IDC survey data. This is a quick nugget of information that is presented in two concise PowerPoint slides.
Market Presentation
Provides an easy-to-use format to post on the Web presentations that were previously delivered at public forums (such as conferences and events) or for internal client meetings and client presentations. It may not come as part of a consulting/custom engagement.
Market Analysis Perspective
Delivers a concise current state view of a market and insight into the impact of future trends. Business executives, product managers, and MI/AR professionals can use this information when looking to understand buyers' perspectives and market impacts.
Tech Buyer Presentation
Provides an easy-to-use format to post on the Web presentations that were previously delivered at public forums (such as conferences and events) or for internal client meetings and client presentations. It may not come as part of a consulting/custom engagement.
IDC Market Glance
Provides a look at the landscape of a tech market, including competitive positioning, adjacent segments, and potential partner opportunities.
Press Releases
Press Release
Announces significant corporate news, such as key hirings or promotions, performance milestones, event highlights, or speaking engagements.
Product Information
Fact Sheet
Describes a research product. Usually details the major areas of coverage and deliverables, and outlines key questions and competitive market conditions that the research will address. Includes links to all published research for a research product.
Studies
Industry Developments and Models
Provides a detailed assessment of a specific target market's expansion pattern. This analysis helps clients develop and deploy the right mix of value-add products, programs, or services to support their sales and/or partnering efforts.
Market Forecast
Provides the future of a single market or a group of related markets. It presents a new or updated market forecast, including key drivers and assumptions used in the forecast.
Market Share
Provides data on market size, regional allocations, and platform splits as well as a summary of vendor shares for the most recently completed period (year, quarter).
Special Study
Provides a one-time study produced by a research group that is not published as a deliverable under a subscription service.
Taxonomy
Highlights and emphasizes how IDC tracks the market while also making it easier for customers to find and identify IDC Taxonomy documents.
Technology Assessment
Provides an analysis of the intricacies of an emerging or established technology or the technologies contained within a specific product.
IDC Innovators
IDC Innovators is aimed at informing IT buyers about emerging vendors with an innovative new technology or ground-breaking business model. Vendors identified in the document as innovators are linked together within a specific market area and around solving or alleviating a common business problem. Vendors included have annual revenue under $100 million at the time of selection.
Technology Segment
The IDC Technology Segment offers CEMA clients a comprehensive view of a technology segment in one country or subregion and provides a market view and forecast and/or market share and vendor profiles, including performances and strategies. It is specifically intended to serve smaller country markets and subregions.
This IDC Market Note discusses the Nutanix.NEXT 2024 conference. Held in Barcelona, the conference showcased the company's evolution from a hyperconverged infrastructure provider to a significant player in the hybrid multicloud market, emphasizing ...
This IDC Market Note publishes a forecast for the number of total logical applications periodically, with this update extending the previously published forecast from 2025 to 2028.
"The industry's use of modern application development ...
This IDC study reports the market share of the worldwide competitive deployment centric and container platforms software market for the year 2022 and the two prior years. It includes both on-premises and cloud deployment types, depicting ...
This IDC Market Perspective discusses the impacts of WebAssembly (Wasm) from an infrastructure deployment point of view and its impacts on existing virtual machines (VMs) and containers. It explores the security isolation implications of ...
This IDC Market Note highlights the latest technologies in cloud-native computing at the KubeCon North America 2023 event. Key trends identified include the use of Kubernetes for AI applications, the emergence of platform engineering to ...
This IDC Market Perspective discusses the transformative impact of generative AI on the container infrastructure software market. The rise of AI applications will increase the demand for containers and Kubernetes, but the impact on container ...
The close of Broadcom's acquisition of VMware started a new era for the infrastructure software maker that started an infrastructure revolution that began two decades ago. Broadcom has made many encouraging statements about its planned investments ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights data from IDC's November 2023 Site Reliability Engineering Survey, which shows how SREs in enterprise organizations are spending their time.
According to Gary Chen, research director, ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights data from IDC's November 2023 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 10, which shows the diverse sourcing that enterprises are relying on for generative AI applications. ...
This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of the cloud system software market in 2022 and a 2023– 2027 forecast for this market. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for the total worldwide market. Cloud system software is a submarket ...
This IDC study examines the market share of container infrastructure software vendors in 2022 as well as the market forces that influenced their performances. Container infrastructure software is a submarket of the software-defined compute ...
This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of the virtual machine software (VMS) market in 2022 and a 2023–2027 forecast for this market. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for the total worldwide market. Virtual machine software ...
This IDC study examines the market share of virtual machine software vendors in 2022 as well as the market forces that influenced their performances. Virtual machine software is a submarket of the software-defined compute (SDC) software ...
This IDC study examines the market share of cloud system software vendors in 2022 as well as the market forces that influenced their performances. Cloud system software is a submarket of the software-defined compute (SDC) software functional ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) presents the overall market perspective on the software-defined compute market, which is made up of virtual machine software, container infrastructure software, and cloud system software. This MAP ...
This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of the container infrastructure software market in 2022 and a 2023–2027 forecast for this market. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for the total worldwide market. Container infrastructure ...
This IDC study provides a top-down sizing of the software-defined compute software market in 2022 and a 2023–2027 forecast. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown for the total worldwide market and forecast revenue data is broken ...
This IDC study examines the market share of software-defined compute software vendors in 2022 as well as the market forces that influenced their performances.
"Infrastructure continues to shift to modern platforms that use a cloud ...
This IDC TechBrief examines server-side WebAssembly (Wasm), a binary code environment that enables near-native code execution and portability irrespective of runtime (e.g., browser, server, edge) and/or application development language. ...
This IDC Market Note presents technology and business considerations for regulators reviewing Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and their concerns on potential anticompetitive behavior. IDC expects Broadcom's acquisition of VMware to happen; ...
This IDC Perspective is the fifth year of a "top OSS projects" report, and the candidates to be covered continues to grow. Whereas in the first three years, we covered five OSS projects, in 2022, we expanded that to 10 projects and categories ...
This IDC Perspective provides an in-depth review of Kubernetes security. Securing a Kubernetes environment is not like securing a virtualized collection of servers and applications. Kubernetes totally changes the rules of the software code ...
This IDC study presents IDC's top 10 predictions for the future of digital innovation for 2023 and beyond.
"If the pandemic didn't force an organization to pivot toward digital innovation, the multitude of current headwinds ranging ...
This IDC study provides IDC's 2022 top 10 predictions for the future of digital infrastructure.
"Digital infrastructure spans compute, storage, network, infrastructure software including virtualization and containers and the automation, ...
This IDC study presents IDC's top 10 predictions for the future of digital innovation for 2022 and beyond.
"One notable impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is that many enterprises now recognize that their ability to build innovative ...