SMBs still love PCs

Posted on August 20, 2013 by - News

dell-aioSales of tablets are skyrocketing and many punters claim they are cannibalising PC sales, which is true to some extent. Tablets are excellent gadgets for media stuff, but in many settings they simply can’t replace the traditional PC.

According to research firm Techaisle, SMBs are still buying plenty of PCs and tablets can’t tap this market. So the firm believes rumours of PC’s death are greatly exaggerated.

“Those who predict that the PC is dead are not seeing the picture correctly,” Techaisle analyst Anurag Agrawal told Information Week. “They are probably getting carried away by the current wave of tablet adoption.”

Agrawal does not dispute the fact that some people are buying tablets instead of PCs, but this is not a one-for-one replacement. Small and medium size businesses simply can’t replace PCs with tablets.

Techaisle found that 68 percent of American SMBs bought tablets to fill new or complementary functions. Only 16 percent of them bought tablets to replace traditional laptops.

Most tablets in SMBs are used as complementary devices and 70 percent of British SMBs say tablets won’t replace their PCs.

Tablets can be a valuable asset for SMBs, especially in some industries, but PCs will continue to dominate the SMB IT landscape. Tablets are more likely to replace credit card readers and POS systems than PCs.

The real problem for PC vendors is that SMBs and just about everyone else don’t really have much of an incentive to upgrade. PCs last a lot longer than they used to just a few years ago, so many companies buy new PCs only when they have to, that is, when they die.

“There are no compelling reasons based on technology advancements alone for a business to buy a new PC or replace an older one,” Agrawal said. “However, businesses are still buying PCs as per their needs.”

Maturity appears to be killing the PC market, not tablets.

Foxconn starts selling TVs

Posted on August 20, 2013 by - News

foxconn-tvFoxconn may be about to diversify and try its luck in the smartphone and tablet business, under its own brand. The company has been building iPhones, iPads and a range of other products for years and now it’s selling smart TVs, with a bit of help from 7-Eleven Taiwan.

Foxconn launched its TV assembly business in 2008 and it has expanded it in recent years with the acquisition of manufacturing facilities from Sony. It also bought a 50 percent stake in Sharp’s panel making plant in Japan, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Shoppers in Taiwan can already buy a range of Foxconn tellies and with gaudy ads like this one for a 40-inch smart TV, who could resist? However, the big news is that Foxconn may be about to launch smartphones and tablets of its own, or through some sort of deal with 7-Eleven.

This is not good news for Chinese white-box outfits. They have been performing quite well recently and demand for white-box smartphones and tablets is quite strong, often outstripping growth reported by big brands. If Foxconn enters the fray, the white-box crowd will face a lot more competition.

Foxconn has a lot of experience and capacity second to none, but it doesn’t actually make any crucial components used in smartphone or tablets. This is true of most smartphone outfits except Samsung.

There is no shortage of high resolution panels, cheap application processors, cameras or batteries. Depending on volume Foxconn could get much better prices than small white-box companies. However, it is still unclear whether Foxconn’s push will be limited to the 7 Eleven deal, or whether it will spread to other markets.

The company certainly has the muscle to pull off a global rollout, but this might not be necessary, at least not for now. Foxconn could instead choose to target a handful of emerging markets like China, markets that are not very saturated and that tend to scoop up white-box phones. The exact same markets Lenovo is gunning for. Such an approach could give Foxconn a foothold in the mobile industry through a back door, as it wouldn’t have to go head to head with Samsung or Apple.

STAP IT – IDC expects boom in threat market

Posted on August 19, 2013 by - News

stapThe advanced threat detection market may experience a boost on the back of increasingly sophisticated financial and intellectual property theft, according to a report from IDC.

Malware is becoming increasingly specific and stealthy, and is able to dodge signature based defence – and code writers understand that highly targeted attacks are even more difficult to detect.

Reacting to this, there has been the emergence of a new suite of products that go beyond the traditional signature based defences. IDC calls these products Specialised Threat Analysis and Protection, or STAP, which use mostly signature-free tech like sandboxing, emulation, and big data analytics to detect malware.

These can be based on the network level or at the endpoint, or both, and look for both inbound and outband traffic – scanning for anomalies in this data.

STAP products, IDC believes, should have a compound annual growth rate of 42.2 percent from 2012 to 2017, with revenues approaching $1.17 billion in 2017.

