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Market Share: Worldwide Creative Applications Shares, 2025

Roger Beharry Lall — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides a detailed breakdown of vendor revenue, share, and growth across the creative applications market in 2025. The worldwide creative applications market reached $22.0 billion in 2025, growing 17.2% as generative AI accelerated content production economics and expanded the buyer base well beyond traditional creative departments. The market remains highly concentrated at the top, yet competitive dynamics below that tier are shifting, with several challengers posting growth rates well above the market average on the strength of accessible, AI-native platforms.

“Generative AI is restructuring the underlying economics of content production in this market, and today’s share rankings still reflect yesterday’s workflows. Established vendors have earned their positions and are not going anywhere, but the next wave of growth will be contested at the margins by a new generation of vendors rewriting the rules of creative production.” — Roger Beharry Lall, research director, Advertising Technologies and SMB Marketing Applications, IDC

European Telcos’ ICT Offering to SMB: Cybersecurity and Cloud Collaboration at the Core

Daniela Rao — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective focuses on European telcos’ cybersecurity and cloud collaboration propositions for SMBs as the most relevant components of their IT services portfolio, alongside connectivity and device offerings.

“Telcos’ success in the SMB market depends on their ability to shift from complex, fragmented tools to automated and managed capabilities delivered as an invisible, native communication service, together with support services helping them assess their digital needs and adopt the most suitable solution,” said Daniela Rao, senior research and consulting director, IDC Telecom and UC Global Team.

Market Forecast: U.S. SMB Communications Services Forecast, 2026–2030

Daniela Rao — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation analyzes and forecasts the revenue for the U.S. small and medium-sized business (SMB) communications services market. The presentation provides IDC's definitions of SMB and telecom voice and data categories, and it presents a detailed forecast, beginning in 2025 and extending through 2030.

"Small and medium-sized businesses understand the necessity to invest in technologies and services that address their operational challenges, but they will continue to have limited resources. Telcos targeting SMBs should design new value-creating propositions rooted in their networks, ecosystems, AI, and analytics capabilities to address the pricing challenges with services geared to remove friction between SMBs' daily operations and digital transformation road map." — Daniela Rao, senior research and consulting director, Worldwide Telecom and UC, IDC

Market Share: U.S. SMB Wireline Voice and Data Shares, 2025

Daniela Rao — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides vendor market shares for the U.S. small and medium-sized business (SMB) wireline voice and data market for 2025.

Small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly recognizing the need to invest in connectivity to improve operations and strengthen their customer engagement. However, since SMB customers have needs that vary significantly by industry, size, and region, it will remain challenging for telco to reach and retain them with standardized offerings at competitive, affordable prices. In addition, SMBs need personalized support and training because they lack internal skills or resources to identify and implement digital services and solutions to achieve their desired outcomes in terms of efficiency, productivity, and customer experience. Telcos understand that attracting and retaining SMB customers requires redesigning their portfolios to better meet SMBs' demand for simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use: convergent packages better oriented to these requirements will be the next telco battleground to successfully address this market.

“Small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly recognizing the importance of investing in connectivity to improve operations and strengthen their customer engagement. However, since SMB customers have needs that vary significantly by industry, size, and region, it will remain challenging for telco to reach and retain them with standardized offerings at competitive and affordable prices." — Daniela Rao, senior research and consulting director, Worldwide Telecom and UC

SAP Sapphire 2026: How SAP Is Bringing the Autonomous Enterprise to Small and Midmarket Buyers

Katie Evans, Tony Olvet — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note shares key SMB insights and announcements from SAP’s flagship event, Sapphire, held May 11–13, 2026, in Orlando, Florida. While the event has traditionally catered to larger enterprises, this year’s conference illustrated the major ERP vendor’s refocused efforts to capture more of the small- and midsize tech buyer market.

“The GROW with SAP AI offerings unveiled at SAP Sapphire make clear that capabilities once considered out of reach for SMBs are now quickly becoming achievable,” says Katie Evans, Senior Director, Worldwide Small and Medium Business Markets, IDC.

