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Dell pushes out four new monitors

Posted on February 12, 2013 by - Products

dell-u3014-1360625063Tinman Michael Dell has released four new monitors to make up what is being marketed as a flagship range.

Floating the bunting are the U3014, U2713H and U2413. Dell waxes lyrically with a heavy coating, banging on about how it offers one of the industry’s highest-quality and most advanced technology experiences, with uncompromising screen performance, precise, and consistent colours.

One thing is certain, at 30 inches the U3014 with PremierColor is Dell’s largest screen size to date. It has a 16:10 aspect ratio, suitable for the fine level of detail required for colour-critical work such as CAD/CAM, graphic design, desktop publishing, gaming or media creation.

Users should be able to see more onscreen with a 2560 x 1600 resolution. It meets the latest environmental standards that you can poke a stick at, such as EPEAT, ENERGY STAR and TCO Certification. It will hit the shops worldwide for $1,499.

Also released were the Dell UltraSharp U2713H 27-inch and U2413 24-inch Monitors with PremierColor. Again these are being pitched for graphics work. Dell tells us that users will experience remarkably consistent, precise, and accurate colours calibrated at the factory to support 99 per cent AdobeRGB and total sRGB coverage with a deltaE of less than 2. Dell will provide a user with a certified report to indicate its exact colour calibration.

Each one has a 12-bit internal processor enables a whopping 1.07 billion colours, superb colour reproduction and gradation onscreen. The U2713H pricing starts at US$999 and the U2413 is $599
Dell has also released the UltraSharp U2913WM 29-inch Ultra-wide Monitor which is an ultra-wide monitor.

This is designed for multi-taskers and has an aspect ratio of 21:9 and means that users do not need dual monitors. Users can extend content to additional monitors using DisplayPort 1.2.1 It is not bad for watching wide Full HD either. Dell have not given us a price for this one.

Say Tata to broke Indian outsourcers

Posted on February 12, 2013 by - News, Opinions

Workers are pictured beneath clocks displaying time zones in various parts of the world at an outsourcing centre in BangaloreReports from India suggest that the country’s  IT outsourcing business is turning a corner after being in a slump for a while.

This means that the UK companies can expect to find tougher competition from Indian based software companies, outsources and contract service outfits in the near future.

Analysts predict an improvement in India’s outsourcing industry, which has been gutted for many quarters by shrinking IT budgets and a slowdown in decision making by customers in the traditional markets like US and Europe.

Research firm Offshore Insights predicts that the offshore market for outsourced services is will grow by 12 percent to 15 percent this year, as more customers are expected to increase IT spending.

India’s $100 billion IT services sector seems to be recovering thanks to the acceleration in IT spending by existing customers although there have been a few new sign ups.

This week, Nielsen Holding increased the size of its contract with India’s top software services exporter, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, to $2.5 billion from $1 billion.

India’s $100 billion IT services sector has been in the doldrums for a while but it seems to be recovering thanks to the acceleration in IT spending by existing customers.

TCS has major clients including General Electric, British Airways and Sony and competes with rival Indian software providers Infosys and Wipro as well as multinational firms such as IBM and Accenture Plc for outsourcing deals.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) also forecasts that India’s exports of software and services will be between $84 billion to $87 billion in the Indian fiscal year from April 2013 to March 2014.

One of the problems that some business watchers believe that the Indian outsourcers will have to tackle is the fact that they are dependent on a revenue model that is largely dependent on the number of people working on a project.

This worked well when IT labour was cheap. While labour is still comparatively cheap in India, it is getting more expensive meaning that outsourcers have to woo new business with promises based on owning some natty technology and replicable processes.

They will have to shift more of their operations closer to their key markets in the US and Europe.

Indebted 2e2 could be a dead duck

Posted on February 11, 2013 by - News

dead duckThe last of the remaining bidders for the broke 2e2 outfit have walked away saying that they are no longer interested in buying any of the company

The IT services group filing for administration and there was some optimism that the Newbury-based group would be sold to either Daisy or Computacenter.

In a statement, FTI, 2e2’s administrators said they had spoken to a number of parties who were interested in acquiring all or parts of the [2e2] business as a going concern.

But FTI said that it could not get an acceptable and deliverable offer to sell the business as a going concern and there is no further funding which can be made available.

