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 Health Insights Pivot Table provides an overview of trends and forecasts for IT spending by healthcare providers in Central and Eastern Europe between 2016 and 2020, with 2015 as the base year.
This downloadable pivot table ...
This IDC study introduces the concept of self-directed organizations as an alternative to traditional hierarchical, command-control structures in the face of increasing business volatility. It introduces practices aimed at helping CIOs and ...
This IDC study outlines the definition of this service and provides insights on what the offering should include from a hardware, software, and services perspective.
"IDC sees the adoption of on-premise utility and as-a-service consumption ...
This IDC Perspective discusses key risk indicators for digital security.
"The digital security world is constantly dealing with the negative reactions from massive data breaches," said Pete Lindstrom, VP of Security Strategies. "It's ...
This IDC Health Insights Perspective discusses the impact of the 2016 election results on value-based health. With 2016 election results still being evaluated and while cabinet members are being proposed, IDC Health Insights does not believe ...
Over time, analytics and information management (AIM) technology adopted for IoT will be different from an organization's existing technology investments that performs a similar, but less time-sensitive or data volume–intensive function. ...
This IDC study provides a framework for successfully implementing a data security program. To that end, enterprises should adopt a formal approach toward identifying and assessing the risks to corporate data assets. By taking a systematic ...
This IDC Manufacturing Insights Perspective provides a quarterly update that analyzes the business environment and trends for the worldwide manufacturing sector in 2Q16 and the current situation. This document includes trends in the manufacturing ...
This IDC study provides a systematic assessment of technologies related to customer experience in manufacturing. The IDC TechScape is an evaluation based on a comprehensive framework and a set of parameters that assess vendors relative to ...
This IDC PeerScape aims to help CIOs and production and supply-chain leaders understand the issues that their CEE manufacturing peers have faced during implementations of robot systems, and to formulate effective strategies to augment their ...
This IDC study presents a framework for how IT organizations should start to think about integrating multiple types of management platforms for disparate end-user computing technologies — from endpoint devices and applications (both mobile ...
This IDC study provides actionable advice for customer interaction leaders and their counterparts in IT who need to understand the impending demands on their customer service and support capabilities. Organizations will be faced with requirements ...
This IDC Energy Insights Presentation provides an analysis of the strategies and priorities in place within the South African mining industry. This Presentation looks at the business drivers and operational drivers that South African mining ...
This IDC Financial Insights report discusses the opportunities and challenges that financial firms face in using the Ethereum platform. Blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) are gaining momentum in financial services and other ...
This IDC Health Insights report explores the scenarios and solutions offered by product life-cycle management (PLM) software to life science companies. PLM software has gained widespread acceptance in many industries, first as an innovation ...
This IDC Perspective reports on the results from a recent survey on the experiences of users in adopting Hadoop and NoSQL technologies and bringing them into production. It includes views regarding challenges and best practices and includes ...
This IDC FutureScape provides the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) regional context for the IDC Health Insights worldwide predictions for healthcare. It provides healthcare executives with a road map for the next 36 months that prioritizes ...
This IDC study is part of a three-part series that focuses on IT product management roles that a have critical influence in the innovation phase of a product life cycle.
"The new IT product management role revolves around understanding ...
This IDC Perspective is part 1 of a multiple-part series that focuses on the digital transformation objectives with which IT organizations must align. This document explores the results of IDC's 2016 CIO Sentiment Survey to ...
This IDC study discusses the recently ratified IEEE 802.3bz Ethernet standard, which represents Ethernet switch port speeds of 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps. This study analyzes the high level business case for adoption of this technology and the considerations ...
This IDC Perspective is part 4 of a multiple-part series that focuses on the digital transformation objectives with which IT organizations must align. This document explores the results of IDC's 2016 CIO Sentiment Survey to ...
This IDC study discusses the evolving state of modern PaaS environments and focuses on the deployment-centric style of PaaS, which provides abstraction of infrastructure resources to run standardized programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, ...
This IDC Manufacturing Insights Perspective examines SAP's recent best practices conference for the consumer products industry.
Back in October, I had the opportunity to attend the SAP-sponsored event Best Practices for Consumer ...
This IDC Perspective provides an overview of the U.K. manufacturing market and its developments, including the major industry subsectors as well as the challenges that manufacturers and the government are facing.
This IDC study discusses current views about mainframe inclusion as part of DevOps and the consequences of a lack of visibility and coordination between legacy systems and "modern" development including mobile systems of engagement. The ...