This IDC study provides a comprehensive overview and definitions for enterprise infrastructure hardware. The definitions provided in this document represent the scope of IDC's enterprise infrastructure hardware research.This taxonomy outlines market segmentations and measurement methodologies for the enterprise infrastructure market including classification by technology, vendor, geography, and revenue metrics. "The buyer and cloud taxonomy and market coverage extend IDC's enterprise infrastructure research by overlaying a cloud and service provider view of which types of customers are purchasing infrastructure," said Natalya Yezhkova, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technologies Group at IDC. "This document will evolve as IDC's analysis and granularity of cloud and buyer research grow over time."
IDC's Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment Taxonomy
Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: Buyer and Cloud Deployment Taxonomy Changes for 2025
Taxonomy Overview
Definitions
Infrastructure Buyer
Hyperscalers (Versus Hyperscale Datacenter)
Cloud Service Providers
Shared Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers
Cloud Software-as-a-Service Providers
Digital Service Providers
Communication Services
Dedicated Hosting and Managed Services
Nonservice Provider
Infrastructure Platform
Cloud
Noncloud
Infrastructure Sharing
Dedicated
Shared
Location
Service Provider Site
Colocation Site
Customer Site
Core Versus Edge
Core - The "Central Datacenter"
Edge - Everything Between the "Core" and "Endpoints"