Contractors and suppliers will not get paid and 2e2’s data centre clients appear to have been asked to stump up with more dosh to keep the servers switched on. According to Contractor, a letter had been sent out to clients telling them that not paying would result in FTI being “unable to maintain [2e2’s] Data Centre Infrastructure” and the whole lot will be switched off before any customers can get their data back.

However in its letter, FTI hinted that it will be impossible for customers to get their data back in a hurry as it had been hit by a number of requests from customers seeking to gain access to their data immediately. It thinks that the levels of data stored at the company will take up to 16 weeks to get out of the system, and if customers don’t pay up to keep the servers open they will lose everything.

 

Channeleye’s likely tips for new Pope

Posted on February 11, 2013 by - Fun Stuff, News

Leo-I_Attila_Raphael-(1)With Pope Benedict announcing that he is cleaning out his desk and collecting his pink slip, Channel Eye has come up with a list of those who it thinks will have the right stuff to be the next Pope. Now we know that one of the jobs of the Pope is to be Catholic, but given that the church is unlikely to survive another 100 years unless it liberals up a bit, we have given our nominations on the basis that if they can run an IT company they can probably look after the world’s largest religious organisation.

1. Steve Ballmer
Ballmer is already half way to the job by having the inner certainty that he is God. Ballmer would sort out most of the Catholic church’s problems by shouting at them until they go away. Pope Ballmer would probably encourage cardinals to make all sorts of power plays so long as they left him alone. We predict that under his rule, the Catholic church would adopt wide scale contraception to avoid another Ballmer.

2. Sir William Gates
Since resigning from Microsoft’s top job, Gates has been heading towards sainthood. Not only is he well on the way of purging Africa from the devilish mosquito, his various charity work is now healing the sick of Polio. If he were appointed Pope, Gates would closely monitor other religions and then try to mimic their success.

3. Steve Jobs
A tricky choice for the church given that he is already dead, however, that has not stopped him being the head of the world’s fastest growing religion. Chances are that thanks to Apple technology he could do the job from the afterlife, all it would take is to replace all those videos of him with an iPad so that he appears to be holding a bible. We predict that under the rule of Jobs, which would be eternal, you would have to pay half of your salary to the church every year and queue to get into the sermons.

4. Leo Apotheker
A bit ofan  outsider but given that Cardinal Ratzinger was a similar figure within the Catholic church, and it is known for being fairly conservative, we think he could be a starter. Pope Apotheker would start by selling off all the churches and training all priests so that they could handle business management software, like SAP. While many people will not understand why the Catholic Church should dump everything it makes money on and moving into business software, Apotheker would point out that this was exactly the same plan he would have run for HP if those pesky board members had not been involved.

5. Michael Dell
Although he might be a little busy for the job, Michael Dell will abandon all the churches and tell his priests to take their services directly to parishioners. However, if this plan starts to go wrong, he will do a deal with Microsoft to buy out the Church from its Mafia backers and make himself the supreme pontiff and not have to answer to anyone.

6. Paul Otellini
Paul Otellini is retiring soon so might be up for the job, as he is a big fan of monopolies and will probably rule the Catholic Church in the same way as he did at Intel. This would involve leaning on the supplies of other religions and advising them to follow the Roman Catholic Church. Then the other religions would go broke and collapse. In some cases, where they had interesting theology, Intel might buy up their patents and incorporate them into Catholic theology.

Customers confused by “SIM free” and “unlocked”

Posted on February 8, 2013 by - News

Old_chainCustomers buying “SIM free” Nokia Lumia 920 handsets from retailer Phones 4U have found much to their horror that they are locked into EE network and not “unlocked” like they expected.

Phone4U obtained the Lumia 920 as an exclusive deal in the UK for mobile operator EE. However it was also being sold SIM-free via Phones 4U.

According to PC Pro, the phones are locked to EE, Orange and T Mobile and has been offering refunds for those who expected the full “unlocked” experience.

Phones 4U has admitted that its marketing initially wasn’t clear enough about the difference between “unlocked” and “SIM free”.

Part of the problem appears that when Phones4U announced the handset at the end of October, everything was exclusive to EE.

It was advertised online and in-store as being SIM-free, not unlocked, however it started to queries that from users who thought SIM-free means unlocked.

Staff have since been “rebriefed”, and the website and sales material were altered. Since that time, the phone outfit has not had any complaints about it or queries about it,” a spokesperson claimed, although recent EE forum posts suggest sales staff are still confused about the difference themselves.

