Author: Eva Glass

Eva Glass first rose to prominence in The INQUIRER. She continues to work behind the scenes to dig out the best stories.

Hawaii illustrates AMD’s newfound love of GPUs

Posted on September 23, 2013 by - Opinions

AMD, SunnyvaleThe PC market has been in trouble for quite a while, but even before the most recent slump, there were a few telltale signs that many big players were getting ready for a slowdown. Lavish launch parties aren’t very high on the agenda and the 2008 crash only sped up the austere trend.

AMD is now taking a different route. After years of low-profile product launches, the company is holding a big bash in Hawaii, where it will launch its latest Hawaii GPU on Wednesday.

This is clearly a statement of intent – AMD wants to raise the bar in the GPU space yet again. Nvidia on the other hand is talking up Tegra, but it’s not doing nearly as much on the GPU front. AMD has a few highly successful promotions in the form of Never Settle bundles, while Nvidia talks Tegra, Tegra and more Tegra. Did we mention Tegra?

So what’s behind AMD’s recent change of heart? Well, it might be a knock-on effect of Rory Read’s hands-on approach to management, but we believe it represents a strategic shift in AMD’s thinking. Nvidia still has a firm grasp on the professional market, with its high-margin Quadro series. It is also beating AMD in notebook design wins – but notebook sales aren’t going very well and with each new generation of Intel Core chips and AMD APUs, integrated graphics are getting better, hence the low-end discrete GPU market is evaporating.

Tegra was Nvidia’s way to tap new markets and make up for lost ground in the GPU space. It was by no means a failure, but it hasn’t been a huge success either. Nvidia no longer wants to deal with console GPUs, hence it ceded that market to AMD.

To some extent, AMD and Nvidia are no longer vying for the same market. There’s never been so little overlap when it comes to the AMD – Nvidia duopoly. AMD does consoles, Nvidia does discrete mobile GPUs, AMD does APUs, Nvidia does Tegra and so on.

Nvidia will continue to do well in the workstation space, as workstations are still selling quite well and they’ve been largely unaffected by the PC slump. Sales of gaming hardware are projected to grow at a steady CAGR of about three percent for the foreseeable future, which means both AMD and Nvidia should have no trouble selling mainstream and high-end discrete graphics. However, the console wins and the lack of presence in other markets mean that AMD is left to pursue the core gamer market more actively.

This explains the Hawaii bash along with the huge bundles. As Nvidia tries to diversify, AMD will try to attack its core business and right now it is lot more aggressive than it was a year or two ago. Whether AMD’s back-to-basics strategy will work remains to be seen.

Tesco launches fresh Hudl tablet

Posted on September 23, 2013 by - News, Products

tesco-hudl-tabletTesco has officially launched its first tablet, which is coincidentally probably the first tablet ever launched by a grocer. On a more serious note, the humble Hudl tablet doesn’t look bad at all. In fact, it is much better than we expected.

It features a 7-inch screen with a rather high resolution of 1440×900, which is marginally better than 1280×800 on the first generation Nexus 7 and Nvidia’s new Tegra Note. Tesco says it packs a quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz, but we suspect this is a Cortex A7 part due to the relatively low price of the device, which is just £119.99.

The tablet also features 16GB of storage and a microSD slot, along with dual-band Wi-Fi and Blinkbox support. Naturally, it can also be used for online shopping and it can access a wide range of other Tesco digital services. 

The tablet will be available in retail and online. There is a choice of four lively colour options and Tesco Clubcard holders will be able to buy it at a discount, which means many shoppers will pick it up for less than £100.

“Hudl is a colourful, accessible tablet for the whole family to enjoy. The first stage in our tablet offering, it’s convenient, integrated and easy to use with no compromise on spec. Customers are quite rightly very discerning about the technology they buy so we knew we had to be competitive on all fronts,” said Tesco Chief Executive, Philip Clarke.

Clarke does have a point – with a 1440×900 screen and a snappy processor, the cheap Hudl doesn’t seem to compromise on spec. Most white-box tablets in the £100 – £149 range ship with inferior screens and slower chips, not to mention that many of them cost a few pounds more than the Hudl.

