The coverage taxonomy

What a practice area is, and what it is not

A practice area is a coverage boundary: the unit Futurum files published work and analyst ownership under. There are eleven, each with a named lead analyst. Each one publishes a market model, a decision-maker study and a coverage taxonomy, so the boundaries of what is covered are visible before a client buys rather than after.

Each area is three things: a code, a display name and a public URL. The code is the contract — it is what a tagged record carries and what every filter takes, and it cannot drift. The name and the description are copy, and a human can rewrite either without anything downstream breaking.

What a practice area is not is a product, a market, or the internal taxonomy it mirrors. That internal list also carries deprecated aliases, reserved slots for coverage that has not started, versioned duplicates, and utility domains describing internal product surfaces. None of those appear here. This is the public content taxonomy, and it is deliberately a curated subset.

How a record gets filed

Every post carries a practiceAreas array of codes, declared on the record. A post can sit in more than one area, and the array is the only thing that files it.

A person record carries the same field, and where a profile declares it, that is authoritative. Most analyst profiles do not: the corpus was imported from a site that tagged posts rather than people. So an analyst's coverage is derived instead, from the practice areas of the posts they are credited on, most-published first. That is a derived fact, and it is never written back to the record.

Filtering by area

The code is the filter value on every surface, and it is shown here because it cannot be guessed from the URL slug — the code ai serves /practice-areas/ai-platforms/.

On the content API, /api/content/posts/?practiceArea=<code> narrows the corpus to one area, alongside the kind, author, company and limit filters; /api/content/people/?practiceArea=<code> does the same for analysts. /api/content/practice-areas/ serves the whole taxonomy with a published-post and analyst count for each.

Over MCP, list_practice_areas returns the same eleven and the compare_practice_areas prompt takes a list of codes. Each area also publishes an RSS feed at /practice-areas/<slug>/feed.xml, for anything that needs to watch rather than poll.

The eleven

Display name, filter code and landing page for each. The line under each area is the opening sentence of its own description; its landing page carries the rest.

• AI Platforms

  ai · /practice-areas/ai-platforms/

  The Futurum AI Platforms research agenda for 2026 focuses on the critical shift from experimental AI to the deployment of industrial-scale, resilient, and autonomous systems.

• Cybersecurity

  cyberSecurity · /practice-areas/cybersecurity-resilience/

  Futurum covers a broad spectrum of cybersecurity-related technologies, including application, cloud, data, endpoint, network security, identity and access management (IAM), and integrated risk management and Security Operations Center (SOC) markets.

• Semiconductors

  aiChipSets · /practice-areas/semiconductors-supply-chain-emerging-tech/

  Semiconductors have created a technology super-cycle powering the AI revolution.

• Data Intelligence

  dataManagementAndAnalytics · /practice-areas/data-intelligence-analytics-infrastructure/

  Enterprise data is the lifeblood of business.

• CIO Insights

  cioInsights · /practice-areas/cio-technology-buyers/

  Futurum’s Enterprise Technology Buyers practice provides comprehensive coverage of how enterprise technology decisions are made across the organization, from the CIO and IT leadership to the growing universe of business executives who now directly influence technology strategy, budgets, and outcomes.

• Channel Ecosystems

  channels · /practice-areas/ecosystems-channels-marketplaces/

  Futurum's coverage of Channel Ecosystems: analyst insights, research reports and vendor evaluations.

• Intelligent Devices

  aiDevices · /practice-areas/intelligent-devices/

  Futurum covers a broad range of AI-enabled consumer and commercial devices.

• Enterprise Software

  enterpriseApps · /practice-areas/enterprise-software-digital-workflows/

  Enterprise Applications are the lifeblood and framework for accomplishing work in the modern organization.

• Software Lifecycle Engineering

  adm · /practice-areas/software-lifecycle-engineering/

  The Software Lifecycle Engineering market is moving decisively from AI experimentation to AI accountability across the SDLC.

• Networking

  communicationsNetworks · /practice-areas/networking/

  Enterprise networking is the transport system for advanced technologies on-premises and in the cloud.

• Cloud & Infrastructure

  cloudInfrastructure · /practice-areas/hybrid-cloud-infrastructure/

  Data is the lifeblood of a modern business, and the underlying storage technology plays a vital role in delivering it.

Practice areas, with published-piece and analyst counts for each