Nvidia announces Tegra Note Android tab

Posted on September 18, 2013 by - News

nvidianoteNvidia has announced its very own Android tablet platform, the Tegra Note, readied by the company and brought to market by its partners.

Nvidia boasts that, rather than just providing a low cost and high quality build for Tegra 3, as with the Nexus 7, this is a “complete platform”. Partners include EVGA and PNY Technologies, Oysters, ZOTAC, Colorful, Shenzhen Homecare Technology, and XOLO, which will be joining HP, Asus, Toshiba, Kobo and Xiomi in Tegra 4 products.

So far Nvidia is a little late on the tablet front. The company does have products out there but not as many as it likes.

Tegra Note, however, will sport a Tegra 4 72 core GeForce GPU and quadcore Cortex A15 CPU, with the promise of battery saving tech. The company boasts this will make the Tegra Note the “world’s fastest 7 inch tablet”. It will also ship with Nvidia’s DirectStylus tech which should give users more precise and responsive control with a normal stylus.

Nvidia PureAudio will ship, too, which the company says includes the “widest frequency range in a tablet” through front facing stereo speakers and a bass reflex port.

This product sounds like a solid release compared to the gaming curio, Nvidia Shield, an experiment in remote PC gaming – as long as you’re not too far away. Tegra Note will ship with TegraZone for exclusive Tegra optimised graphics, and the company claims you’ll get a massive 10 hours of HD video playback.

Additionally, a range of accessories will be available, including an intelligent cover with built in magnets, the DirectStylus Pro Pack, and Bluetooth capabilities that turn the tablet into a controller. Over the air software updates will be sent out by Nvidia directly to keep software patched and up to date.

Retail prices will start at $199, taking on other low-cost but high performance tablets in the market.

Public cloud spending to pass $100bn in 2017

Posted on September 18, 2013 by - News

cloud (264 x 264)Public IT cloud services spending could sail past the $100 billion milestone in 2017, according to figures from IDC.

Worldwide spending will reach a chunky $47.4 billion for this year, and is expected to reach $107 billion in 2017. The analyst house expects the scale of cloud adoption to grow significantly and rapidly, especially as IT infrastructure at many companies begins to age. According to IDC, systems are becoming so complex and expensive that an alternative – cloud – will be the only way out.

IDC believes that initial hesitation towards privacy and control in cloud are now being addressed, and more competition in the segment is going to seriously lower prices and expand choice of services to potential customers.

IDC cites Google as a company experiencing rapid growth in cloud adoption. Over 5 million are estimated to be using the company’s cloud offering, Google Apps, compared to 3 million in 2009.

Senior IDC analyst Frank Gens believes with the emergence of business as a service, cloud adoption will pick up, and its value with it. “Much of the growth in cloud services is being driven by the increase in deployment options,” Gens said.

“The growing richness of these options is a clear accelerator for overall cloud services adoption,” Gens said. “The emergence of virtual private cloud offerings has helped to shift momentum from dedicated private cloud offerings toward public cloud offerings”.

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.

Good Technology VP heads to Symantec

Posted on September 17, 2013 by - Moving People, News

symanteclogoGood Technology’s VP and GM Huw Owen has been snapped up and appointed to VP sales and marketing for EMEA at Symantec.

Previously overseeing Good’s channel growth in Europe and introducing the firm to the Nordics, Benelux and the Middle East, Symantec has snapped him up to win and retain customers as well as growing in all regions across EMEA.

Owen has been named twice in Global Telecoms Business’ Top 40 Under 40 for telecoms, globally, and has been quoted regularly offering comment on mobility.

Before his time at Good, Owen was executive director at Lenovo’s EMEA team, where he helped in servicing and sales in EMEA and globally. He has also held positions at Veritas and Fujitsu, and served as senior director of EMEA northern region services at Symantec.

Commenting on his return to Symantec, Owen said the opportunities at Symantec are “huge”.

“The EMEA region is a key area of focus for Symantec, contributing significantly to the global company revenues,” Owen said.

Matthew Ellard, senior vice president EMEA, Symantec, said: “Huw has an exceptional amount of knowledge in the channel sector which will be of tremendous value”.

