IDC Quanta launched this year with over 175 customers across the beta program: CIOs, analyst relations and communications leaders, and technology strategists who spent months telling IDC exactly what they needed.
That’s not the usual way an intelligence platform gets built. Most AI tools ship first and adjust later. IDC Quanta did the opposite, and the difference shows up in how customers describe using it.
Months of beta testing
Nick Gartner, Director of Digital Product Management at IDC, led the beta program from the ground up, handling recruiting, communications, reporting, and every round of testing in between. He described a deliberate, expanding process that ran all the way through to general availability.
Each round fed directly into the next. The goal, Gartner explained, was never to build something because it followed a trend. It was to build something people would use every day, one that made IDC’s research easier to reach and easier to act on.
That approach is baked into how IDC Quanta works today. It’s described as the technology intelligence fabric of the AI-enabled enterprise: IDC’s structured, sourced, and defensible research, built for over 60 years, now living inside the tools where work already happens instead of requiring one more portal and one more login.
What customers kept naming: Time
Across every round of beta feedback, one theme surfaced more than any other: with more than 1,000 analysts publishing continuously, it often took a lot of time to find and digest the exact data and research customers needed. Customers said they were regularly spending a week or two working through lengthy reports just to get to the specific insight they were looking for.
Gartner put it plainly: people needed to get to trusted intelligence faster, and IDC Quanta was built to close that gap. Instead of just retrieving research, it acts more like an always-available IDC consultant. Customers can question it, reason through options with it, and even upload their own business documents for a side-by-side comparison against IDC’s data.
One beta customer, Mark Terranova of Kyndryl, told IDC that work which used to take weeks now takes minutes. Beta customers across industries, from technology providers to hospitality, said something similar: the same research now takes hours instead of the week or two it used to consume.
A platform build only on verified data
That speed opened up room for a wider set of use cases. Ask customers what they use IDC Quanta for and the answers span the map: competitive intelligence, vendor landscape analysis, market sizing, technology adoption research, and benchmarking their own internal documents against IDC’s data.
IDC Quanta doesn’t search the open web, and it doesn’t learn from anything customers upload. Every response is grounded in verified IDC research, and every answer can be traced back to its source. For leaders who need to defend a recommendation in a boardroom, that traceability is the reason they can act on what the platform tells them.
Phillip Langeberg, CTO of The Resorts Companies, Inc., described that confidence directly:
“An AI platform backed by the knowledge and research of IDC gives me a lot more confidence in the answers provided.”
Eric Walk, VP of AI and Data Platform Services at Perficient, framed it as the entire point of the tool:
“The ability to ask a question and get an insight that’s backed by specific, referenceable research is really the key to the tool.”
And for some customers, the value went beyond confidence: it changed how they thought about what was even possible. Ashley Spicer, CIO of Amarok, put it this way:
“We are getting ridiculous, previously unimaginable value from IDC Quanta. If you had told me 20 years ago that I would have access to something like this in my lifetime, I would have said no way.”
Watching the reaction in real time
Gartner said the moment IDC Quanta’s value became undeniable wasn’t in a spreadsheet of feedback scores. It was in a room. He demoed the platform live to IDC’s CIO Executive Council Advisory Board and again to attendees at IDC’s CIO event in New York, walking senior IT leaders through their own real-world use cases in real time.
The reaction, he said, was immediate: people started using it and simply kept going. After using the platform, Jolene Peixoto, VP of Corporate Communications at RELEX, described it as:
“One of the most intuitive and useful AI tools I’ve seen across analyst research portals.”
A better way to work
It would be easy to describe IDC Quanta purely as a faster way to get answers. That undersells it. The deeper shift is in how people work day to day, with IDC’s research embedded directly in email, in Anthropic’s Claude, and in the custom AI tools and workflows enterprises are already building, with no new login and no new habit to learn.
That’s also where the human side of IDC hasn’t gone anywhere. Every session includes a direct path to contact an IDC analyst, something most AI research platforms skip entirely. When a customer wants to go deeper than an AI-generated answer, they can schedule time with the expert who knows the subject, based on the exact data they were just looking at.
What happens now that it’s live
Gartner was clear that the listening doesn’t stop at general availability. IDC built IDC Quanta on months of direct customer feedback, and every future feature will start the same way, with customers telling IDC’s product team what to build next.
For teams still evaluating whether an AI research platform can be trusted, that’s the difference these customers kept coming back to: not the AI itself, but what’s behind it. What’s behind it is 60 years of verified, sourced IDC intelligence, already showing up in customers’ inboxes and inside Claude.
Want the full story straight from the person who ran the beta program? Watch our complete conversation with Nick Gartner on the IDC Quanta beta, launch, and what’s next.
IDC Quanta is available now. Visit the IDC Quanta page to see it for yourself, or reach out to schedule a walkthrough with your team.
