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 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 study provides a comprehensive overview of and definitions for servers and enterprise storage in the context of IDC's ODM Direct infrastructure and supply chain research, including IDC's Service Provider Infrastructure Supply Chain ...
This IDC study provides a comprehensive overview of and definitions for the compute infrastructure market in the context of IDC's Computing Systems, Platforms and Technologies CIS as well as the Quarterly Server Tracker. ...
This IDC study provides a comprehensive overview of and definitions for compute and storage infrastructure in the context of IDC's service provider infrastructure research, including the Service Provider Adoption Trends and Strategies CIS ...
This IDC Market Presentation offers an overview of the worldwide server market and related trends as of the fourth quarter of 2023. Detailed results were released on March 7, 2024, in IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker and on March ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight provides a perspective on how IT buyers are evaluating function accelerators for their infrastructure in the next 12–24 months. With Broadcom (VMware) now providing native supporting several DPUs in vSphere cost ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight provides insights into what types of workload accelerators customers are planning to deploy as well as the key reasons for those choices. In November 2023, IDC conducted a survey of companies worldwide to evaluate ...
This IDC Perspective explores how the computational and data management demands of emerging GenAI and other next-generation emerging workloads are being served by a new generation of fit-for-purpose processors, accelerators, storage platforms, ...
NVIDIA's 2024 GTC AI Conference kicked off with a keynote from CEO Jensen Huang packed with product, technology, platform, and partner announcements and demonstrations. At the center of it all was the company's newest GPU-based Blackwell ...
This IDC Perspective discusses IDC's Future of Digital Infrastructure framework, updated for 2024, that provides enterprise decision-makers with an updated view on how emerging innovations and disruptions across the digital infrastructure ...
On February 21, 2024, Arm, a leading global semiconductor design company, announced the launch of two new Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) built on its third-generation Neoverse IP dubbed Neoverse S3: Neoverse CSS V3, which is the first ...
This IDC Market Presentation offers an overview of the worldwide service provider infrastructure market and related trends from 3Q23. Detailed results were released on January 11, 2024, in IDC's Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure ...
This IDC study provides historical data (2018–2022) and forecast data (2023–2027) for the worldwide server market. 2023 data includes historical data for the first half of the year. The forecast and historical data illustrate IT buyer consumption ...
This IDC study provides historical data (2018–2022) and forecast data (2023–2027) for the worldwide and U.S. external enterprise storage systems (ESSs) market. This forecast represents an annual view of the quarterly forecast released in ...
This IDC Market Presentation offers an overview of the worldwide server market and related trends as of the third quarter of 2023. Detailed results were released on December 5, 2023, in IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker and on December ...
This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation provides suggestions for leveraging key technologies available in the market today that will help improve the efficiency of compute infrastructure or servers. This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation begins with ...
This IDC study provides an overview of the market size and forecast for global spending on enterprise infrastructure to power enterprise workloads. Suppliers of server and storage systems, cloud service providers that offer infrastructure ...
This IDC Market Glance provides an overview of the current small form factor (SFF) computing systems market landscape, describes the structure and segments of the market, and illustrates the vendors participating in each segment.
As cloud service providers look to build more differentiation in their offerings, investments in custom silicon are increasing. Microsoft has joined this trend by announcing its own CPU and GPU designs, intended to provide Azure customers ...
This IDC study discusses worldwide edge enterprise infrastructure forecast for 2023–2027. Edge IT is the deployment of IT resources at peripheral or edge locations relative to where an organization's central or core IT is located. The term ...
This IDC study provides IDC's top 10 predictions for the future of digital infrastructure for 2024.
"The digital infrastructure ecosystem will be heavily impacted by GenAI in the coming years," explains Mary Johnston Turner, research ...
At Intel Innovation, the chip maker announced ways in which the company will tackle AI and related workloads holistically, not just through GPU advancements. From advanced CPUs, materials, and packaging to development platforms, much needed ...
This IDC Market Presentation offers an overview of the worldwide server market and related trends as of the second quarter of 2023. Detailed results were released on September 7, 2023, in IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker and on September ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) summarizes key demand and supply trends driving the service provider infrastructure and ODM Direct market for compute and storage technologies. The MAP includes market forecast and vendor data, ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) summarizes key demand and supply trends driving the core and edge computing platforms market, with servers being the largest segment of analysis. The MAP includes market forecast and vendor data, ...