Whole Cloud Strategies

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Meet the Experts

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Dave McCarthy

Research Vice President, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services

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Lara Greden

Research Director, Platform as a Service (PaaS)

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Rick Villars

Group Vice President Worldwide Research



IDC's Whole Cloud Strategies is a unique research service that provides a "rolled up" view of the entire cloud services market. It presents IDC's freshest thinking on the "complete" cloud services opportunity, including the implications of hybrid cloud applications, "multicloud" architectures, private cloud delivered in different deployment models, and extending cloud to the edge. It provides a wide-angle complement to other IDC research programs that provide drilldown views of specific cloud markets and topics such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, private clouds, and edge. This program analyzes how quickly cloud services are being adopted across customer segments and the organizational barriers to faster adoption. It also details key customer expectations about cloud benefits/concerns as well as forecasts how cloud will impact vendor business models and service offerings.


Markets and Subjects Analyzed


  • The "whole cloud" opportunity — public clouds and private clouds and enabling hardware, software, and services
  • The cumulative IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud services market
  • Cloud user spending and partnering intentions
  • Cloud services adoption and use cases
  • Usage behaviors of public cloud services customers
  • New business models for the implementation of cloud services, including licensing, pricing, and delivery models as well as budgeting/governance implications for customers
  • Changing the competitive landscape for ICT hardware, software, and service providers in a cloud-centric market
  • Comparison of level of competitiveness within different segments of the market and the synergies between these segments

Core Research


  • Worldwide "Whole Cloud" Forecast
  • Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services Forecast
  • Worldwide and Regional Hosted Private Cloud Services Forecast
  • Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Hardware Forecast
  • Worldwide Public Cloud Competitive Landscape
  • IDC MarketScape for Worldwide IaaS
  • Cloud Services Definitions and Taxonomy
  • Cloud User Survey Findings and Analysis
  • Vendor Strategy Briefs Driven by Events and Announcements

In addition to the insight provided in this service, IDC may conduct research on specific topics or emerging market segments via research offerings that require additional IDC funding and client investment.


Key Questions Answered


  1. How big are the opportunities emerging around the cloud model: public cloud services, hosted private cloud services, providing hardware and software for cloud services, and managed and professional services around the cloud?
  2. What are the largest IT public cloud services opportunities?
  3. What are the emerging customer deployment models, including private, public, local cloud, and multicloud?
  4. Which customer segments will quickly adopt cloud services and for which apps/workloads?
  5. What are the leading vendors providing in terms of cloud services, and how are vendor communities converging?
  6. How are customer usage patterns/preferences in leading public IaaS/PasS environments evolving?
  7. How is cloud investment affecting organizations' investments in traditional IT and legacy systems?
  8. How will cloud impact hardware, software, and SaaS vendor business models and service offerings?
  9. What are the key benefits and challenges driving/inhibiting cloud services adoption?
  10. How are development and deployment architectures evolving to include serverless containers and microservices in application architectures?

Companies Covered