According to IDC research manager John Grady, they have become a “strategic necessity for many organisations, especially in the financial services and government sectors, with budget being quickly allocated to prioritise deployment”.

 

Cloud Industry Forum slams Google over .cloud gTLD

Posted on August 19, 2013 by - News

cloud 1Industry group the Cloud Industry Forum has slammed Google for what it calls the company’s attempt to control the future of the .cloud generic top level domain (gTLD).

ICANN had been looking at reviewing thousands of gLTDs, and one of the most disputed was .cloud – with three top brands, Google, Symantec, and Amazon, applying for it as a closed registry. This would make the bid winner the sole registrar of the domain and would exercise all control over it.

An open letter to ICANN, penned by Cloud Industry Forum founder Andy Burton, says none of these companies should have the right over a domain that could represent an entire industry. “Clearly none had the right to exercise ownership over the phrase, and indeed none could ever dream to achieve it in a comparative activity such as registering a trademark,” Burton said.

The CIF thinks Google’s moves to convert the closed .cloud application to a “restricted” one has done “little to allay industry fears, and is likely to compound competition concerns and give Google an unfair advantage over everyone else in the industry”.

The threat is that, by controlling the .cloud domain, other players will be relegated to third level domains and, as a result, will give Google an unfair ability to promote, categorise and develop cloud services.

“As one of the largest and most powerful cloud services companies in the world, Google would have both the incentive and ability to undermine its rivals’ ability to innovate and promote their own cloud services via this gTLD,” Burton writes. “A situation we believe, that no matter what the positive motive of Google’s application may have been, should not be allowed to arise in the first place”.

“We cannot allow market size and funding to win over common sense and fairness in matters such as the control of a generic term,” Burton said.

The letter is available to read in full here.

Although Google does its best to distance itself from anticompetitive claims, the company has been under the eye of both the US FTC and, now, the European Commission. Critics have alleged Google used its market leading position to redirect search results to its own services, and away from those of rivals.

Asus launches NFC thing

Posted on August 19, 2013 by - News, Products

asus-nfc-dongleNFC is slowly taking off, but adoption is still limited. The technology is there, most phones and tablets ship with NFC chips, but very few people and businesses actually use it.

Now Asus has an interesting product that could help bring NFC to desktops and notebooks, but there is a catch.

The company’s NFC Express receiver is a USB 3.0 device that could have quite a few uses. It could allow users to log in using Windows 8 and NFC tags and it could allow the transfer of photos and images without WiFi.

The catch is that the device was designed to be used with Asus Z87 motherboards. It also ships as an accessory with the Z87-DELUXE/DUAL motherboard. It can also be bought separately and it uses two USB 3.0 ports.

Logging into Windows without a password sounds interesting, but NFC dongles could have a lot of other applications. Cheap, off-the-shelf devices could be used to upgrade existing PCs or POS systems in retail outlets. However, for this to happen NFC needs to see a lot more adoption across the board.

Footfall creeps up, vacancies down

Posted on August 19, 2013 by - News

clouds3The July heatwave is long gone, but its positive effects on the retail sector are still being felt. According to the British Retail Consortium, footfall was up 0.8 percent in July compared to a year ago. The footfall uptick was not the only good news, as vacancy rates went down.

BRC found that vacancy rates in town centres went down from 11.9 percent in April to 11.1 percent in July. Since lovely weather drove shoppers back to the high street, online took a hit. Online sales fell two percent compared to June, but year-on-year they were up nine percent.

In addition, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) is now forecasting GDP growth of 1.2 percent in 2013, up from 1.0 percent in its May forecast. CBI revised its figures after a better than expected second quarter and signs of a pick-up in confidence across a broad range of sectors, including services, construction and manufacturing.

“The economy has started to gain momentum and confidence is picking up, but it’s still early days,” John Cridland, CBI Director-General, said. “We need to see a full-blown rebalancing of our economy, with stronger business investment and trade before we can call a sustainable recovery. We hope that will begin to emerge next year, as the Eurozone starts growing again.”

As the Eurozone emerges out of recession, we could be in for a period of relative stability, but the recovery remains painfully slow in most sectors.

Intel thinks PC market a-ok

Posted on August 16, 2013 by - News

Intel-logo “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” an Intel spokesperson said, before insisting that the PC market isn’t seriously in the doldrums.

At a New York event, Intel execs showed off an Intel sponsored IDC survey that claimed the PC market holds enormous potential, and that there is no better time than now to buy a PC. Cash strapped people in Europe and the US may disagree – instead spending their cash on daily necessities like food instead of replacing functional consumer electronics.

