Category: Products

Dell rules the PC monitor roost

Posted on September 18, 2014 by - News, Products

Dell logoPC monitor unit shipments amounted to 32.5 million units in the second quarter of this year – and that’s a fall of 2.9 percent compared to the year before.

IDC released findings on the quarter, said that tendency will continue over the next three years.

But LCD technology had a 93 percent market share in the second quarter, an increase of 10.5 percent compared to the same quarter a year before.

The favoured screen size is 21.x-inches, and had a market share of 22.5 percent in the quarter.

While touch screen monitors continue to hold only a tiny part of the total PC monitor share of 0.4 percent, there was stronger growth in the USA than in other markets.

Dell managed to stay number one in the quarter, with market share of 15.4 percent, representing five million units.

Samsung, at number two, had a 17.9 percent share in market value. In revenue terms, it was number one, shipping $1.04 billion wrth of units in the quarter.

HP is the number three worldwide, but held the number one position in Western Europe, and the number two position in the US.

Notebook sales slow in the third quarter

Posted on September 12, 2014 by - News, Products

notebooksWhile the computer industry saw comparatively small growth for notebooks in the second quarter, it looks like the third quarter will be much slower.

The third quarter always used to be buoyant for PC sales until sales started to slow a few years ago as smartphones and tablets came into their ascendancy.

Taiwanese wire Digitimes reports that ODMs (original design manufacturers) largely based on the island has fallen quite short of expectations.

It attributes the growth in the second quarter not to a rise in interest in the platforms any more, but because Windows XP was phased out in the spring.

People realised that if they were going to buy a notebook, it would be as well to do it then and move to a new Windows operating system.

Reports earlier this week suggested that sales of tablets in North American and western European markets had reached a degree of stasis too.  Most people who wanted a tablet have got one.

Western Digital fills drives with helium

Posted on September 10, 2014 by - News, Products

helium-ballong-flygWestern Digital’s HGST subsidiary has added 8TB and 10TB hard drives to its HelioSeal product line.

These drives are hermetically seals in helium in order to reduce internal drive friction and power use and make your drives sound like Mickey Mouse.

HGST announced its first helium-filled hard drive, the 6TB He6 model in December.  It did rather well and broke all previous records for hard drive areal density.

HGST said that by 2017, it plans to end production of air-filled hard drives for use in corporate data centres and just use helium-filled products.

Along with the thinner gas’s ability to reduce power use, the helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today’s 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.  Sealing air out of the drive also keeps humidity and other contaminates from getting in.

The announcement follows Seagate’s two weeks ago which announced its highest capacity enterprise hard drive would be an 8TB model that bypassed helium for air.

Seagate uses a technology called shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to increase the capacity of its drives beyond 4TB. Seagate has said SMR holds the promise of creating 20TB drives by 2020.

HGST’s new 3.5-in 8TB drive uses PMR technology. Both drives use a 12Gbps SAS interface, but by using helium instead of air, HGST said it was able to stack seven platters and reduce power usage at idle by 23 per cent and watts per terabyte of capacity by 44 per cent over its 6TB drive.

Balabit box offers security superguard

Posted on June 27, 2014 by - News, Products

praetorianHungarian security company Balabit showed off its Shell Control Box (SCB) at a press gig this  week.

This is a clever gizmo which sits between a data centre and people accessing the data which has an active alert function and which can reconstruct changes people have made to systems as well as preclude certain users from doing different things.

Gabor Marosvari, product marketing manager at Balabit, showed data that demonstrated that 88 percent of internal problems and caused by abuse of privileges,  and 71 percent of all misuses are made using LANs, with 21 percent of those using remote access.

Firewalls, security information and event management (SIEMs) and password managers aren’t enough to protect systems, Balabit claims.  Balabit’s SCB, however, controls privileged user access to remote servers, heads off malicious actions at the gorge, records activities and reports actions for compliance and decision support, it claims. If an intrusion happens, the system can be set up to email the god or goddess that runs the SCB system, and to text them too, if required. It supports the following protocols.

scb

Balabit also claims that it has little competition in the sector. Wallix, CyberARK, Xceedium and Dell Quest use jump hosts; Observe-IT, Centrify and TSFactory are agent based, while Intellinx is a network sniffer.

Balabit, which received an £8 million series A funding from C5 last week, targets banks, central government, telcos, cloud and MSPs, big manufacturers, large enterprises and enterprises using outsourcing.  It doesn’t have any offerings for SMBs, and the cheapest implementation is likely to cost in excess of $10,000. Customers include Raiffeisen, Orange, Telenor, Handelsbanken and Ankara University.