The Hudl will be very disruptive in this segment.

UK August sales fall

Posted on September 19, 2013 by - News

Oxford Covered Market, courtesy of http://www.oxford-coveredmarket.co.uk/content/anna-james-photosThe Office of National Statistics (ONS) said that August 2013 showed a period of contraction compared to July 2013.

Figures it released showed that while there was strong growth of 1.1 percent in July, the retail sector fell by 0.9 percent in August. However, it pointed out, the level of goods bought on the high street remained, er, high.

The food sector fell by -2.7 percent for the month – a normalisation because food sales were boosted in July 2013 because of the clement, that is to say, hot weather.

Year on year, sales whether in the high street, online, in stalls or the covered market grew by 2.1 percent. The ONS attributes last year’s poor sales in Augusts by suggesting that the world+dog was watching the Olympics.

The ONS classifies the sector as food stores, non food stores, mail order and market stalls and petrol stations.

For every pound spent in August 2013, 42 percent (pence) was spent on food; 41 percent in non food stores; six percent in markets and the like; and 11 percent in petrol stations.

Quanta to miss tablet forecast on poor Nexus sales

Posted on September 17, 2013 by - News

nexus7Quanta Computer could miss its tablet target due to weaker than expected sales of Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet. Quanta was hoping to ship 20 million tablets this year, but Digitimes reports it is already having trouble keeping up with the plan.

As a result, Quanta could revise its tablet shipment target for 2013 by as much as 40 percent, to just 12 to 13 million units. In addition to the Nexus 7, Quanta also has orders for Amazon Kindle tablets. Although Nexus and Kindle Fire tablets were originally conceived to target the low-end, but the market evolved. Today, $200 tablets aren’t really low end, as there are plenty of cheaper white-box products priced closer to $100.

On the other hand, people who are willing to pay a bit more tend to go for Apple’s iPad mini, which is pricier still. Rumour has it that Google will not tap Asustek for the next generation Nexus 7, which means Quanta could lose the Nexus deal altogether in mid-2014. In addition, Compal has already grabbed part of the Amazon contract.

Docbyte gets ABBYY gold certificate

Posted on September 16, 2013 by - News

abbyyABBYY Europe announced today that Docbyte is the latest outfit to receive Gold Certified Partner status in its European Solution Partner Programme.

Docbyte is one of Belgium’s premiere document management companies with plenty of automated mailroom solutions, content management and workflow prowess. It will now gain access to ABBYY’s partner portal, product training and support and other perks.

“We are very pleased to receive the Gold Certification, as it acknowledges our skills in successfully implementing solutions for our customers,” states Frederik Rosseel, managing director, Docbyte. “ABBYY continues to put great efforts into developing their products, which enables us to respond to customer demands with e-Invoicing and cloud-based scan solutions. ABBYY clearly senses what the market requires and it helps us be prepared for the changing requirements of our customers.”

ABBYY FlexiCapture enables Docbyte to offer intelligent digitising and inbound document processing solutions related to almost any business process. Invoice processing, for example, is dramatically enhanced and streamlined so that financial data is secure and correct so that invoices become instantly searchable and viewable.

Dell won’t get back into smartphones

Posted on September 16, 2013 by - News

Dell logoLast week Dell helped spice up Intel’s IDF bash with a new 8.1 inch tablet, which brought back to life its Venue brand. Dell used the same brand to peddle smartphones a few years back, but eventually it pulled out of the insanely competitive smartphone market altogether.

With new Venue tablets in the pipeline, many wondered whether Dell would get back in the smartphone game as well, using the same resurrected brand. However, this seems highly unlikely.

In a recent interview with CNBC, Michel Dell said the company plans to focus on tablets rather than smartphones. He pointed out that Dell can still make plenty of cash selling servers and providing the necessary infrastructure and storage for mobile companies, reports Ubergizmo.

It seems like an honest approach. Dell would probably have a lot of trouble cracking the smartphone market, dominated by the likes of Samsung and Apple. At a time when the once mighty Nokia and HTC are struggling for scraps, deciding to move back into the same space would be difficult. Still, Lenovo is proof that it is possible.

