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 TechBrief discusses the value and benefits of using an in-memory database (IMDB) that supports persistent memory (PMEM). It indicates the benefits, risks, current adoption, and critical success factors associated with this technology ...
This IDC TechBrief outlines the importance of data historians and time series databases for operations. In asset-intensive industries such as manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities, and mining, data historians have served as the bedrock of ...
This IDC TechBrief provides business leaders and IT with an executive snapshot of eSignature software, its impact on process improvement and business continuity, and the value it brings to an enterprise through successful adoption.
"The ...
This IDC study explores the impact of the use of technology to develop digital twins for assets and processes within operational settings such as factories, oil rigs, utility grids, and mines. As enterprises struggle to gain value from the ...
This IDC TechBrief assesses the business value, adoption considerations, key metrics, critical success factors, and leading vendors of automated checkout solutions that utilize computer vision, deep learning, and sensor fusion. These solutions ...
This IDC TechBrief discusses integrating social, human, and behavioral care into clinical care, which is not easy. All domains are fragmented, making data and program integration challenging. Healthcare efforts to meet social and human service ...
This IDC TechBrief examines the benefits of using software composition analysis (SCA) to mitigate the risk and complexities of open source software.
Modern software is increasingly composed of external open source components, and bad ...
This IDC TechBrief discusses the benefits of self-healing incident recovery and how it provides a valuable safety net in endpoint security.
"Time is a precious and finite resource in the battle against cyberthreats," according to Michael ...
This IDC TechBrief examines the microsegmentation for zero trust.
"Zero trust is a buzzworthy topic that points toward real architectural changes to a security program," says Pete Lindstrom, VP of Security Strategies. "Microsegmentation ...
This IDC TechBrief provides business leaders and IT with an executive snapshot of robotic process automation software, its impact on process improvement, and the value it brings to an enterprise through successful adoption. In the definition ...
This IDC TechBrief provides IT and service executives with an executive snapshot of warranty and service contract management applications and its impact on how manufacturers can execute of service while delivering enhanced customer experiences.
"Warranty ...
This IDC TechBrief provides IT and business executives with an executive snapshot of intelligent virtual assistants specifically in the delivery of customer service and support in manufacturing.
According to Aly Pinder Jr., program ...
This IDC TechBrief examines the software-defined perimeters for zero trust.
"Zero trust is a buzzworthy topic that points toward real architectural changes to a security program," says Pete Lindstrom, VP of Security Strategies. "Software-defined ...
This IDC TechBrief examines the advantages, critical success factors, and risks of implementing a fully integrated data loss protection platform that incorporates user and system behavioral analytics and provides automated encryption and ...
This IDC TechBrief presents the implications of adopting the blockchain technology in retail. The document provides a snapshot of the current status of blockchain adoption in retail as well as its benefits, critical success factors, risks, ...
This IDC TechBrief identifies the key factors when considering hearables for the enterprise. Wearables have been making slow strides into the enterprise, but a generally warming reception has made them increasingly popular. What began with ...
This IDC TechBrief provides IT and business executives with an executive snapshot of field service management (FSM) applications and its impact on how manufacturers deliver service and issue resolution to customers through a field service ...
This IDC TechBrief discusses the current state of blockchain technology and how it will impact technology vendors and buyers in terms of the infrastructure required to establish blockchain solutions. Although blockchain is still in its earliest ...
This IDC TechBrief defines the technologies and discusses considerations information technology (IT) managers need to keep in mind as they think about deploying them. As storage performance requirements have continued to increase, emerging ...
This IDC TechBrief discusses AI adoption in enterprises' CX personalization. AI adoption in the enterprise shows immense potential in customer-facing applications for driving superior customer experiences. Customer services, marketing, and ...
This IDC TechBrief describes the needs, use cases, risks, and success factors associated with a customer data platform deployment.
"Marketers with greater insights into the whole customer relationship have a distinct competitive advantage ...
This IDC TechBrief considers an emerging kind of product suite, the enterprise data platform, and its potential impact on the enterprise, which provides a clearinghouse capability for defining, cataloging, accessing, and governing data in ...
This IDC TechBrief provides IT and business executives with an executive snapshot on digital rights management (DRM) technology, with specific analysis on DRM benefits, risks, adoption rates, success factors, select products, metrics, and ...
This IDC TechBrief discusses the evolving NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) standard in the context of market developments. There are clear workload requirements driving NVMe-oF deployment today, but there are still a very limited number of production ...
This IDC TechBrief provides IT and business executives with an executive snapshot on key management-as-a-service offerings, with specific analysis on the benefits, risks, adoption rates, success factors, select products, metrics, and investment ...