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.
On January 13, VMware announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger will leave the company to become the CEO of Intel, effective February 15. Current Intel CEO Bob Swan is stepping down after taking over the position, first as interim CEO for seven months ...
Quest Software is a leading provider of system management and database tools and utilities, including the Toad product line for database development and tuning, the SharePlex product for database replication, and the monitoring tools Foglight ...
Google's cloud-streamed gaming (CSG) service celebrated its first anniversary in November, and in the past week, it announced easier 30-minute free trials, iOS browser support, and four new games coming to its Pro subscription service in ...
The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as enterprises' responses to it, triggered urgent digital transformation efforts for agile workforces, contactless customer engagements, and automated business operations in 2020. ...
AWS announced public previews of managed service offerings for the popular Prometheus CNCF project and Grafana open source observability project during the virtual AWS re:Invent conference. In conjunction with the previously announced AWS ...
On December 17, 2020, Accenture reported its FY 1Q21 results, including $11.8 billion in quarterly revenue, a 4% YoY increase in U.S. dollar (USD) and 2% in local currency. The earnings call was led by Accenture's Chief Executive Officer ...
Splunk recently had its annual customer conference with a record 30,000 virtual attendees. There were several key product announcements at the event targeting DevOps, IT operations, and security teams. In addition, the company recently released ...
On December 10, 2020, Oracle announced its fiscal 2Q21 earnings. Here are the top financial highlights for the quarter (all growth rates are presented in constant currency terms):
- Total revenue for the first quarter was $9.8 billion, ...
PTC is acquiring 20-year-old Arena Solutions, the first public cloud SaaS PLM vendor in the market, to build upon its 2019 acquisition of SaaS CAD vendor Onshape. The combined offering will be, when integration is complete, one of the few ...
Cisco held the WebexOne event, its collaboration event, on December 8 and 9, 2020. Cisco's goal for Webex is to create a platform that provides 10x better experiences than in-person interactions. The event was held virtually, with Cisco ...
In announcing its agreement to acquire datacenter intent-based networking pioneer Apstra, Juniper Networks is seeking to accelerate realization of the self-driving network, with continuous network automation and validation designed to simplify ...
On December 9, 2020, HPE announced a new HPE GreenLake offering targeted at the high-performance computing (HPC) market. This is an important announcement for the leading vendor in the HPC infrastructure market to counter the migration to ...
Engineering giant Jacobs has bought a majority stake in veteran United Kingdom–based management consultancy PA Consulting. The combination of PA's business consulting acumen and Jacobs' immense capabilities in engineering services potentially ...
The lawsuit brought by the attorney generals of 48 states alleges monopolistic behavior on the part of Facebook and seeks a remedy as much as breaking out Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook, but does not quite succeed to present a smoking ...
On December 1, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several innovations, enabling the application of machine learning to video capture to improve operational processes. These promise to enable organizations to apply advanced analytics at ...
With cloud becoming the de facto engine for IT modernization, enterprises are evaluating it not just for net-new cloud-native applications but also to modernize core workloads such as SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server. By adding data ...
The modern data estate for any organization involved in digital transformation is getting more diverse, distributed, and dynamic, especially as we have seen an acceleration in the move to the cloud, driven by the COVID-19 global pandemic. ...
Red Hat and the CentOS Project Governing Board disclosed in a December 8, 2020, blog entry that they intend to focus investments in the CentOS Project almost exclusively on CentOS Stream as upstream work to the larger Red Hat Enterprise ...
VMware continues to offer customers options across product delivery models (i.e., on premises and SaaS) and flexible pricing models (subscription and perpetual). The company is meeting customers where their business and technology demands ...
A reform or repeal of Section 230, a liability waiver that was designed by congress to protect internet companies from litigation targeting potentially criminal content posted on their sites by users or other third parties, might affect ...
During the recent virtual AWS re:Invent customer symposium, AWS emphasized the role that digital infrastructure and software-driven innovation plays in helping businesses to disrupt and reinvent themselves. Recognizing that many customers ...
On December 1, 2020, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced 4Q20 financial results. The company reported that fourth quarter total net revenue growth in constant currency was flat YoY at $7.2 billion. This concluded four consecutive ...
ServiceNow have been rapidly expanding its AI capabilities and footprint organically on the Now Platform and through previous acquisitions of Loom Systems, Passage AI, Attivio, and others. With the announced acquisition of Element AI, ServiceNow, ...
Underscoring the importance of enterprise collaboration, Slack (NYSE: WORK), who made channel-based messaging easy and popular has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), it was announced today. The deal, ...