The survey said 97 percent of respondents consider their PC their main computing device, and of these respondents, 41 percent plan to buy a PC in the coming year. Many also said they would rather give up exercise, sweets, caffeine, and TV than their computers.

As AllThingsD points out, a rather different recent IDC document showed PC sales trends are the worst they’ve ever been, ever, not just in the US and Europe, but also in emerging markets like Latin America and Asia.

Intel’s Merlin Kister said retailers were partly to blame because they frequently do not show off the capabilities of hybrid-style notebook, tablet crosses.

Euro online sales to double in five years

Posted on August 16, 2013 by - News

visa-epayOnline retail sales in Europe are expected to double by 2018, reaching €323 billion. This year online retail should hit €188 billion and some companies like Amazon are expected to see even faster growth, according to market research firm Mintel.

Mintel’s survey covered 19 markets in Europe and it was made exclusively available to Reuters. The survey found that Germany, Britain and France would remain by far the largest markets for online retail. However, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland should see fast growth, while Norway and Sweden already have the highest online per-capita spend.

Mintel analyst John Mercer said there is a big North-South divide in e-commerce in Europe. French participation levels lag Britain and Germany, but Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain are even further behind, which is hardly surprising since they can barely afford Molotov cocktails now.

Amazon is expected to maintain its lead and double its market share in the next three to four years. Amazon currently has just five dedicated websites in Europe, in Britain, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Mercer reckons Amazon would be better off with localised sites for the Nordics than Italy.

British grocers are doing surprisingly well. Tesco’s market share is 2.3 percent, Asda and Sainsbury’s have 1.1 percent and 0.9 percent respectively. However, online grocery shopping is not popular in the rest of the continent.

Dell profit falls by 72%

Posted on August 16, 2013 by - News

Dell logoDell has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. The company is embroiled in a protracted battle between CEO Michael Dell and celebrity investor Carl Icahn, who doesn’t want the company to go private. As a result of Icahn’s grandstanding, practically every Dell headline over the last few months had more to do about Icahn and his supporters than the company itself.

Business is not going well, but thanks to the mess, nobody seems to be paying much attention. On Thursday the company reported a 72 percent dip in quarterly earnings and flat revenue. The results were predictable, as practically every PC maker that’s not Lenovo is struggling.

Net income was $204 million, down 72 percent year-on-year. Revenue was flat at $14.5, but it still managed to beat Wall Street’s estimate of $14.18 billion. Dell’s net income was 25 cents per share, a penny better than expectations.

Last quarter Dell shipped 8.98 million PCs, down from 9.35 million a year ago. Dell still ranks as the third biggest PC seller with a 12 percent share. Lenovo and HP have slightly over 16 percent of the market each.

There were some bright spots, too. Enterprise computing revenue was $3.3 billion, up 8 percent year-on-year. Sales of networking hardware and servers were also up.

Ironically, the downturn could benefit Michael Dell in his ongoing row with Icahn. Icahn still insists that Dell is trying to buy the company for less than it’s really worth, but if the PC market keeps underperforming, Icahn might be about to run out of arguments.

Microsoft turns to channel in Surface catastrophe

Posted on August 15, 2013 by - News, Opinions

redmondMicrosoft will be reeling after top manufacturers dropped Windows RT as a platform one after the other with more rumoured production stoppages on the way.

Asus, Lenovo, and HTC have all ditched RT while Samsung is rumoured to quit production soon, and Toshiba and HP have not made clear any plans to push the operating system, as PC Advisor reports.

In the oversaturated tablet market where Android and the iPad are king, it is not particularly surprising RT failed to woo customers as a ‘cheap’ watered down alternative to Windows 8, that was actually anything but affordable. Microsoft’s none-message advertising campaign spectacularly flopped and while reviews were OK, the tech press was baffled by Ballmer’s insistence to keep the price tag high.

Even with a more recent price cut, the Surface RT is not particularly alluring.

The numbers in Microsoft’s inventory were staggeringly poor, with the company losing $900 million to its bet on the Surface RT sitting shipped but unsold in warehouses everywhere.

When even Windows 8 was not persuading potential customers to jump ship from Android or iOS with their smart devices, it was an expensive experiment for Redmond to insist on the viability of RT, and considering the company’s track record in hardware, even crazier to build and brand the Surface RT itself.