Ingram Micro and Outsourcery team up for VAR cloud service

Posted on September 16, 2013 by - News

IMIngram Micro and cloud provider Outsourcery have conjured up a new cloud service designed specifically for Ingram Micro’s partners and customers.

Under the arrangement, Ingram Micro partners will sell Outsourcery’s hosted version of Microsoft Lync, with enterprise-grade services and unified functionality delivered from the cloud. Cloud computing is a relatively hot trend at the moment, but surveys reveal that almost a quarter of IT organisations are concerned about the lack of staff skills necessary to support cloud solutions. The partnership is supposed to address these concerns.

Apay Obang-Oyway, General Manager, Enterprise Software and Services at Ingram Micro commented: “We have created the Advanced Solutions Division to offer our channel partners a comprehensive approach for identifying and pursuing opportunities within advanced technology categories.

Obang-Oyway said the goal is to help partners grow and diversify while facilitating development in the channel.

“The successful model Outsourcery have already established complements these objectives so taking hosted cloud solutions to market together was the natural next step,” he concluded.

Semiconductor market to grow three percent

Posted on September 13, 2013 by - News

silicon-waferThe worldwide semiconductor market is expected to grow 3 percent this year. The market has been seeing sequential growth for several consecutive quarters and most vendors believe they will end the year on a positive note, just barely.

“It has been a tough few years for the semiconductor industry. While we haven’t seen a dramatic decline in overall revenues since the 2008/2009 period the market has been pretty stagnant since 2010,” comments Peter Cooney, practice director. “We will see some growth in 2013 as the wider economic environment improves but major market growth is not expected until later in 2014, early 2015.”

The year will be remembered for several major mergers and acquisitions rather than record growth. Fujitsu and Panasonic semicon divisions are merging and Micron has scooped up Elpida. Intel has strengthened its portfolio with the ST-Ericsson GPU unit merger, while Broadcom bought Renesas Mobile’s LTE assets.

ABI Research noted that consolidation in the industry should come as no surprise, as chipmakers are forced to deal with far stiffer competition and lower margins.

“Margins are falling and the competitive environment is tough—especially in the mobile device market—this is driving vendors to re-evaluate their overall strategy and pull out of some of their once major markets. We have seen a number of major vendors exit the mobile device market – Freescale, TI, STMicroelectronics, and Renesas and we expect there are more to come,” said Cooney.

 

Public sector outsourcing drops

Posted on September 13, 2013 by - News

kcalmAccording to research outfit Information Services Group (ISG), the public sector outsourcing market in the UK has taken a massive hit in the first half of the year. The ISG Outsourcing Index for EMEA found just €2 billion of outsourcing activity in the UK for the first half of the year. Last year the market was worth €4.6 billion.

However, Britain still leads the way when it comes to public sector outsourcing in Europe. The whole EMEA market for the first six months of was just €2.3 billion compared to €3.1 billion last year. In other words, the UK accounted for five sixths of all public sector outsourcing in EMEA this year.

The ISG figures track all outsourcing contracts with an annual value of €4 million or more. They include IT contracts, business process outsourcing, back office processes, but IT dominates with more than two thirds of all contracts. Public sector outsourcing now accounts for 41 percent of all outsourcing activity in EMEA, with Britain in a clear lead.

The top 15 companies winning these lucrative contracts are Accenture, AECOM, Arqiva, Arvato, BT, Capgemini, Capita, CSC, Grupo Ferrovial, HP, Interserve, QinetiQ, Serco, Thales and Tieto.

Notebook display panel shipments down, down, down

Posted on September 13, 2013 by - News

dell-latitude-7000-330pxShipments of LCD panels for notebooks dropped 23 percent in July year-on-year, according to new data from IHS. Eight out of the nine leading PC vendors cut their LCD shipments and total shipments were just 1.49 million units, down from 19.3 million in July 2012. Worse, shipments were down 18 percent sequentially.

