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 worldwide market forecast for SD-WAN infrastructure, including regional geographic segmentation, for the period from 2024 to 2028. It also includes historical SD-WAN infrastructure market data for 2019 through 2023. ...
This IDC Survey Spotlight presents telcos' strategy for multi-access edge computing (MEC) solutions to their enterprise customers. It contains data from IDC's May 2024 Telecom DX Survey, based on responses from 100 telco operators ...
This IDC study presents a forecast for the worldwide 5G and 4G/LTE enterprise wireless WAN market for the 2024–2028 period.
"The enterprise wireless WAN marked continued to demonstrate multiyear resiliency and growth in 2023. Continued ...
This IDC study examines the worldwide private LTE/5G wireless infrastructure market for 2024–2028.
"The private 4G/LTE market is expected to remain resilient over the next few years, particularly in verticals (e.g., utilities) where ...
Datacenter networking, driven by explosive growth in the GenAI/AI and the need for faster interconnect inside datacenter and intra-datacenter, has become a new frontier for the optical networking industry. Nokia's strategic move to acquire ...
This IDC study presents the worldwide market forecast for carrier routing network equipment for 2023–2028. Carrier routing network equipment sales to carrier SPs is forecast to grow from $12.56 billion in 2023 to $14.96 billion by the end ...
This IDC study reviews the worldwide service provider router market for 2023.
"Communications service providers worldwide continue to upgrade their network to add capacity and support new and emerging applications. The overall carrier ...
This IDC study provides a view of worldwide SD-WAN infrastructure market shares by vendor, covering both hardware and software revenue.
"As organizations across the globe look to compete — and thrive — in the AI era, they're increasingly ...
This IDC Market Glance provides an overview of the current telecom network infrastructure landscape, describes the structure and segments of the market, and illustrates the vendors participating in each segment.
Generative AI (Gen AI)/artificial intelligence (AI) has created tremendous excitement in the optical networking industry, which is propelled by the need for higher speed, lower latency, and higher bandwidth solutions for datacenter and service ...
This IDC Market Presentation illustrates five key trends in telecom network infrastructure in 2024. 5G maturity, private cellular, cloud-native deployment, optical network innovation, and GenAI will be shaping 2024.
This IDC study presents the worldwide market forecast for telco cloud infrastructure software (NFVI, VNF, and CNF) for the 2023–2027 period.
"The adoption of cloud-native network functions (CNFs) is slowly gaining momentum and is deployed ...
This IDC Market Perspective offers an analysis on the impact of generative AI on the service provider's broadband network infrastructure due to additional bandwidth requirements and new traffic patterns to support various use cases. It also ...
This IDC Market Glance provides an overview of the telecommunications ecosystem, including hardware and software vendors, IT infrastructure providers, network service providers, cloud communications platforms, managed service providers, ...
This IDC study provides a five-year forecast for the worldwide 5G network infrastructure market for the 2023–2027 period.
"The overall mobile network infrastructure market is expected to slightly decline over the forecast period as ...
This IDC study provides a view of worldwide SD-WAN infrastructure market shares by vendor, covering both hardware and software revenue.
"The era of the hyper-distributed enterprise — where workers can be anywhere and applications are ...
While Oracle's telecom business has traditionally been driven by the company's solution sets in OSS/BSS, policy, network core, and session routing, the company is now shifting to address the next wave of telecom challenges including cloud-scale ...
This IDC Market Perspective covers the fast-developing network API ecosystem and seeks to answer key questions related to how the ecosystem is developing and who is shaping it. In addition, this document covers our thoughts on key consortia, ...
This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) provides a view of the worldwide carrier network infrastructure market. It is designed to summarize key trends driving the industry and provide clients with an opportunity to engage with IDC's analysts ...
VMware held its annual customer and partner event, Explore, in Las Vegas on August 21-24, 2023. The event centered around predictable themes – multicloud, AI (and its cool cousin GenAI), security, orchestration, and automation, to name a ...
This IDC study provides a worldwide market forecast for SD-WAN infrastructure, including regional geographic segmentation, for the period from 2022 to 2027. It also includes historical SD-WAN infrastructure market data for 2017 through 2021. ...
This IDC Market Note examines public details of the T-Mobile and Google Cloud partnership and its impact on 5G use case development in both the near and long term. The T-Mobile and Google Cloud partnership announcement represents the next ...
This IDC study examines the digital transformation priorities for telecommunications industry and analyzes the key elements necessary to evolve network, IT, and customer-facing technologies and processes. IDC publishes research on digital ...
Nokia and Red Hat announced a partnership June 29, under which Nokia will discontinue its investment in Nokia Container Services (NCS) and CloudBand Infrastructure Software (CBIS) and transfer 350 employees supporting those products to Red ...
During the week of June 12th, Ciena held its biannual Vectors analyst conference in Ottawa, Canada, where the company demonstrated its ongoing innovation across its broad portfolio of networking products. This year's conference showcased ...