Now Microsoft hopes the channel will be able to convince business owners to cover its bad bet.

Today the Surface team announced the channel availability of both the Surface RT and Surface Pro in 17 new markets – including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. Resellers will be able to offer device recycling, data protection, custom imaging, onsite service, and more.

But these resellers will have to persuade businesses that the Surface or Surface RT are actually useful devices. There may be a few bloated budgets channel players will be able to extract some cash from, but overall, the move stinks of Microsoft trying to dump as many of the tablets as far away as possible.

Here is the official line: “We continue to be committed to bringing business channel availability to all markets where Surface is currently sold. As Forrester analyst Tirthankar Sen noted in his blog commentary, extending from our initial U.S. commercial channel roll-out on July 1, this measured approach helps us to quickly gather feedback and improve while we grow our geographical reach in the business channel.

“This availability in international markets, along with the updates coming to Surface RT with Windows 8.1 are all important milestones for our customers”.

The blog post concludes: “We know that people who use Surface love it!”

IBM to buy Trusteer

Posted on August 15, 2013 by - News

ibm-officeIBM has coughed up the readies to acquire IT security company Trusteer, which it hopes will help boost its portfolio in advanced threat management and application security.

Big Blue is putting together a cybersecurity software lab in Tel Aviv, Israel comprised of over 200 IBM and Trusteer researchers, in addition to the company’s existing R&D in Israel. Together, they will focus specifically on mobile and application security, advanced threat, counter fraud, malware, and financial crime.

IBM security will take advantage of Trusteer’s knowledge in security as a service through the cloud, as well as counter-fraud and advanced persistent threat protection. Additionally, Trusteer points out in a statement, that half of the top 25 US financial institutions offer mobile finance management, meaning advanced security needs to be in place to protect the institutions and their customers.

IBM wants to roll Trusteer’s expertise into its own range of software and services, such as QRadar, i2, SPSS, InfoSphere, and Enterprise Content Management.

In a statement, Trusteer’s CEO Mickey Boodaei said the way organisations are protecting data is quickly evolving. “As attacks become more sophisticated, traditional approaches to securing enterprise and mobile data are no longer valid,” Boodaei said, adding that Trusteer already has large banks as customers.

Android tablets still lack tons of iPad apps

Posted on August 15, 2013 by - News, Products

NexusSales of Android smartphones and cheap tablets are skyrocketing, but the same isn’t true of high-end Android tablets. While many models feature impressive hardware that could easily go toe to toe with the iPad, the app ecosystem just isn’t there yet. 

According to Canalys, out of the top 50 paid and free iPad apps in Apple’s US App Store, 30 percent are nowhere to be found on Google’s Play Store. Another 18 percent were available, but they were not optimized for tablets, which means they look and feel like oversized phone apps. Just 52 percent were available through the Play Store, optimized and ready for tablets.

“Quite simply, building high-quality app experiences for Android tablets has not been among many developers’ top priorities to date,” said Canalys senior analyst Tim Shepherd. “That there are over 375,000 apps in the Apple App Store that are designed with iPad users in mind, versus just a fraction of this – in the low tens of thousands – available through Google Play, underscores this point.”

Canalys expects all this to change, as the user base grows and Google introduces improvements to the Play Store. However, Google simply has to do more to support developers to invest time and money in high-quality Android apps for tablets. Since pricey Android tablets don’t sell well, the user base will remain limited. Most people who buy Android tablets go for cheap and small models, hence it is safe to assume that they are not willing to invest in premium apps and services, either.

The other problem facing Android developers is fragmentation. Apple developers need to design tablet apps for just two screen resolutions and form factors, both of which use the same aspect ratio. They don’t face nearly as many as many challenges as Android developers, who have to deal with dozens of different resolutions, form factors, Android versions, APIs and application processors.

Worse, at the end of the day Android developers have a very limited market for bespoke tablet apps, as the user base is still small and it’s growing from the ground up, i.e. growth is coming from low-end tablets that weren’t designed with anything serious in mind.

Intel talks up the PC market

Posted on August 15, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIntel is in the middle of a leadership change  and on top of that it is facing headwinds coming from all directions. The chipmaker finally seems to be getting it, at least if statements from CEO Brian Krzanich and President Renee James are anything to go by, and they are.

However, although the new Intel is all about Atom and hybrids, the company is still trying to put a positive spin on dismal PC sales. Intel commissioned an IDC survey of 3,997 US adults which apparently found that the PC is still alive and well. We beg to differ.