Customers were given a refund if they complained within 14 days, and anyone still affected would be dealt with on a “case by case” basis, she said.

Even if Phones4U wanted to unlock phones, it couldn’t and those who use a backstreet jailbreaker will void the warranty, the spokesperson added.
She admitted it was rare for phones to be SIM-free but not unlocked, saying she could think of no other phone on the store’s website with such conditions.

Fujutsu orders 5,000 to fall on sword

Posted on February 8, 2013 by - News

seppuku-p1000701Troubled Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu has announced that its wants 5,000 workers to dispatch themselves in the company carpark while PR bunnies throw cherry blossom in the air. Not literally, of course.

The company said that nearly three percent of its global workforce will have to surrender to the company’s vigorous restructuring, write a haiku of resignation  and clean out their desks.

Fujitsu is desperate to boost profitability by reshaping its computer chip business and its overseas operations.

In a statement, it said that the job cuts will be completed by the end of this fiscal year, next month, and will rely on early retirement, layoffs and “other methods”.

Meanwhile another 4,500 workers will be shifted to other parts of Fujitsu. There is a computer chip company being set up with Panasonic, which does sound better than the dole queue. It should be pointed out that Panasonic is not exactly in the best of health either.

Japan’s electronics sector, which has been flapping around on the floor of the IT industry like a bloated fugu fish waiting to be prepared, has been getting a boost lately from the the weakening yen. Still, 2012 will be remembered as the year that the Japanese government finally gave up Elpida Memory and the outfit filed for bankruptcy.

Microserver market set to be a money spinner

Posted on February 8, 2013 by - News, Opinions, Products

HP-MicroServerCompanies interested in jumping on the next industry craze might want to have a look at what is being cooked up in the microserver market.

Analysts like iSuppli thinks that shipments of microservers will go up by three times this year. While that sounds like a lot, we are talking about a miniscule market now so a threefold increase is only 291,000 microservers.

But, if the pundits are right, this year will just be the start of something fairly bright and glorious which will start netting huge numbers of sales next year.

The forecast shows shipments increasing substantially each year until 2016. By then, it will represent one-tenth of overall server shipments.

For those who came in late, a microserver uses a bunch of densely-packed, low-power chips. The chips themselves are slower than an asthmatic turtle with a heavy load of shopping, but they can manage to do simple tasks without wasting power.

This makes them ideal for providing contact information on one website user. The bigger web-companies, including Facebook and Yahoo, and the banks are looking at them.

IHS says that Microserver shipments are going up faster than general servers and blade servers.
It will take a while for them to dent normal server shipments. To match that IDC estimates that microservers will have to come up with 8.4 million sales. It is worthwhile remember those are  last year’s figures and that companies were not buying due to the recession.

Already the big names in the chip industry are starting to come up with their plans for this big boom. Both Intel and ARM have announced that they are ready to come up with chips ready. The key was having 64-bit versions, which Intel was tooled up for while ARM wasn’t.

Now it looks like ARM is ready to come to the party and its partner AppliedMicro announced it will have something ready by the middle of the year.

Chief Financial Officer Robert Gargus told Reuters this morning he has been increasingly impressed this month with performance test results on new chips that include 64-bit features widely used in servers.

The company’s shareholders also like such talk. AppliedMicro stock has surged almost 80 percent since September. Gargus however seems to think that the serious revenue from microserver chips will not be around until next year. When they come through, those chips could account for as much as half the company’s business.

Intel is vying for a sizable cut with its Atom-based processor that uses just six watts. AMD snapped up SeaMicro, and Rackspace has already certified the new SM15000 for use in OpenStack.
Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics, which both use ARM’s technology to make chips for mobile gadgets, could also move into the microserver market and create a formidable challenge for AppliedMicro, analysts say.

Then there are the hardware makers who will be wading in for a slice of the pie. All up, there will be a lot of people who will want to make a pile out of technology before the technology becomes old hat.

Zycko prepares for Flash flood

Posted on February 7, 2013 by - News

flash_gordon (1)The demand for Enterprise class SSDs is going to grow like topsy according to value-added distributor Zycko.

The outfit has just signed a partnership deal with Micron to provide its Client, Enterprise SATA and Enterprise PCIe SSD solutions to channel resellers.