IT departments nervous about BYOD

Posted on September 16, 2013 by - News

threeiphonesMost IT departments are not certain their mobile policies are compliant with both corporate policy and government regulation, according to a report.

Bring Your Own Device means staff are increasingly taking their smartphones into work. Despite this, according to research commissioned by Accellion, an enterprise security company, just 30 percent of organisations have an approved BYOD policy.

70 percent of respondents admitted to being “concerned” and a further 20 percent “extremely concerned” about mobile file sharing.

Additionally, 63 percent of those surveyed want to clamp down on VPN use, and about two thirds have or plan to allow official enterprise content management accross mobile devices. Of course, this means making sure the infrastructure is in place to secure those devices – especially running on sensitive networks.

There was a consensus on limiting or controlling with sites or folders are accessible to staff on mobile, for example, making sales documents available on mobile but blocking access to human resources.

14 percent of respondents were in the process of developing their own corporate app store, with another 14 percent already having one.

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.

Guidance Software picks Wick Hill as UK distie

Posted on September 12, 2013 by - News

truckDistie Wick Hill has got the UK contract for US-based forensics, analytics, and incident response company Guidance Software.

Guidance Software can claim over half of Fortune 100 companies as clients. The company offers EnCase Analytics, which promises to find and treat otherwise hard to detect threats. This technology uses data from every endpoint at a kernel level instead of trusting a compromised OS.

The EnCase Cybersecurity product peers into endpoint activity across a network after a hacking attempt, specifically when threats have been suspected but aren’t identified, or if it’s necessary to snip out sensitive data from unauthorised locations.

EnCase Enterprise, Guardian boasts, is forensic level enterprise investigation, which can cut down on massive costs and regulatory risks typically associated with investigations in the enterprise. Guardian says it can quickly and accurately detect policy violations, including employee fraud and intellectual property theft.

Ian Kilpatrick, chairman at Wick Hill group, said Guidan can give the channel an answer to maintaining security across network infrastructure, which increasingly has more endpoints and generating more data.

“Guidance provides exceptional visibility into endpoint activity across the network, as well as sophisticated forensic tools, which include the ability to preserve forensic evidence post-incident,” Kilpatrick said.

Guidance’s veep of sales for EMA and APAC, Sam Maccherola, said Wick Hill was the right distie because of its existing experience in IT security and the major markets Guidance operates in.

Vega GPU Announced by Vivante

Posted on September 12, 2013 by - News, Products

VivanteRight up front Vivante states that it designed its GPU architecture to scale to compete with Nvidia and ATI. It plans to vie with Nvidia in the next generation of ultra-mobile GPU in GTX/Maxwell, John Oram writes from San Francisco.

A fledgling start up once assisted by semiconductor angel investors and corporate investment from Fujitsu, Vivante was profitable five years after opening its doors. It is now headquartered in Sunnyvale, California with offices in Shanghai and Chengdu China. Over its nine year history, Vivante Corporation has infiltrated many markets.

The company flaunts its “firsts” – first to ship OpenGLES 3.0 silicon and first to ship embedded OpenCL 1.1 silicon. It has shipped over 120 million units. Currently, Vivante is inside the majority of the top players in the fields of SoC vendors, mobile OEMs, TV OEMs, and automotive OEMs.

At IDF, Vivante was heralding its  advantage over its competitors referring to benchmark ratings in its slides. For example see the GC1000 – Mali 400-MP2 comparison where it also pictorially point out the difference in size between the Mali and smaller Vivante product.

Smart TVs, such as Vizio, LG U+, Lenevo, TCL, Hisense, and Changhong, rely on Vivante. Chromecast Internet to TV streaming experiences Acceleration by Vivante in 3D gaming, composition, and user interface. Set top boxes from Toshiba out of Japan, and three companies out of Shenzhen, China, Huawei, Himedia,and GIEC, all use Vivante’s GPU Acceleration.

Tomorrow’s cars will never be the same. Vivante is everywhere. Drivers will check out their positioning with ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) displays, reverse guidance, pedestrian detection, and object distance indicators. In fact, Vivante was awarded the 2013 Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Award  for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.