Of course, the big question is that it will be one or two superusers, such as auditors, that has access to the device that monitors an entire enterprise.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes – who will guard the guards themselves? Because she, he, or they are humans too, subject to the emotions, passions, greed and chicanery that affects all of our species.

Get yourself a firewall or get stung

Posted on June 3, 2014 by - News, Products

Dell logoPatrick Sweeney, executive director of network security at Dell, talked about next generation firewalls and how the world+dog needs them because of increased security threats.

He said Dell processed 50,000 pieces of malware a day and that means 50,000 new counter measures a day too – with updates to its firewalls pushed out between eight and twelve times a day. Mobility is changing and is being compromised – it’s not just the enterprise. Security from little to large companies all face the same problems and threats.

There’s an increase in criminal to criminal activities, with exploit auction houses, and people offering a distribution service as well as Botnet rental.  The biggest companies in the world and many governments have been badly compromised.

Encryption is used offensively by malware designers which makes it hard to defend networks. Algorithms to defend against these threats must be able to cope with encrypted malware too. Defence has to be at multiple levels, including deep packet inspection to filter content, offer anti-spam, SSL inspection, intrusion protection and others.

Dell has introduced several new features to its SonicWALL offerings including new content filtering policies that are downloaded when people are on the road – an enforced client deployment mode for CFS and AV. Application control is important too, so that highly threatening applications are prevented from being runnable on the network.

Canon offers SMB benefits

Posted on February 3, 2014 by - News, Products

canonMFPCanon Europe said that its imageRUNNER2400 series will bring its partners some cool profit benefits.

The multifunctional printer (MFP) is network ready and Francis Thornhill, Canon’s European and UK product manager, said that the devices helps it partners to address challenges of small workgroups.

The device lets Canon partners secure revenues after sales, he said – partners’ contact details are left on the device for end users to re-order consumables and the unit has a triple backed up counter so that bill printing costs can be tracked properly.

The device will be available in March.

A billion smartphones ship

Posted on January 28, 2014 by - News, Products

threeiphonesIDC said that a billion smartphones shipped worldwide.

There are over seven billion humans on the planet.

IDC said that that vendors sold 1,004.2 million smartphones – a rise of 38.4 percent from 2012 – which equates to 725.3 million units in 2012.

And smartphones accounted for 55.1 percent of all mobile phone shipments in 2013 – a rise from the 41.7 percent smartphone share in 2012.

Samsung was the market leader, with Apple, Huawei, Lenovo and LG occupying the top five vendors.

Samsung shipped 313.9 million units in 2013, Apple 153.4 million, Huawei 48.8 million, LG 47.7 million and Lenovo 45.5 million.

“Others” exceeded Samsung by shipping 394.9 million units during 2013.

DRAM shortage continues to bite

Posted on January 7, 2014 by - News, Products

nand-chipsIt looks as though the shortage of DRAM will continue well into 2014.

A fire at an SK Hynix factory last year was primarily responsible for the run on DRAM and even though the company says that production has resumed, there is still an element of catch up.

According to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, speciality DRAM chips are particularly badly affected due to increased demand from various sectors for SDRAMs.

Spot prices for DDR3 memory have risen and are expected to rise even further as the year goes on.

Samsung readies a tablet blitz

Posted on January 6, 2014 by - News, Products

Samsung rules the roostGiant chaebol Samsung is readying an assault on the low end tablet market with a range of cheapo machines intended to consolidate its place in the sector.

It will introduce a Galaxy Tab 3 Lite – a seven inch unit – which is set to be priced at $129, Taiwanese wire Digitimes reports. The machine will have a 1024×600 display, use a 1.2GHz Cortex A9 microprocessor, come with 1GB of storage, have a three megapixel camera and Android 4.2, the wire reports.

But it’s not leaving it there, it seems.  It will also introduce more seven inch as well as eight inch, 10 inch and 12 inch models this year.

Samsung remains second in the tablet market, behind Apple, but wants to be number one.

Unlike Apple, and many other players in the tablet market, Samsung has its own fabs and can source memory, microprocessor, display and other components as well as use its own machine assembly lines.

Business to go for smart specs

Posted on December 17, 2013 by - News, Products

spyspexA company claims that enterprises will adopt smart glasses faster than your average geek.

APX Labs, which makes Skylight software, claims that Google, Epson and others are making devices which in conjunction with apps will be adopted by large corporations.

Skylight, it claims, will let workers share their view with remote colleagues, continuously monitor important information, control devices, sensors and equipments remotely and find and track objects and people.