The sharp drop can be in part attributed to seasonal trends, but there were a few other factors as well. Demand for new Haswell-based deigns remains soft and the fact that many people are still waiting for Windows 8.1 did not help, either. All this resulted in some inventory problems.

“Notebook brands during the third quarter typically increase their purchases of LCD panels as they prepare to launch new mobile PC models for the second half of the year,” said Ricky Park, senior manager for large-area displays at IHS. “However, many key brands this year have accumulated large panel inventory surpluses because of weak sales in the first half. This has caused them to reduce purchases in July, leading to major declines in notebook PC panel market shipments both on a sequential and an annual basis.”

Many notebook makers are still sitting on heaps of old displays and they are clearly having a hard time getting rid of them. Acer’s panel orders dropped 53 percent in June, Toshiba was down 43 percent and even mighty Lenovo experienced a 35 percent drop. It did not get any better in July.

IHS expects to see some positive figures in August, as the market should return to sequential growth, but on-year figures won’t look good.

EMEA workstation market rebounds in Q2

Posted on September 11, 2013 by - News

pc-sales-slumpThe PC market might be down, but there are still a few bright spots. Gamers haven’t gone anywhere and long-term forecasts indicate they will continue spending plenty of hard earned cash on new toys. Professionals are another breed of PC user that can’t afford not to upgrade.

According to IDC’s quarterly workstation tracker, shipments of personal workstations in EMEA grew 3 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2013. The previous five quarters were in the red.

Interestingly, the growth is not coming from desktop workstations. It remained flat, with 0.1 percent growth. However, the mobile workstation segment saw 10.9 percent growth. Mobile appears to be the flavour of the day in many markets, especially in the Nordics. Mobile workstations are quite a bit more expensive than their desktop counterparts, and they aren’t as easy to upgrade or customize, but the appeal of taking a workstation on the road is simply too compelling for many people.

“In addition to tighter competition over the last year and a half, the major workstation vendors – Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and Lenovo – were facing tougher market conditions,” said Mohamed Hefny, senior analyst with IDC’s systems and infrastructure department. “The sovereign debt crisis forced the public sector to follow strict policies regarding hardware investments, financial uncertainty pushed the enterprise sector to extend the refreshment cycle for another year, and SMBs often opted for high-end commercial PCs, as the performance gap with workstations is reduced when they are paired with professional discrete graphic cards.”

The 2014 outlook is even better. IDC expects 6.2 percent year-on-year growth in volume and 3.2 percent growth in value. As major European markets emerge from recession, demand for workstations is expected to pick up even further.

Intel promises sub-$100 tablets, has some convincing to do

Posted on September 11, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIntel hasn’t had much luck with tablets. Very few devices have Intel innards and most of the ones that do are low-volume Windows 8 tablets, accompanied by a nasty price tag. However, there have been some moves towards cheaper Intel tablets in recent months. A number of vendors has rolled out Windows 8 products powered by Atom parts with relatively decent prices.

Now Intel is taking it a step further by promising sub-$100 tablets by the end of the year. It sounds a bit like a general saying his troops will be home for Christmas and here is why. Intel just has a terrible track record when it comes to making any promises involving pricing. This is a relatively new thing for Intel, usually it tried not to make any predictions at all, but over the past couple of years it made a few, and they were all dead wrong.

It started a few months after the fist Ultrabooks were announced. The press pounced on Intel, demanding to know how it plans get a lot of traction on skinny, overpriced notebooks with prices starting at $999. Intel’s response was pretty clumsy. It promised to do its best to bring the prices down to $699 by the end of 2012, then $599, depending on who was on stage. Then it started making similar promises about hybrids and x86 tablets. All the promises had one thing in common – for all intents and purposes none of them came true. To be fair to Intel, some of them were quite vague. Saying $599 Ultrabooks will appear sooner or later isn’t much of a promise, put pinning down a date is.

Speaking at IDF, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the company’s new Hallway tablet platform will “go below $100 by Q4 2013” and to be honest we are not sure we believe in Intel election promises anymore. There are practically no big brand Android tablets with anything close to that pricing at the moment.