Vivante used IDF to announce Vega. Vega is the culmination of seven years of architecture refinements and the experience of more than 100 SoC integrations. It is optimized to balance the big three: performance, power, and area. GPU delivers highest in class performance at greater than 1 GHz GPU clock speeds. It even touts patented logarithmic space full precision math units. Vega is optimized and configured from production GPU cores GC2000, GC4000, and GC5000. Vega GPUs have been delivered to lead customers for tapeout.

Vivante’s SDK is ready for GUI, gaming, and navigation applications. Vivante provides full API support across the GPU product line, OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenCL 1.2, and DirectX 11 9_3. The company prides itself on its Scalable Ultra-threaded Unified Shader which offers up to 32x SIMD Vec-4 shaders and up to 256 independent threads per shader operate on discrete data in parallel. Shaders facilitate creation of an endless range of effects by tweaking hue, brightness, contrast and saturation of the pixels, vertices and textures to create an image. Shaders provide a programmable alternative to the hard-coded approach known as Fixed Function Pipeline.

Vivante isn’t shy about pointing out its edge over the competition. As far as performance / area advantages, they are taking on Tegra, Adreno, Mali, and IMG.

In conclusion, Vivante indicated that it isn’t overlooking the mass market either with their Vega Lite version which still promises the smallest silicon area matched with extremely low power.

Intel becomes irrelevant

Posted on September 12, 2013 by - News, Opinions

The mighty dinosaur IntelIt was formerly a chip giant but pretty soon now some archaeologist will uncover the bones of Chipzilla as the lumbering dinosaur nears the end of its existence.

At the Intel Developer Forum this year, Intel’s newly hatched CEO, Brian Krzanich, attempted to breathe new life into the diplodocus he tends by warbling on about healthcare and tablets. He must realise, of course, that to somewhat mix metaphors, Chipzilla has missed the boat.

The writing was on the wall for Intel some years ago but because the company is such a giant, the tiny brain wasn’t getting messages from its extremities that it was slowly dying.

It is a climate change in the egosystem that will spell the end for Intel because, in the marketing babble of the present age, its business model is clearly “unsustainable”.

Intel could only continue to churn out new processes and chips as long as it had a virtual monopoly in the market.  A new fab costs billions to produce and profit is predicated on the fact that it essentially controlled the market.

The giant appears to have missed the fact that handset manufacturers didn’t and don’t want to be locked into the same model as the PC industry.  Now, anyone with a smartphone or tablet is toting around an extremely sophisticated computer and no-one in their right minds wants to spend thousands on a PC unless they’re forced to.  As recent market research has shown, the days of PCs are pretty much numbered and, of course, like its evil twin Microsoft, Intel forgot about the mantra it used to chant, that mantra called convergence.

It will take a while for Intel to die because it is such a lumbering creature, but a model that requires billions to develop new processes simply based on PC sales just won’t work anymore. And if Intel thinks that tablets or smartphones will save its bacon, then it is living in cloud cuckoo land.

In some ways, we must lament the coming death of Chipzilla.  It had some fine people working for it and its process technology was next to none.  But greed and its virtual monopoly meant that it was viewing the world wearing blinkers and its own momentum and size prevented it from taking vital decisions.

Windows devs struggle with mobile compatibility

Posted on September 11, 2013 by - News

acer-w3Windows app developers are gagging to code for mobile platforms but are finding the cost and complexity associated with the transition a barrier, according to a report.

Dimensional Research asked 1,337 Windows developers around the world for their views on going mobile.

According to the research, there is great demand for development, but delivery itself is challenging, revealing a disconnect between the interest in apps and the tools available to actually make them.

85 percent of the respondents had received requests for mobile apps. The most requested platform by far was for Android support.

Using HTML5 and JavaScript have not proved the way forward. Most respondents understood that native apps are ultimately the best for end users, while three quarters said using HTLM5 and JavaScript caused niggling challenges.

Senior researcher at Dimensional Research, Diane Hagglund, said that Windows developers see the need to bring their experiences to mobile. But “today’s development options either limit the end user or result in costly and complex native development across multiple platforms”.

“These Windows developers clearly need better options,” Hagglund said