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
Flash
Provides rapid IDC insight and analysis about a significant industry event or conference, merger or acquisition, product announcement, or other fast-breaking news affecting the IT market.
Forecast Update
Provides a short, quick look at an updated forecast and the changed assumptions behind the update. It updates a market forecast published in the same calendar year, identifies changed and key forecast assumptions, and highlights actions for participants to consider in light of the changes.
IDC Insight
Provides coverage and analysis of an industry event, new product or service, or a company announcement or development.
Update
Provides brief overview coverage of what is happening in a market.
Vendor Profiles
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.
Daily Graphics
Daily Graphic
Illustrates IDC's keen analysis of major market trends in downloadable PowerPoints. Available as a free download the day it appears, an IDC Daily Graphic provides valuable material for speeches and strategic planning.
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
Insights-only Research
Best Practices
Correlates the use of specific practices and superior performance as indicated by an analysis of the benchmarking database. Highlights any significant differences between industries. Conclusions provide a set of process priorities for improving a business case and advice on how to overcome change management issues.
Business Strategy
Helps buyers to assess their business strategies and/or associated business processes, especially as they relate to the use of technology.
Methods and Practices
Provides a step-by-step description of a method or methods that can be applied. As appropriate, the report may compare the benefits and drawbacks of several methods.
Perspective
Presents an article written by an Insights analyst on a topic of special interest to a target audience. This information has generally already appeared in an industry publication and is repackaged for display on the Insights Web site.
Vendor Assessment
Helps buyers select the right IT supplier. The report helps buyers understand the various providers of a technology by providing analysis on market landscape, vendor profiles, vendor market share, and vendor assessments.
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.
Predictions
Top 10 Predictions
Provides bold, well-conceived market predictions grounded in solid methodologies, primary research, and analyst experience. Lays out a clear road map to understanding major market opportunities and trends.
Presentations
IDC Presentation
Provides the latest, select CIS forecast data, primary research survey findings, and critical IDC analyst opinion in a succinct, easy-to-digest PowerPoint format.
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.
Insights 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.
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
Competitive Analysis
Provides a detailed accounting and review of a vendor's programs, processes, products, service, satisfaction, and/or strategy in a target market. This knowledge helps clients reduce their risk of losing market share or enhance their position over the competition.
Customer Needs and Strategies
Focuses on the important decisions that business and IT professionals make every day.
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 Analysis
Provides an in-depth examination of the dynamics and future of a single market or a group of related markets. The Market Analysis is where we will typically present our forecasts and assumptions, using a key forecast assumptions table.
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 onetime study produced by a research group that is not published as a deliverable under a subscription service.
Survey
Provides a study and interpretation of the results of a demand- or supply-side survey.
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.
Vendor Needs and Strategies
Provides an in-depth analysis of a company, a small group of companies, a division of a company focused on a particular market, or a best practice that the company exemplifies.
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective discusses the current state and outlook of the worldwide artificial intelligence (AI) market. As organizations look to accelerate their AI adoption journey and gain sustainable competitive advantage, ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) summarizes key demand and supply trends driving the storage software market. The MAP includes market forecast (2018–2023) and vendor share data (2018), as well as a discussion of technology buyer ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) summarizes IDC insights and data on technologies, industry dynamics, and trends influencing the digital commerce software market. This MAP presentation was designed to give clients the opportunity ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides enterprise content technology vendors with an overview of the content management, sharing, collaboration, capture, and customer communications ecosystem. This document presents the information ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) provides a view of the worldwide content delivery networks (CDN) market. The MAP presentation is designed to provide clients the opportunity to engage with IDC's CDN analysts on the key issues impacting ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective analyzes the state of the market for persuasive content management software and includes commentary on market drivers and trends in website software, digital asset management, product information management, ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) examines the IT service management and virtual client computing markets as they continue their divergence between a more traditional approach based on existing approaches and an "AI-first" approach ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) summarizes key demand and supply trends driving the core and edge computing platforms market. The MAP includes market forecast (2019–2023) and vendor share data, as well as a discussion of technology ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides a general overview of the worldwide application life-cycle services. Industry factors that are examined include a look at modern application delivery and traditional application services markets, ...
This IDC Market Presentation discusses recent research that asked North American channel partners about their use of distributors. The results demonstrated the importance of the services that distributors provide to the channel. Distributor ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight focuses on the investment plans of U.K. government agencies. This IDC Survey Spotlight is based IDC's European Vertical Markets Survey, 2H18. It provides a view on how spending is anticipated to change over ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight examines results from IDC's 2019 Multicloud Survey, which collected responses from 664 European organizations for both multicloud (332 respondents) and non-multicloud users (332 respondents). The purpose ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight highlights and analyzes the biggest challenges Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) (APEJ) organizations face regarding Big Data and analytics.
The survey results are tabulated from IDC's annual 2019 ...
This IDC Market Presentation includes results from the European Edge Computing Launchpad research. It focuses on the edge computing vendor landscape, particularly in Europe. The scope of the study is to assess how edge computing players ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) examines the DevOps competitive market for 2019. Modern technologies and market pressure are helping drive DevOps adoption. This is changing the way software applications are delivered to the marketplace. ...
This IDC Survey discusses the results of the IDC U.S. Enterprise Mobility team's survey of 501 United States-based enterprises (firms with 1,000+ employees) to gauge levels of adoption of enterprise mobility, mobility management, and unified ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current state and outlook of the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) software platforms market. As an innovation accelerator market, analysis of artificial intelligence ...
This IDC Survey examines the spending intentions and behaviors of buyers of analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and intelligent automation services. It includes data taken from respondents' answers to questions about a range of issues, ...
This IDC Market Presentation includes results from the European Edge Computing Launchpad research. It focuses on the edge computing vendor landscape, with particular attention to Europe. The scope of the study is threefold: assess the current ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight looks at the impact of data security on European organizations' investment preferences when deciding on infrastructure systems to store their data.
As many European enterprises execute on their digital transformation ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight looks at the key data management and data services challenges faced by European enterprises compared with last year. The survey also explores which data services challenges have risen in complexity and why. This ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides an overview of the worldwide cloud management software CIS, which reviews trends, competitors, and growth opportunities across public, private, multicloud, and hybrid cloud management software ...
This IDC Presentation summarizes the worldwide storage software and basic storage (public cloud IaaS) market performance during the second calendar quarter of 2019 (2Q19). It also provides select historical and forecast data, along with ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides a general overview of buyer needs and provider requirements for the HR, talent, and learning software and services markets. This document provides insights into key buyer requirements and offers ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides a view of the worldwide travel and expense software market. It is designed to summarize key trends driving the industry and provide clients with an opportunity to engage with IDC analysts on ...