Where big data is headed

Posted on December 11, 2013 by - News

John Dee and Queen Elizabeth the firstAs predicted here, now is the time for predictions for 2014. And the latest seer to gaze into his dark John Dee style speculum is Mario Faria, from ServiceSource.

Fario says many companies have experimented with big data stuff during 2013 and tried pilots. The crunch time will be when these pilots start to show a return on investment.

And next year, he says, the phrase big data will yield to analytics because it’s not about collecting data but to capture, analyse and act in the here and now to stay cmpetitive.

Fario’s job title is Chief Data Officer and he explains that this function is the janitor of data but also an evangelist and will engage in 2014 with the board of directors. No doubt the board of directors will engage with chief data officers too.

Unlike the Harris poll we published earlier, which shows a degree of insouciance about wearable stuff, Fario thinks that Fistbit, Nike devices and Google Glasses will be part of our everyday life.

But ultimately, everything is down to the quality of data because if its not reliable any amount of analysis will not deliver results. He says that data quality is a  money maker.

No-one gives a stuff about wearable tech

Posted on December 11, 2013 by - News

google-ICA Harris poll has shown that people largely show a vast indifference to wearable technology.

That could be bad news for vendors who have hyped up the category like there’s no tomorrow.

Harris surveyed 2,250 people aged 18 or over in the USA. The majority of these sensible folk don’t really know what it’s all about while 19 percent were vehement and said they’d never buy a wearable tech device.

Nearly half (46 percent) of those surveyed said there were no benefits to wearable tech – while 54 percent said it might benefit them in some way.

Only 24 percent say they don’t have any worries about wearable tech while 76 percent say they do have worries.  The biggest worry is that this tech will be too expensive, while other worries include privacy and lack of unique features.

IBM takes plastic quantum route

Posted on December 10, 2013 by - News

ibm-officeBig Blue said it has made a breakthrough that will provide the potential to create ultra fast optical switches, suitable for future big data computer systems.

The company said its scientists have demonstrated a quantum mechanical process known as Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC).

It uses a luminescent polymer similar to the light emitting displays in smartphones of today.

The phenomenon demonstrated by the scientists is named after Satyendranath Bose and Albert Einstein – they predicted it in the mid 1920s, said IBM.  A BEC is a state of matter when a dilute gas of particles (bosons) are cooled to close to absolute zero (-273C).

However, IBM has achieved the same state at room temperature in a thin plastic film of 35 nanometres with bosonic particles created through interaction of the polymer material and light.   The phenomenon last for a few picoseconds, but the IBM scientists think that is long enough to create a source of laser-like light or an optical switch.

Argos has canned its tablet – report

Posted on December 10, 2013 by - News

Argos MyTabletAfter rumours that high street giant Argos had dropped its MyTablet, it now appears that,  er, it has.

A report on Hudluser.com quotes a customer service rep from Argos saying that its Bush MyTablet pink and its Bush MyTablet silver have been discontinued.

Argos had previously said that it was out of stock because of its popularity.

We have contacted Argos for comment and will update this story when we hear from the company.

Big printers down, document scanners up

Posted on December 9, 2013 by - News

HPAn IDC report said that the Western Europe  large format printer market fell in the the third quarter of 2013 by 2.9 percent. Meanwhile it also reported that the document scanner market was up by more than 30 percent.

The top three vendors in the large format printer market are HP, Canon and Epson – together they accounted for 89.3 percent of shipments – they were close to 15,500 units in Q3.  LED tech fell by over 13 percent, but UV inkjet printers grew by more than 30 percent year on year.  The technical segment accounts for a 60 percent share of the application type while the graphics segment fell from 41.5 percent in share from Q3 2012 to 39.7 percent in Q3 2013.

For document scanners, the top five vendors in Western Europe were Brother, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu and HP – making of 83.9 percent of shipments, which numbered around 83,000 during the quarter.

Distributed document scanners is larger of two main segments with 97 percent share, but production document scanners increased by 8.7 percent in Q3, compared to the same quarter this time last year.

Rackspace peers into its crystal ball

Posted on December 9, 2013 by - News

crystalballA VP at Rackspace has spread out his tarot cards and given his prediction on how the market will shift in 2014.

According to Nigel Beighton, VP of technology, the division of cloud computing into public and private clouds will be disrupted by the emergence of specialist cloud providers. They’ll target specific markets including finance, telecoms and retail – there will also be more application specific cloud based stuff – including cloud computing for CPU monitoring.

Platform as a Service is over hyped, thinks Beighton, but DevOps will be a better way of helping software development.