David Galton-Fenzi, Zycko’s group sales director said that as the price of SSD drops and performance increases, the technology will take a leading role in data access and storage.

The SSD enterprise market has grown year-on-year and against this backdrop, Zycko has been looking for a manufacturer who can give it the products for its client list.

Meanwhile Micron wanted a partner to develop the enterprise market for its products. “In that sense the timing and nature of this partnership is perfect. There’s a gap in the market that Micron can fill with its cost-effective SSD solutions, known for their exceptional quality, low-latency and reliability,” said Galton-Fenzi.

The read speeds of the Micron Enterprise PCIe SSD are perfect for the rigorous virtual I/O demands of the current breeds of optimised data centres.

“It’s clear the SSD market is going to quickly grow and Zycko’s reseller network will be well positioned to help their enterprise customers benefit from best-in-class SSD technology,” Galton-Fenzi added.

He said that SSDs were reaching a price tipping point where the technology is becoming part of every major business storage network.

Retailer scorns Blackberry’s “sold out” claims

Posted on February 7, 2013 by - News

blackberry-z10UK retailers have rubbished claims by the mobile phone maker formerly known as RIM that its white Blackberry has sold out.

BlackBerry boss Thorsten Heins buzzed enthusiastically that the BlackBerry Z10 white model is completely out of stock after only being launched last week.

While retailers have said that the BlackBerry Z10 has seen an exceptional first sales week it was not quite what BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins painted, when he claimed that the white version was sold out already and the black was hard to stock up again.

Mobile retailer Phones 4u has confirmed that while over 55 percent of its 680 stores sold out of the BlackBerry Z10 over the launch weekend, the lighter hued handset is, unlike Heins’ comments suggested, still available.

In fact Trusted Reviews said that if you are prepared to do the leg work you can easily find one. In the UK London-based Phones 4u outlets are the exclusive supplier for the white BlackBerry Z10.
Oxford Street has both colours and was telling worried punters that they did not have to run to pick one up as they had shedloads out the back.

Regent Street only had the white BlackBerry Z10 left.

Heins does need the Z10 to be a success, but does seem to be overestimating how well it is doing. Analysts claiming Heins is attempting to boost the hype surrounding the new device, particularly as many of them think that the phone is too little too late to save RIM, er Blackberry.

Scott Hooton, Chief Commercial Officer at Phones 4u said that while a few stores did sell out of the Blackberry Z10 on launch weekend, but the outfit replenished its stock within hours.

 

Public sector drawing up cloud contracts

Posted on February 6, 2013 by - News

cloud (264 x 264)Vendors will find themselves bidding for lucrative European government cloud projects soon.

According to the IDC Government Insights report for Cloud Trends for Western European Government Sector more than 56 percent of local government survey respondents and 42 percent of central government respondents have adopted or are planning to adopt internally hosted private clouds.

More than half of public sector groups are adopting or planning to adopt provider-hosted private clouds. Public clouds come second, with 28 per cent of respondents, and hybrid cloud is a distant third.
Among central governments, citizen Web portals and assembly management are the areas most under consideration.

Silvia Piai, research manager, IDC Government Insights said that the reseach suggests that public and hybrid cloud will gradually replace private clouds.

The study, with the catchy title, “Western Europe Government Sector IT Cloud Computing Trends, 2012–2013 (IDC Government Insights #GIPP12U, January 2013)”, is the third in a series of studies which say more or less the same things.
Not only are central and local governments about to make large cloud investments, but eventually Public clouds will become more important.

Microsoft confuses on Azure

Posted on February 6, 2013 by - News, Products

clouds3Software giant Microsoft is trying to encourage its channel to come up with more cloud offerings by cutting the price on its Azure licencing.

Microsoft lowered Windows Azure price on SQL Reporting Services, which is used for business intelligence-type applications.
The SQL Reporting Service is now measured at increments of 30 reports at $0.16 per hour. The previous charge was measured at $0.88 per hour in increments of 200 reports.

Writing in its bog Vole claims that “the smaller report increment will give customers better use of the service and lower effective price points”.

Like most of the postings that Microsoft has made on its cloud offerings this one is as clear as mud. That is one of the things that resellers have been moaning about when it comes to Azure. The licensing arrangements are so Byzantine you have to be Constantine the Great to understand how they all work.