IDC Survey: SMB-Focused Partners in EMEA — Business Models, Customer Demand, and Implications for Partner Strategy

Stuart Wilson, Andreas Storz — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey examines SMB-focused partners in EMEA and the SMB customers they serve, using data from IDC’s 2025 EMEA Partner Survey and 2026 Worldwide SMB Survey. It explores how SMB-focused partners build and monetize multimodel, services-led business models within vendor-driven ecosystems.

The analysis connects partner behavior to SMB customer priorities around growth, efficiency, and cost control, and examines how these shape demand for technology and services. Taking an ecosystem view, the report highlights how vendor programs, platforms, and engagement models directly influence how SMB-focused partners go to market and deliver value.

Salesforce Connections 2026: Short-Term ROI on Marketing AI to Drive Long-Term Transformation

Gerry Murray, Heather Hershey, Douglas Hayward, Roger Beharry Lall, Tapan Patel — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Perspective summarizes Salesforce Connections 2026 and its implications for CMOs and marketing technology buyers. The document covers Salesforce's Agentforce Marketing and Commerce announcements, including the pipeline generation agents Piper and Hunter, the Contentful acquisition, the Agentforce Marketing Goals Agent, and Headless 360 MCP campaign management capabilities.

"The road to scaling agentic marketing is ultimately an organizational, process, and technological transformation proposition, each step of which will have to pay its way," says Gerry Murray, research director, Enterprise Marketing Apps and Agents, IDC. "By forming its go-to-market strategy on this principle, Salesforce aligns itself with CMO agendas and CFO requirements for funding enterprise-scale investments, which expands account TAM and accelerates Salesforce's ability to capture share of the agentic infrastructure spend."

Japan IT Spending Forecast by Vertical Segment, Company Employee Size, Company Revenue, and Region, 2026–2030

Hitoshi Ichimura, Ko Shikita — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study presents the Japan IT market actual IT spending in 2024 and 2025, and the IT spending forecast from 2026 to 2030 by industry segment, company size, and annual turnover. This study also analyzes IT spending by dividing the industries into 21 categories, company size and product segments into five categories, and annual turnover into four categories; and discusses IT spending trends observed in each industry segment.

Despite the increasing uncertainty in the Japan economy, many Japanese companies are making full-scale efforts toward digitalization and digital business. In particular, large and medium-sized enterprises are advancing existing system renewals and infrastructure modernization projects, and therefore, IT spending is forecast to expand steadily. On the other hand, while small and medium-sized enterprises have needs for digitalization, their initiatives remain limited due to factors such as deteriorating business performance or a shortage of personnel with expertise in digitalization, which has also led to stagnation in IT spending growth rates. "IDC believes that IT suppliers' further focus on supporting the digitalization of small and medium-sized enterprises, centered on AI utilization, will contribute to stable growth in the IT business going forward," says Hitoshi Ichimura, senior research manager, Software, Services, and IT Spending at IDC Japan.

This is the English translation of the Japanese document (IDC #JPJ53503626).

IDC Survey Spotlight: Where Are SMBs Prioritizing Their Security Investments?

Yih Khai Wong — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight summarizes findings from IDC’s Asia/Pacific Security Survey, highlighting IT investment priorities for SMBs in Asia/Pacific.

This document draws on data from the Asia/Pacific Security Survey, which asked 141 SMB organizations in the region the following question: In the next 12–24 months, which areas will be the top priorities for modernizing your organization’s security operations?

Market Forecast: Europe Small and Medium-Sized Business Telecom Services Forecast, 2026-2030

Daniela Rao — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides the five-year forecast for the European small and medium-sized business (SMB) telecom services market for 2025 to 2030. It focuses on the evolution of spending on fixed and mobile telecom services for the SMB (1–249 employees) market segments.

“The SMB telecom services market will be driven by the intensive use of mobile and fixed connectivity, demonstrating almost flat end-user total spending and declining ARPU. The SMB segment will remain the main challenging arena in which European telcos are redesigning their strategies to retain these customers, achieve new revenue, and gain capital efficiencies,” said Daniela Rao, senior research and consulting director, European Telecom at IDC.