Mr Big Data will receive close care and attention from big tech vendors who will “take the time and complexity” out of operations and there will be consolidation of NOSQL technologies.

The NSA revelations will mean that we’ll see investments in better encryption – and that should allay some peoples’ concerns about cloud based platforms and systems.

Finally, Beighton believes that in 2014 everyone will go nuts about DevOps and that means developers and IT departments will have to work closer than ever before.

ChannelEye predicts that before 2013 comes to a close, we will see more predictions about what is going to happen next year.

Intel refuses to give up on tablets

Posted on December 9, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoNever one to give up even when the battle’s already lost, chip behemoth Intel is apparently preparing a big notebook push.

According to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, which claims to have information frm the supply chain, Intel will unveil a plethora of chips that support entry level and high end tablets.

And, in bitter news for its long time “friend” Microsoft, Intel will introduce CPUs that support Android operating systems at the end of this year.

Bay Trail Android CPUs aimed at seven inch tablets will cost between $99 and $129 while it will also introduce other chips in the first quarter of next year costing between $149 to $199.

Bay Trail and Cherry Trail CPUs will look to target eight to 10 inch tablets and cost a staggering $199 to $249.

And in September next year, Cherry Trail will emerge from the factories using 14 nanometre “Airmont” manufactures – Another Trail blazer wll be Willow Trail at the same time, using 14 nanometre Goldmont, according to Digitimes.

And it seems Chipzilla hasn’t given up the ghost on smartphones and will intro 22 nanometre chips.

It’s hard to see how Intel can possibly catch up this late in the game, but it sure looks like it’s going to give it a stab.

Storage sales fall

Posted on December 6, 2013 by - News

emcboxThe external disk storage market posted a decline of 3.5 percent for the third quarter of this year, compared to the same period last year.

IDC, which released the data today said the total disk storage market – including internal disks – produced $7.4 billion in revenues – and that’s a 5.6 percent fall compared to last year.

Total disk storage system capacity amounted to 8.4 exabytes, growth of 16.1 percent year on year.

Despite the decline, IDC believes there is still strong demand for virtualised departments including integrated infrastructure. IDC said the reason fr decine includes reduced US government spending, more us of storage efficient technology, investment in public cloud capacity and price pressure.

The top five vendors total disk storage were EMC, HP, IBM, Dell and NetApp. HP saw a drop over the same period of 10.2 percent, IBM of 11.2 percent and Dell of seven percent.  NetApp, however posted an increase of 5.9 percent.

Shop sales slow on the interweb

Posted on December 6, 2013 by - News

highstreetA report said a staggering 92 percent of the top shops in the UK didn’t take advantage of so-called “Cyber Monday”.

“Cyber Monday” is a spinner’s term for last Monday, which was expected to be the peak time when people ordered kit over the internet.

But, according to the NCC Group, it all went terribly wrong, mostly because of slow download speeds.

It said it monitored the top retail websites last Monday and didn’t reach an average download speed of three seconds or less.

Why? According to Bow Dowson, director of NCC Group’s website performance group, for some weight of traffic was probably a problem.  One site it monitored on the day was 50 percent slower than the average download speed over the previous three months.

He said: “You could argue that the availability of good load testing solutions makes traffic-induced performance problems unforgivable these days. However, a number of companies performed badly this year, and that might be down to the extra hype we’ve seen around Cyber Monday meaning an even greater surge in visitors.

“What’s more, a lot of retailers have been advertising Cyber Monday discounts. A closer look at some of the special promotion pages from Friday to Monday also revealed that prospective customers would have been experiencing even longer load times or timeouts at certain times of day.

“It’s also important to remember that poor performance can be caused by third-party plugins and widgets. These are also under greater strain at this time of year, and it’s difficult to factor in the effect of elements over which you have no direct control.”

The NCC Group did not name names.

Dell offers voluntary redundancies

Posted on December 6, 2013 by - News

Dell logoA number of staff at Dell were offered voluntary redundancy, it has emerged.

The Wall Street Journal said it had got hold of an internal memorandum giving people the chance to take voluntary redundancy with the cut off date being the 20th of December.

The Journal chatted to a spinner at the company who would not say how many people Dell wanted to lay off. He also refused to say whether the tin giant would introduce compulsory redundancies if not enough people offered to fall on the sword of their own account.

He did say that Dell wanted to improve its cost structure.

Like other PC manufacturers worldwide, Dell has faced declining sales as people dash to swipe tablets and smartphones rather than face the wonders of Windows 8.1 and Intel microprocessors.