Customers have to pay for the compute time, data storage and data access and the bandwidth of the data transferred out of the cloud. Those various services get priced per GB. Then there is a monthly fee rolled into the overall cost if an organization uses SQL Azure.

To make matters worse, at the end of last year, Vole started reducing the price for Windows Azure Storage (WAS), claiming that costs could be reduced by 28 percent. WAS offers geo-replication storage support, as well as lower cost “redundant storage”. The geo-replication storage service is turned on by default.

However according to RPC magazine the service cannot be that good because when there was a two-day Windows Azure service disruption in December, Vole did not bother using it. If it had, Microsoft would have lost customer data.

Microsoft is apparently planning a few price more cuts which look even more complex as they are discounts based on spending tiers.

All this is because of the effectiveness of Amazon, particularly Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon cut data transfer prices by as much as 83 percent. In addition, Amazon decreased some EC2 on-demand prices by up to 13 percent.

All up this is making the life of the reseller trying to sell Azure based offerings a little harder. Price cuts would make things a lot more competitive, if the original pricing structure was not so complex. Trying to sell such a complex structure to a client is a tough sell, particularly when the customer does not know what they are getting into.

Lenovo has nothing to fear from Dell deal

Posted on February 6, 2013 by - News

lenovo-logoOne of the few successful PC makers this year, Lenovo has said that it has nothing to fear from Dell going private.

For those who came in late, Michael Dell along with a consortium of chums which include Microsoft, bought up the with his name on it to make the hardware maker private.

The move will mean that Dell will not have to answer to any nasty smelly shareholders and Microsoft will be assured that it has a hardware base for its Windows 8 plans.
In a statement, Lenovo said that Dell’s actions will make no difference to its outlook. In fact the wording, which failed to mention Dell by name, seemed to imply that there had been calls for it to do something similar.

If Lenovo had been thinking of doing something similar that would have been surprising, nevertheless, the company seemed to be answering an unasked question “what will it do now?”.

In a press release Lenovo said it did not have to do anything, thank-you very much. Its strategy was clear, its financial position is healthy and its business is very strong.

Lenovo was “focused on products, customers and overall execution rather than distracting financial manoeuvres and major strategic shifts”.

Lenovo has enjoyed growth in sales and profits thanks to its strength in China and emerging markets so it never really need to change anything it was doing.

Since buying IBM’s PC business in 2005, Lenovo has grown fast and overtaken Dell in the PC market. It is the world’s second-largest PC vendor, is now only slightly behind market leader HP.
So Lenovo’s response to Dell’s sale is that “well we are not going to do anything like that” which is fair enough. We didn’t think it would.

Inkjet market going the way of the Dodo

Posted on February 5, 2013 by - News, Products

Dodo-birdIt is starting to look like inkjets are going the way of the Dodo and the Rubik’s Cube.

Figures from Context show that all-in-one inkjet sales in the UK slid 11.8 percent by volume in 2012. That figure is better than the rest of the EU where all-in-one inkjet sales fell by 14 per cent.

Wireless versions of InkJets are doing slightly better because they are popular in homes and small offices because they can be located easily, connecting to multiple devices without cabling.

As you might expect, HP is still the leading vendor of wireless all-in-one inkjets, although Epson and Canon are doing a little better. However, the InkJet market has been looking shaky for a year.

In August Lexmark announced that it was pulling out of the market completely. Lexmark made its name on the “flog a cheap printer make your money back on the ink” model which was pioneered by HP. The fact that it left the market was seen as the beginning of the end. If Lexmark could kill off an entire business, unit sales numbers must have been dramatically bad.

Other companies have been seeing the writing on the wall for about three years. Consumer inkjet sales were proving so bad that it was better to try and flog the technology to corporate. Epson spent a fortune on its WorkForce high-end inkjets and did OK. HP, which has pitched its products to the business market for years, should have been doing fine too.

However, HP CEO Meg Whitman blamed part of the company’s recent and dismal earnings announcement as a steep decline in HP printer sales. She said that this lack of interest from consumers meant HP was going to de-emphasise products for lower-end customers. It seems business customers are no longer that interested either.

It is not quite so clear why the inkjet market has been so completely gutted. There have been moves to claim that the low end market and the consumer space have become completely paperless. Pictures which once would have been printed are now saved and shared across the net. Hard copy is less likely to be needed.