The survey found that 97 percent of respondents still believe their PCs are their primary computing devices, not smartphones or tablets. They consider access to their PC essential and 73 percent said they would rather go without exercise than without their PC. Geeks aren’t into exercise, but they are into candy and sweets, yet 71 percent said they would rather ditch their sugary treats than their PCs. Another 65 percent said the same about caffeine, 58 percent would rather ditch their TV, while 33 percent would rather spend a few days without their car than without their PC. The average time spent on computing devices was 43 hours a week and half of that was spent in front of a PC.

However, these figures don’t matter nearly as much as the next one – the average PC is four years old. Just a few years ago this would mean that the average PC is ripe for an upgrade, but this is no longer the case. The upgrade cycle has slowed down and average users have little to gain from getting a new PC. Professionals and gamers are a different breed, but the bulk of PC purchases comes from mainstream users.

Over the last decade or so the PC has become so mature that it is practically treated like any other household appliance. People get a new one only when the old one breaks. Nobody buys a new microwave because Samsung launched a new one, with a colour touchscreen. The same is slowly becoming true of PCs.

On a more positive note, the PC is still practically the only platform for productivity. Tablets and smartphones can’t replace it and they can’t even come close, at least not in the foreseeable future. As a result, 83 percent of respondents to the IDC survey said they are more productive on their PCs than on smartphones or tablets. As for the remaining 17 percent, we’re not sure they know what “productive” means.

AMD, Intel gain share in GPU market

Posted on August 15, 2013 by - News

graphics-cardsGPU shipments are recovering and according to Jon Peddie Research, the graphics market increased 4.6 percent last quarter, while the PC market as a whole took a 2.5 percent sequential dip. Intel and AMD upped their market share, at Nvidia’s expense, of course.

The increase in overall GPU shipments reveals that many customers are choosing to “double-attach,” or add a discrete GPU to a system with integrated graphics. This doesn’t really paint the full picture, as practically all Intel non-server chips ship with integrated graphics and the same goes for more than two thirds of AMD chips. As a result, the average PC today has 1.4 GPUs on board.

On a year-to-year basis total graphics shipments in the second quarter dropped 6.8 percent. Once again this was better than PC shipments, which slipped 11.2 percent. JPR expects the total shipments of graphics chips in 2016 to hit 319 million units and the CAGR from 2012 to 2016 now stands at -1.4 percent.

jpr-gpu-market-2q13

AMD’s overall PC graphics shipments increased 10.9 percent and the company upped its market share to 21.9 percent. However, shipments of APUs declined 9.6 percent. Shipments of APUs in notebooks increased 47.1 percent, but it should be noted that AMD’s presence in notebooks is rather limited. With that in mind all it takes to get such a high figure is a few design wins.

Intel’s desktop graphics shipments dropped 1.4 percent, but notebooks were up 12.1 percent. Intel’s overall shipments increased 6.2 percent.

Nvidia was the big loser last quarter. Its desktop discrete shipments were down 8.9 percent, while discrete mobile shipments were down 7.1 percent. It should be noted that Nvidia scored the vast majority of Haswell notebook design wins, but new notebooks aren’t exactly flying off shop shelves right now.

Although some of the numbers are encouraging, total GPU shipments were down 5.2 percent from the same quarter last year. The trend for discrete GPUs remains negative, with a CAGR to 2016 of -2.2 percent.

Boston signs distie deal with Mellanox

Posted on August 14, 2013 by - News

bostonskylineBoston Limited has just signed a distribution deal with Mellanox Technologies to sell the latter’s Infiniband and Ethernet Interconnect kit, as well as rigging it up with Boston’s own server and storage tech.

Boston hopes the contract will help its growth and development in offering high performance server and storage, especially as enterprises are after scalable options running with high performance and efficiencies.

Mellanox increases efficiency, the company says, by offering the highest throughput with the lowest latency to deliver data, quick, as well as using a system to the best of its capabilities. Interconnects like adapters, switches, software and silicon will all be on offer to optimise HPC, enterprise data, cloud, storage and financial services.

Mellanox’s Darrin Chen said adding Boston Limited as a distie partner will help the company “better address customers looking to achieve their performance”.

“Across EMEA, organisations are increasingly demanding new systems with the scalable and high performance interconnect products to increase application performance and business productivity,” Chen said.

The Mellanox products are available to buy from Boston now.