Datacentre availability is big deal for channel

Posted on December 5, 2013 by - News

datacentrebatteriesA survey commissioned by Brocade has surveyed 350 global resellers and systems integrators and concludes that datacentre availability is the primary concern of customers.

The survey, carried out with the aid of Avnet, TD Azlan, TechData, Arrow ES, edsLAN, the Immix Group, Mindware and Westcon showed that 60 percent of end users see fabrics as the future of networks. But their unwillingness to invest in datacentre networks is a big hurdle for enterprises.

A third of the channel players surveyed said their customers only invested in networks to support a specific new application or service.  Over one in 10 said they only invested when the network was already failing.

The survey identified five drivers of network investment: virtualisation, faster access to data and applications, greater bandwidth, supporting increasing data volumes and the need to support mobility.

Sixty percent of the channel players think fabric networks will be deployed in datacentres by 2020.

However, a third admitted knowing little about SDN, while 62 percent think budget constraints have a significant impact on companies investing in technology.  And 63 percent consider vendor financing as “vital” or “more important”.

brocade_infographic

iPass signs up more resellers

Posted on December 5, 2013 by - News

Rene Hendrikse, iPassPeople looking to implement BYOD in their businesses are looking for secure network access and iPass has signed a clutch of resellers to promote its Open Mobile strategy.

The company has signed three UK resellers and one German reseller today and is looking to increase its channel partners.

Bridgeway Security Solutions, Olive Communications and Specialist Computer Centres are its three new British partners, while it has also signed mITE GmbH in Germany.

Rene Hendrikse, iPASS VP of EMEA, told ChannelEye that while some sectors – such as the financial sector – there are big opportunities for resellers in other industries.

Hendrikse said: “We can help resellers work with their customers while resellers are looking for solutions to use secure devices.”  iPass has a worldwide network of secure wi-fi access points.

He said that in the last 18 months the reseller landscape has changed and customers are turning to BYODs.

iPass is looking to recruit resellers with customers in other sectors such as the airline industry and other sectors.

Business failing to see mobility value

Posted on December 5, 2013 by - News

Matt Bancroft, Mobile HelixA survey of 300 IT decision makers in the UK and the US has revealed that 86 percent of their companies fail to use mobility to change their businesses and make more money.

Matt Bancroft, president of Mobile Helix, which commissioned the survey said that while widespread enterprise mobility is “still its infancy” making good choices today will increase revenues.

“Mobility has the potential to disrupt business in much the same way as the internet, but at the moment, cost and complexity challenges lead people to frequently ignore the enormous possibilities available,” he said. He sees the value of mobility as consisting of three stages – turning existing enterprise apps into mobile apps, adding mobile capabilities to existing apps and making new mobile apps as where necessary.

The survey shows that 87 percent of the CIOs think most employees will gain from increased access to CRM, ERP and SharePoint on mobile devices.  But 66 percent of CIOs think it is too complicated while 72 percent say it’s too expensive to integrate mobile into legacy applications.

The CIOs are also concerned about development, support and security.

HP to axe UK jobs

Posted on December 4, 2013 by - News

HPOver 1,000 jobs at HP UK will disappear next year, as part of its move to restructure its global business.

The cuts will hit HP at Warrington, Sheffield and Bracknell.

Some people will be redeployed within the company.

600 of the job cuts will go at its Bracknell HQ.

Last week HP released its fourth quarter results which showed mixed results.  But like other tier one vendors, HP has suffered from a decline in people buying PCs using X86 chips.

Meg Whitman, the CEO of HP, has vowed to turn the company round. But HP is quite a big ocean going liner and turning it round isn’t exactly a piece of cake.

5i introduces cloud channel programme

Posted on December 4, 2013 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeResellers are aware of the potential of the cloud but need help implementing complex systems.

That’s according to channel services company 5i – which said today it is launching a Partner Enablement Programme.

Richard Brown, 5i channel sales director, said: “Cloud technology offers many benefits but is also the biggest threat to businesses. And resellers are quick to recognise the complexities of deployment.

“It is the most disruptive technology to dominate the market for a long time. Many businesses see the huge benefits that cloud can bring – but embracing it can be incredibly challenging.,” he continued.

Brown said that resellers’ customers rarely introduce full cloud deployments but are looking for blended cloud and on premise environments.

The 5i programme, he said includes marketing, sales, pre-sales and technical engagement to support partners. If resellers use its services, resellers always keep their customers.  Brown said his firm is 100 percent channel focused.