Vertical sectors adopting smart glasses are likely to include nurses, doctors, fieldservice technicians, warehouse workers, and factory workers.

Skylight is already being used in multiple large businesses in a beta programme while the software officially launches next January.

Ed English, product manager at APX Labs, gives a little demo in a video here. He isn’t wearing smart glasses.

CWCS to offer unlimited bandwidth

Posted on November 22, 2013 by - News, Products

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeManaged hosting company CWCS said today it will offer unlimited bandwidth on cloud server packages.

According to the company, its cloud servers are more inexpensive because removing data transfer charges will lower the prices.

MD Karl Mendez said: “We can offer unlimited bandwidth because we run, manage and operate our own data centres, using high specification equipment and servers with a deliberately built-in amount of spare capacity.”

He said his company is one of the first in the UK to offer cloud servers with unlimited data transfer.

He said that the unlimited bandwidth is now available on CWCS Managed Hosting’s recommended cloud server plans and also on cloud servers that clients have configured themselves.

The services – which have a number of Windows and Linux specifications, are available from its UK data centres.

Android leaps ahead in smartphone sales

Posted on November 15, 2013 by - News, Products

Keep taking the tabletsA report from analyst company Gartner shows that while the Android OS has lept ahead in the third quarter of 2013, Apple’s iOS has lost share.

According to Gartner figures, Android has 81.9 percent share, iOS 12.1 percent, and Microsoft 3.6 percent.  In the same quarter last year, the figures were 72.6 percent, 14.3 percent and 2.3 percent respectively.

Gartner attributes growth of Microsoft sales to decline in the shares of other OSes – particularly Blackberry, which had 1.8 percent in Q3 2013 compared to 5.2 percent in the same period last year.

On the smartphone device front, Samsung has 32.1 percent, Apple 12.1 percent, Lenovo 5.1 percent, and LG 4.8 percent for the third quarter.

The figures for smartphones shipped for the whole year is expected to reach 1.81 billion units, up 3.4 percent from 2012. Gartner thinks that in mature markets, people will buy smaller sized tablet over replacing older smartphones.

ODM bullish about notebook sales

Posted on November 14, 2013 by - News, Products

Flying in the face of received wisdom, Compal’s president Ray Chen is talking up notebook sales in 2014.notebooks

Compal is an original design manufacturer (ODM) – that is to say a company which makes notebooks for big brand names.

According to a report in Digitimes, Chen expects shipments to hit 40 million units next year.

But he is conservative about touchscreen notebooks, despite Microsoft’s best efforts, and thinks they’ll only account for 15 percent of shipments next year. Compal will ship 15 million tablets next year.

He told the Taiwanese wire that its customers have been placing additional orders in this final quarter and expects notebook business to increase as enterprises are forced into upgrading as Windows XP reaches the end of the road.

You can read more, here.

Apps ain’t heavy, they’re by Brother

Posted on November 12, 2013 by - News, Products

ipad3Brother said it has created a series of apps intended to help its reseller community and its salesforce.

And to that end, it has given its entire sales force iPads with 3G access intended to help them put the message across about their products to resellers when they’re on the road.

David Peters, who heads up strategic development at Brother UK, said: “Access to our bespoke iPad apps means that our salesforce can easily access our online corporate resources, including those on our partner programme Brother Network, and as a result, provide better answers and a higher level of service.

“Brother UK is living and breathing an agile working culture, which increasingly typifies the working style of many of our partners and product end-users. By investing in the latest technology, we are not only improving our service to our partners, but also showcasing the progress we are making as a forward thinking solutions provider.”

Sharp readies cloud push

Posted on November 11, 2013 by - News, Products

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeSMEs are not taking sufficient advantage of the opportunities and cost advantages of the cloud, according to a survey by Sharp.

It has launched its Cloud Portal Office today, a subscription based model aimed at SMEs with data held at Amazon Cloud Services in Dublin.

Chris Hale, product manager of software at Sharp UK told ChannelEye that people running small to medium enterprises often didn’t realise the savings that could be made by having their data in the cloud, rather than in their offices. There were advantages from the security aspect too, with backups held remotely in case of fires or other catastrophes.

Hale said companies often had little idea how much it cost to maintain their own IT equipment costs.  The Cloud Portal offering, while launched today, will go live on the 2nd of December next giving it time to train its own direct and its channels’ indirect sales force.

SMEs, Sharp said, are “not only failing to realise the business benefits the cloud can bring, but also can lose control of networks and introducing vulnerabilities”.  Of the 1,500 plus employees surveyed across Europe, 83 percent didn’t think that they had an official cloud network in the workplace.