Some of that might be true, but the cost and quality of laser printing has also dropped. Cartridges require filling less often and are frequently cheaper than inkjets. Mostly it is because in the consumer market inkjet sales were tied to PC sales. Cheap inkjets were often sold as packages with PCs.

It also might indicate that there was a gradual realisation among consumers that inkjets really are a waste of cash in the long term. While the high-end inkjet technology was good, particularly for photographs, most of the great unwashed would not pay over £250 for a decent inkjet with all the sub-$100 models floating around. The cheap and nasty machines poisoned the market for the others.

Apple turned resellers into hostile competition

Posted on February 5, 2013 by - News

skippysonny_1334Apple might have scored an own goal down-under by culling its channel savagely and pushing its own retail model.

Last year, Apple fired more than 200 Australian resellers. Many of them had been selling Apple gear for years. The sackings came without warning or explanation.

One Sydney reseller told CRN Australia that all he got was a two line email terminating his reseller status. It ended his connection to Apple which brought $5 million worth goods to Australian businesses, health organisations and not-for-profits.

Another reseller who was dropped from Apple’s list was Sydney reseller Complete PC Solutions. Director Frank Triantafyllou said Apple made up figures which claimed his outfit had not sold enough products. Not only was that untrue, but what he found was that Apple was not really behaving like a partner.

His company often found he was competing against Apple’s own sales team and would find that product was not being made available for him to sell.

In one case he wanted 100 iPads for a school customer but was told by Apple he wasn’t authorised to supply that particular product.

The feeling down under is that Apple has peaked and it is losing business opportunities because it can’t handle the channel. The reason it can’t handle its channel is because it can’t give up control.
Apple’s policy appears to be one of forcing customers to go direct. This is helped by the development of its own retail channel. While this boosts the company at a local level it means the loss of huge numbers of sales.

Apple also failed to notice that those 200 resellers suddenly turned from committed advocates to actively hostile competition.

What the resellers have done is to recommend to their installed base of customers products which are not blessed by Apple. Talking up the merits of rival products seems to be working.

For example, HP’s ElitePad business tablet is being pushed for having a number of superior features for businesses, including better touch control, better keyboard, battery life, faster processing and of course Windows 8 and Flash compatibility.

Instead of pushing Apple, they have established an idea, which we are seeing among Apple resellers in Europe too, that Apple is a spent force.

One Roman reseller, which had been a keen Apple supplier for a decade, said that he started recommending other products because Apple’s time was over.

“It used to be that Apple was seen as infallible, and perhaps under Steve Jobs it was, but now cracks are appearing,” he told ChannelEye. “We could have put up with them being arrogant before, but now it is just annoying.”

European biz wants Network-as-a-Service

Posted on February 5, 2013 by - News

cloud 2Beancounters working for research outfit Ciena have discovered that European enterprises are falling over themselves to get to WAN connectivity.
Interest is particularly strong in the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Dubbed the Vanson Bourne survey, the report indicates that corporates are most interested in a WAN connectivity model that adapts to peak and off-peak demands.

Four out of five enterprises describe themselves as very or somewhat interested in adopting Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). The report said that this reflects the increasing bandwidth requirements that enterprises face today as well as the need for a more cost-effective connectivity model.

More enterprises are considering a ‘Data Centre Without Walls’ model where they can pay for connectivity according to usage.

The survey was made up of senior IT decision makers in Western Europe. German companies were particularly keen on Network-as-a-Service as a way of reducing IT costs.

Almost half of interviewees in the finance and manufacturing sectors describe themselves as very interested in such a model, while the public sector seems more reluctant with only 14 percent seeing it as an option.

Dutch and French enterprises are the most receptive to a pay-per-use model for WAN connectivity, followed by the UK and Germany. A third of French and British enterprises are attracted to this model by lower cost while the Dutch like the fact it is very predictable.

The report also shows the extent of IT outsourcing. About two thirds of companies have outsourced IT services, and among those more than a third intend to outsource more.

Ian Harris, EMEA system integrators leader at Ciena said that with most enterprises outsourcing part of their IT services, the next step for enterprises will be to move part of their infrastructure requirements to the cloud.

He thinks that the Data Centre Without Walls idea will catch on because it allows enterprises to share resources while dealing with peak and off-peak demands.

The research backs up findings from Gartner’s IT Spending Report for 2013 that overall spending on IT infrastructure will surpass $3.7 trillion this year and $4 trillion by 2015.