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
Vendor Profile
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.
IDC Perspective
The IDC Perspective is a flexible doc that seeks to help business and tech buyers assess their business and IT strategy and/or associated business processes, especially as it relates to the use of technology. The document can be used in areas such as:
- Strategy and planning
- Trends and observations
- IT spending and investment
- Vendor conferences and announcements
IDC TechBrief
The IDC TechBrief helps the technology or business executive get smart about a single technology in the context of the business by answering 6 business critical questions about the technology:
- What is the technology?
- When should I adopt it?
- What can it do for my business?
- What are the critical success factors?
- What are the risks?
- Who are the suppliers?
Market Note
The Market Note is a flexible doc that provides IDC analysis and point of view on an industry event, new product or service, or a company announcement or development or fast breaking news.
Market Perspective
The Market Perspective is a flexible doc that analyzes key changes and developments happening in the market. This flexible research type can be used to analyze areas such as:
- Competitive Environment
- Innovation & Market Opportunity
- New Business Models
- Partner & Channel Strategy
- Enterprise Strategies (targeted to supplier)
- Regulation
- Socioeconomics
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
IDC Blink
IDC Blink
Provides timely context and insight around important market trends and events in a short opinion piece with a 2-minute audio clip. IDC Blinks provide IDC's point of view on:
- Financial announcements
- Product announcements
- Mergers and acquisitions or divestitures
- Events
- Response to news
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.
Presentations
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.
Market 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.
Tech Buyer 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.
IDC Market Glance
Provides a look at the landscape of a tech market, including competitive positioning, adjacent segments, and potential partner opportunities.
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
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 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 one-time study produced by a research group that is not published as a deliverable under a subscription service.
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.
IDC Innovators
IDC Innovators is aimed at informing IT buyers about emerging vendors with an innovative new technology or ground-breaking business model. Vendors identified in the document as innovators are linked together within a specific market area and around solving or alleviating a common business problem. Vendors included have annual revenue under $100 million at the time of selection.
Technology Segment
The IDC Technology Segment offers CEMA clients a comprehensive view of a technology segment in one country or subregion and provides a market view and forecast and/or market share and vendor profiles, including performances and strategies. It is specifically intended to serve smaller country markets and subregions.
This IDC study provides a competitive analysis of vendor market shares for the worldwide DevOps software tools market for CY23. For more details regarding this revised market definition, see the Market Definition section and refer to IDC's ...
IBM's earnings release for 2Q24 reported revenue of $15.8 billion (+4% y/y at cc) — the balance of this document will use constant currency growth unless otherwise noted. IBM generated free cash flow of $4.5 billion for the quarter. Overall, ...
This IDC study provides a detailed description of IDC's DevOps software tools market taxonomy. It is an update to the taxonomy published in August 2023, reflecting changes to functional market within IDC's Worldwide Security ...
This IDC Market Perspective discusses Broadcom's first mainframe software technology analyst conference in Boston, Massachusetts, from June 4 to –6. Key themes included modernizing mainframe software offerings, taking care of DevOps, data ...
This IDC Perspective highlights the transformative impact of AI, observability, and automation on digital infrastructure operations. It discusses how the shift toward intelligent, software-defined operations will drive modernization of ITOps ...
This IDC Perspective highlights business updates and insights shared by Broadcom's Mainframe Software leadership team during a recent analyst summit hosted in Boston in June 2024.
"Over the past six years, Broadcom has made significant ...
This IDC Perspective highlights key announcements from the Microsoft Build 2024 conference in May 2024. Significant advancements in AI were demonstrated at the event, including new tools and enhancements for Azure, copilot development, generative ...
On June 25, 2024, JFrog, best known for its flagship Artifactory repository solution and software supply chain security, announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Qwak AI Ltd., creators of an AI and MLOps platform, ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the adoption of Wardley Maps among application development teams using DevOps. With the rise of complex distributed application landscapes, organizations are turning to Wardley Maps for a strategic edge. ...
This IDC Pivot Table provides an update to DevOps and DevSecOps Merger and Acquisition Activity, 2011–2022 (IDC #US50124623, January 2023), adding merger and acquisition (M&A) ...
This IDC Market Perspective discusses the announcements made at Red Hat Summit 2024. The Summit 2024 included a bevy of announcements expanding the GenAI capabilities available in the Red Hat product portfolio.
"Red Hat Summit 2024 ...
This IDC Survey is an excerpt from IDC's 2024 DevOps Practices, Perceptions, and Tooling Survey that highlights a series of inquiries related to emerging DevOps automation practices, plans for generative AI (GenAI) in the DevOps pipeline, ...
This IDC Market Presentation is focused on the trends in the application development and testing market while providing insights on compute and storage infrastructure deployments for the development tools and applications workload, as well ...
This IDC TechBrief highlights the importance of API security in the current world.
"In today's interconnected world, APIs are the connections that make it work, with most of the internet traffic now being driven by API interactions," ...
On April 24, IBM announced its intent to acquire HashiCorp, a provider of multicloud infrastructure automation software, for $6.4 billion. This strategic move marks a significant step for IBM in strengthening its hybrid cloud automation ...
This IDC Market Note publishes a forecast for the number of total logical applications periodically, with this update extending the previously published forecast from 2025 to 2028.
"The industry's use of modern application development ...
This IDC Perspective details open source software (OSS) projects to watch in 2024. It highlights various projects in categories including application development, cloud application development, DevOps, DevSecOps, edge networking, GenAI application ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the impact of new GenAI workloads and digital infrastructure on the IT operations resource head count. GenAI is poised to revolutionize various facets of business operations, including IT operations.
"Despite ...
JetBrains, the Czech software company well known for software development tools such as IntelliJ IDEA and TeamCity, announced the beta release of a new CI/CD solution called TeamCity Pipelines. The existing TeamCity CI/CD solution was released ...
This IDC Survey is an excerpt from IDC's DevOps Practices, Perceptions, and Tooling Survey, 2024, that highlights a series of inquiries related to DevOps adoption, maturity of DevOps practices, connection to the business, DevOps ...
This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation provides details of 25 use cases that feature the intersection between generative AI technologies and software development. The software development use cases are categorized into the following 5 groups: ...
This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation highlights generative AI (GenAI) use case examples for the IT operations discipline. It is focused on 4 key pillars that are end-user experience, service performance, FinOps, and service automation with 17 ...
This IDC Market Note details announcements made at Dynatrace's annual customer conference, Perform 2024, and offers insight into the company's potential impact on the market.
This IDC Survey is an excerpt from IDC's DevOps Practices, Perceptions, and Tooling Survey, which highlights a series of questions related to internal developer platforms (IDPs) and platform engineering.
IDC's DevOps ...
This IDC PeerScape offers guidance for achieving success with open source software projects. It includes insights from industry veterans with deep expertise in managing successful open source software communities and initiatives.
"IDC ...