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 study analyzes the worldwide archiving software market, which is made up of revenue from both on-premises archiving software and public cloud/SaaS-based archiving services. This study highlights the key trends impacting market growth, ...
This IDC PeerScape highlights the experiences that some organizations had while deploying container data and infrastructure management solutions and the knowledge they gained.
"To deploy critical applications in containers, organizations ...
Cloud-native ambitions run high among organizations. Organizations are under pressure to modernize their applications and utilize cloud and containers for innovation, but they are also struggling with when and how to migrate their VM-based ...
This IDC taxonomy document provides a detailed description of our storage and computing infrastructure software platforms research coverage. This taxonomy is made up of two core secondary markets, which are further broken down into six functional ...
This IDC Market Perspective provides an update on what defines an application as being cloud native from an infrastructure perspective. As cloud-native technology continues to grow in popularity, it is important to understand the main characteristics ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight provides insight into buyers’ intentions surrounding containerized application protection over the next two years based on IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 10, from November 2023. ...
This IDC study evaluates and highlights the most important criteria that differentiate prominent vendors providing container data management capabilities. Storage administrators need to be able to perform the same back-end tasks for container ...
This IDC study examines the 12 most prominent cyber-recovery vendors on a worldwide basis. Each has its unique market position, and this evaluation is intended to help IT buyers identify short-list candidates for the buyer's specific scenario ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) summarizes key demand and supply trends driving the storage software and operating systems and environments (OSEs) markets, which are components of the Storage and Computing Infrastructure Software ...
This IDC study analyzes the worldwide archiving software market, which is made up of revenue from both on-premises archiving software and public cloud/SaaS-based archiving services. This study highlights the key trends impacting archiving ...
This IDC study analyzes the worldwide archiving software market, which is made up of revenue from both on-premises archiving software and public cloud-/SaaS-based archiving services. This study highlights the key trends impacting market ...
This IDC study presents key figures and trends of the storage software forecast between 2022 and 2027 and highlights some of the main drivers and inhibitors the market will face.
"Demand for storage software remains high and will continue ...
This IDC study highlights some of the key findings and high-level trends IDC observed during 2022, with aggregated storage software results by vendor across the four functional markets. A more in-depth analysis of historical results by functional ...
This IDC Market Note discusses the launch of NetApp BlueXP, its notable features, and IDC's assessment of the product.
"Treating on-premises storage and cloud storage as separate silos needing their own separate management tools complicates ...
This IDC study provides a detailed description of our storage and computing infrastructure software platforms taxonomy. This taxonomy is made up of two core secondary markets, which are further broken down into five functional markets specifically ...
This IDC Market Perspective is the second piece to a series about data classification and its relationship to storage software. It looks into market conditions and what buyers will look for in a data classification solution.
IDC research ...
This IDC Market Note discusses the increased demand of having a data classification capability to combat data exfiltration and help organizations better leverage their data stores for modern workloads. It looks into where storage software ...
This IDC study describes the functional and competitive markets that make up cloud data logistics and protection. It also describes the adjacencies to other research and markets. Cloud data logistics and protection is an updated name for ...
Responding to a cyberattack requires IT (ITOps), security (SecOps), legal, and other stakeholders to act in a coordinated manner, but bringing such disparate entities together in the middle of a crisis is challenging. CYGNVS' (pronounced ...
SaaS application data is among the least protected data of all corporate data. Many SaaS vendors offer only minimal backup, restore, and retention capabilities. Yet SaaS apps are among the fastest-growing drivers of data creation. Backup ...
This IDC Perspective uses conclusions drawn from Data Center World 2022 and IDC's research to address the difficulties in hiring younger talent into IT infrastructure roles. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation have led to IT ...