In mid-November, Adobe announced its intention to acquire work management and project and portfolio management (PPM) provider Workfront for $1.5 billion. The acquisition will augment its Adobe Experience Cloud and broadly adopted Adobe Creative ...
To help streamline the flow of work and minimize application switching, Asana (NYSE:ASAN) announced new and improved integrations including those for Atlassian Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. As productivity hinges more on smooth ...
On November 19, Workday announced its third-quarter results for the current financial year. Total revenues were $1.11 billion, which was a strong increase of 17.9% from the third quarter of the previous fiscal year. This robust double-digit ...
On November 12, Cisco announced its fiscal year 2021 first-quarter earnings, which align to the calendar year third quarter of 2020. The company reported revenue of $11.9 billion, a decline of 9% year over year (y/y), and net income of $2.2 ...
IBM's recent announcement of plans to acquire Chicago-based Instana adds important SaaS and on-premises observability coverage for cloud-native workloads to the company's growing Watson AIOps portfolio. Instana brings IBM agent-based visibility ...
On November 5, IBM announced a broad range of partners for its recently launched IBM Cloud for Telecommunications. IBM's goal is to differentiate its unified architecture by facilitating an open platform with broad industry support to enable ...
Khoros, the platform built from the merger of Lithium communities and Spredfast social media management and marketing, announced an array of new and useful features in its autumn 2020 release. These are designed to help brands improve human ...
Dell Technologies data protection portfolio go to market has sometimes been a double-edged sword: numerous products with broad capabilities able to address nearly any need, but a portfolio that led to product overlap and buyer confusion. ...
IBM announced 3Q20 revenue and operating gross margin performance that was fairly consistent with the dynamics that the company began to experience in the second quarter. The most significant comments related to IBM's announcement on October ...
During the recent virtual Cisco Partner Summit, the company launched a broad effort to simplify and transform its datacenter and cloud management software portfolio with the introduction of its vision for creating agile platforms for IT ...
On November 10, HP Inc. unveiled the LaserJet M200, OfficeJet Pro 8025e/8035e, and OfficeJet Pro 9015e/9025e series. More significantly, HP Inc. debuted HP+ with these product introductions that bring new levels of a simple, seamless, and ...
On October 27, Juniper Networks announced third-quarter net revenue of nearly $1.14 billion, up slightly year over year (y/y) and an increase of 5% sequentially. Juniper's GAAP operating margin was 11.0%, a decrease from 12.2% in 3Q19 and ...
Adobe presented its annual creativity conference, Adobe MAX 2020, entirely online in a virtual setting, with live sessions taking place over three days starting on October 20. Even under the unusual circumstances introduced by the COVID-19 ...
ServiceNow's third quarter of 2020 was another strong quarter, with key results including:
- Subscription revenue of $1,091 million, representing 31% year‑over‑year growth, 29% adjusted for constant currency
- 41 transactions ...
Commvault has extended its cloud data protection services — Metallic Backup-as-a-Service — to Europe with immediate availability in the U.K. and Ireland, Benelux, the Nordics, Italy, and Israel. The SaaS data protection service is engineered ...
On October 29, 2020, Google's parent company Alphabet announced its financial results for 3Q20. In this earnings link, Alphabet and Google are used interchangeably when referring to the company. The earnings announcements saw a return to ...
On October 26, Medallia and Visier announced a collaboration to provide HR and people analytics managers with a comprehensive view of the employee, bringing together in a single platform both Visier's operational people data and Medallia's ...
On October 29, Apple announced its fiscal 4Q20 results, with revenue growing to $64.7 billion, representing 1% year-over-year (YoY) growth. For the full fiscal year, the company reached $274.5 billion. Apple pushed its new iPhone launches ...
BMC used the recent virtual BMC Exchange 2020 customer event to showcase how it continues to modernize its Service Management, IT Operations Management, Workload Automation, and Mainframe software portfolios for the digital era. Leading ...
Coupa has announced the acquisition of LLamasoft — a provider of AI-powered supply chain design and planning solutions. The acquisition further extends Coupa's existing direct and supply chain capabilities for procurement, treasury, and ...
On October 19, 2020, Juniper Networks announced its intention to acquire 128 Technology, a start-up in the enterprise branch routing and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) market. Incorporating the 128 Technology into the Juniper ...
The Citrix business model transition clearly accelerated in the third quarter; the company will finish with 85–90% of total bookings coming from subscription bookings in the fourth quarter. The company raised the midpoint of its revenue ...