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.
VMware announced their financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2020. Revenue for the third quarter was $2.46 billion, an increase of 12% from the third quarter of fiscal 2019. License revenue for the third quarter was $974 ...
Nokia is under pressure after cutting its profit outlook during its 3Q19 earnings call and pausing its dividend payout for the next six months. During its annual Global Analyst Forum, the vendor shared how it intends to move forward from ...
This IDC Link provides a summary of the MEF19 event and key observations related to the development of SD-WAN. MEF19 underscored the need for further development of industrywide interoperability standards to achieve the goal of global services ...
When most companies start with a free videoconferencing solution to establish themselves in the market, 8x8 (NYSE: EGHT) is going the other way. Already an established vendor in the global voice, video, collaboration, and contact center ...
For the most part, companies need to evolve in order to survive. If they don't, they risk irrelevance and nowhere is this truer than in the technology marketplace. Evolution can be organic or inorganic, and increasingly, technology suppliers ...
Episerver's acquisition of Idio, an AI-based B2B personalization vendor, significantly strengthens Episerver's value proposition for enterprise B2B brands and accelerates Episerver's delivery on its commitment to personalization as a key ...
During the 2019 edition of Microsoft Ignite, the company introduced Azure Arc to provide Azure “services anywhere” by extending the Azure control plane across on-premises and public cloud platforms. Azure Arc provides connections to the ...
Splunk recently held its annual customer conference, .conf19, in Las Vegas, where over 11,000 attendees from I&O, DevOps, security, and analytics teams gathered to hear more about Splunk's new positioning as the "Data-to-Everything" ...
VMware acquired CloudHealth in August 2018 to provide customers with a SaaS platform for multicloud cost transparency, governance, optimization, and analytics. CloudHealth, which is its own business unit at VMware, recently held its customer ...
At its recent BMC Exchange, BMC Software introduced a new, modernized vision for the convergence of its traditionally independent IT operations management (ITOM) and IT service management (ITSM) solutions. The announcement was new CEO Ayman ...
In IDC's annual FutureScape predictions (see IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2020 Predictions, IDC #US45599219, October 2019), we predicted that there will ...
SAP has been in the news quite a bit the last few weeks with several changes in executive leadership. The SAP 3Q19 earnings announcement makes the transition easier as the company reported substantial operating margin expansion and increased ...
At Splunk's annual customer show, the company took a major next step in its evolution by positioning the entire Splunk portfolio as the "Data to Everything" Platform. Characteristics of the new platform include the ability to ingest and ...
Digital Realty Trust and Interxion announced they have entered into an agreement to combine their businesses, greatly expanding Digital Realty's presence in key European locations and accelerating competition with Equinix in the interconnection ...
PTC's acquisition of Onshape for SaaS, cloud CAD comes at a time when cloud-based engineering software remains under 10% of the overall enterprise application cloud market yet accelerating considerably at an 18% CAGR. The move is an aggressive, ...
ASG Technologies hosted its third annual customer conference, EVOLVE19, on October 21-23, 2019, in Dallas, Texas. With the theme of "see the future," ASG previewed its latest developments in content services with the new cloud-based digital ...
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) held its 2019 Securities Analyst Meeting in New York on October 23 and President and CEO Antonio Neri took the occasion to lay out his vision for the company that is transitioning into an "edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service ...
This IDC Link discusses the market implications of Automation Anywhere's (AA) cloud-native RPA platform, Enterprise A2019. IDC attended AA's EMEA launch on October 18, 2019, where we spoke with co-founder Rushabh Parmani and other executives. ...
John Donahoe has led ServiceNow for nearly three years as CEO and is leaving by the end of the year to become . He has been a member of Nike's board since 2014. Donahoe has made a significant impact on ServiceNow, growing the market capitalization ...
IBM's third-quarter overall revenue declined modestly. But under the covers, the company continued to ramp up its high-growth, cloud-centric product and services portfolio; brought Red Hat into its portfolio and strategy; and continued to ...
Business Technology Platform, Cloud Data Fabric, and Intelligent Automation were among the most frequently discussed topics during the executive talks and analyst sessions at SAP TechEd 2019 in Barcelona, surpassing S/4 HANA, the usual suspect. ...
All good things must come to an end, but for SAP, the ending may be securing the future with the change of guard from Bill McDermott as SAP CEO to co-CEOs Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein.
At the McAfee MPOWER 2019 user conference, executives unveiled a streamlined and tightly integrated set of cloud-native data security and threat detection and prevention capabilities designed to reduce the complexity of managing sensitive ...