There are however plenty of white-box tablets priced at $99 or less, but most of them are rubbish, as they feature antiquated chipsets, low resolution screens and simply don’t have a lot going for them. It is relatively easy to come up with interesting products in the $130 to $180 range, but going down to sub-$100 isn’t as easy. A quick glance at the BOM of low end tablets reveals that there’s really not much room to cut corners and pinch pennies without seriously compromising the product, but let’s leave the geeky details out of this. Even if it practically gives away Bay Trail parts at cost, it is highly unlikely that hardware makers can come up with compelling designs at $99 or less.

The other problem with Intel’s promise is that it sounds pointless on another level. Chasing others to the bottom doesn’t really sound like something the world’s leading chipmaker should be doing, unless it considers MediaTek, Rockchip, Allwinner and other low-cost SoC makers as direct competitors. It just looks bad and if some partners really come up with dirt cheap Intel based tablets they will just hurt Intel’s brand, because they are bound to be terrible. With today’s component prices, the only way Intel could come up with truly good sub-$100 tablets by the end of the year is if it subsidizes them, quite heavily. However, that would cost plenty of money and it would not address the primary concern – what on earth is Intel doing in that market segment to begin with?

Three quarters of companies open to BYOD

Posted on September 10, 2013 by - News

coffee-deskIt appears that three quarters of British companies have given in to tech promiscuity in the form of BYOD. A total of 76 percent of CIOs surveyed by Robert Half Technology are now reporting that their companies allow employees to bring their own gear to work.

Although smartphones and tablets are usually associated with BYOD, laptops still lead the way as the most popular BYOD option, at 65 percent. Smartphones rank second with 56 percent, memory sticks are third at 51 percent, while tablets and external hard drives rank fourth and fifth, 38 and 27 percent respectively.

Oddly enough, there are some huge differences depending in BYOD attitudes throughout the country. For example, use of BYOD smartphones is really big in the Midlands and London, at 73 and 69 percent respectively. However, in Wales and Scotland the figures are just 46 and 36 percent.

“There are a number of factors leading to the growth of BYOD, from company cost savings to employee preferences for using their own device. Only 24 percent of IT directors in our survey said that they do not currently allow employee owned devices into the workplace, so the tide has clearly turned in favour of BYOD,” said Phil Sheridan, Managing Director, Robert Half Technology. “Companies need to consider a well thought out BYOD strategy if they want to attract the best candidates – especially IT professionals. Almost half of CIOs reported that allowing employee-owned devices into the company improved productivity, while 37 percent said that they improved employee retention/satisfaction.”

However, although BYOD toys can keep the worker bees happy, Sheridan warns that organizations still need to take security concerns raised by CIOs seriously. There are some financial implications as well, as more money has to be burned on upgrading IT infrastructure and providing BYOD related training. On the other hand, 30 percent of organisations surveyed said BYOD helped them control capital costs, while 22 percent said it helped control contract costs.

IT departments lead the way in BYOD adoption, which makes perfect sense, as they can work out the kinks before the rest of the workforce joins the trend.

Capita launches pays as you go cloud service

Posted on September 9, 2013 by - News

clouds3Capita has introduced a new UK-based service aimed at small outfits operating on a shoestring. The Capita Private Cloud is a pay-as-you-go cloud service hosted entirely on Capita’s UK data centre infrastructure.

Due to its payment model, it should be easily within grasp of even the smallest clients and it’s more flexible than most cloud services.

“Capita Private Cloud takes that uncertainty away by offering a simple, cost-effective solution that customers can have access to within minutes. The combination of public and private cloud services, with the support of a dedicated account manager and technical experts, means businesses can meet all their IT requirements in one place,” said Andy Parker, deputy chief executive at Capita. “In addition, managing all cloud platforms together in Capita’s UK data centres guarantees data security and sovereignty – a key for many public or highly regulated companies, such as banks and pension providers.”

The flexible nature of the service means customers can choose exactly what they need and only pay for what they use. In case a business experiences a sudden surge in demand for its IT services, extra capacity is always available. Furthermore, customers have access to 2,000 pre-tested cloud applications via a self service portal, allowing them to easily tailor, monitor and manage services.