Tag: enterprises

Enterprise to boost tablet sales

Posted on March 3, 2015 by - News

cheap-tabletsA report said that adoption of tales by commercial enterprises are set to boost sales in Western Europe.

IDC said the commercial market for tablets will reach over 11 million units by 2019 – that’s 130% CAGR.

The tablet market so far has largely been driven by home users, and by early adopters in corporations. Newer designs are lighter, better connected and have options including keyboards.

IDC said that devices are now shipping with features that IT departments like, particularly in security, and both Samsung and Apple have started to target the corporate market.

According to Chrystelle Labesque, a research manager at IDC, over two thirds of the enterprises IDC surveyed in Western Europe have already deployed tablets.

The main reason for their adoption in enterprises include price erosion, more features and increasing employee productivity.

The news couldn’t come any sooner for vendors selling tablets for personal use. All indications are that there is a degree of saturation in this sector.

 

Enterprises will adopt internet of things

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsA report commissioned by Verizon looks today at enterprise adoption of the internet of things (IoT).

While only 10 percent of organisations currently are using IoT extensively, that picture will rapidly change.

Verizon said it saw a 45 percent increase in its IoT business last year, and a 135 percent increase in activations using 4G LTE, year on year.

The highest growth sector is manufacturing which saw a 204 percent increase in 2014, but other sectors are showing big growth figures too – finance and insurance experienced a 128 percent increase and media and entertainment 120 percent increase.

Verizon has a dedicated IoT VP. Mark Bartolomeo said: “IoT covers a multitude of solutions from wearable devices, to remote monitoring of energy management devices to industrial transportation.”

He said Verizon has seen a number of new entrants creating an IoT “roadmap”.

Currently, Verizon estimates that by 2020 there will be around 5.4 billion connections globally.

Internet of things provokes security questions

Posted on February 17, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsLarge enterprises seeking to get to grips with the internet of things (IoT) will have a whole new series of challenges to meet.

That’s according to Gartner, which said identity and access management (IAM) won’t be able to scale or to manage the complexity that the IOT brings to enterprises.

The problem is that enterprises will need a method to define and manage the identities of entities – by which Gartner means people, services and things, inside one framework.

This Gartner calls the Identity of Things (IDoT) which will have to be able to include all entity identities and also to define relationships between these entities.

It all sounds very complex but it is a problem that chief information officers (CIOs) will have to learn.

Gartner did not say whether such definitions have even been thought of yet, but is holding a conference on March 16-17th in London to hammer out the different problems and approaches.

 

Worldwide IT spending still to grow

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - News

Pic Mike MageeIT spending worldwide will reach $3.8 trillion 2015 – that’s up 2.4 percent from last year.
But market intelligence company Gartner has warned that its earlier prediction of 3.9 percent will be affected by the rise in the price of the US dollar as well as conservative sentiment about services and devices.
But Gartner research VP John-David Lovelock sought to play down the reduction.  He said it “is less dramatic than it might at first seem.  The rising US dollar is chiefly responsible for the change.  Stripping out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding growth figure is 3.7 percent.”
Gartner breaks down the spending by categories as follows:

Screen Shot 2015-01-12 at 12.09.23

Datacentre systems will be worth $143 billion in 2015, while enterprise software will total $335 billion.
There will be a price war in cloud per seat during 2015 with price drops of as much as 25 percent right through until 2018.  Vendors are discounting cloud offerings heavily, said Gartner.

 

SaaS deployments are at boiling point

Posted on November 25, 2014 by - News

Pic Mike MageeThe use of Software as a Service (SaaS) by enterprises is becoming “mission critical”,  according to a survey by IT market research company Gartner.

Gartner said that cost and agility are the main reasons for SaaS cloud adoption by enterprises, based on a survey involving four countries in four regions around the world.

Joanne Correia, a research VP at Gartner, said that the most common reasons for using SaaS were to develop and test production and mission-critical workloads.

“We’ve seen a real transition from use cases in previous surveys where early SaaS adoption focused on smaller pilot projects. This is an affirmation that more businesses are comfortable with cloud deployments beyond the front office running sales force automation and email,” she said.

Of those surveyed, 44 percent thought overall cost reduction was the main reason for investment in SaaS.  But CIOs and senior IT project managers rated adoption not only because of cost but because of operational agility and giving their businesses an advantage over competitors.

Gartner believes that few enterprises will completely migrate to SaaS and instead will mix that with traditional on premises deployment.

Outside of the USA, many enterprises still worry about security, privacy and “fear of government snooping”.

Traditional on premise deployments will shrink from 34 percent in 2014 to 18 percent by 2017.

Dell takes aim at HP business

Posted on October 24, 2014 by - News

Andy Zollo, channel director Dell EMEAThe decision by HP to split itself into two will offer opportunities for Dell to take more business.

That’s according to Andy Zollo, director of channels at Dell EMEA, who said today that its own plans will allow it to sell software, services and hardware to a number of new customers.

Zollo said that Dell had embarked on a series of roadshows throughout Europe over the last several weeks to educate its partners on opportunities open to them.

Dell – formerly known primarily as a hardware company – now has a wide portfolio of products and has appointed partner development managers to offer one single “backside to kick”.

He said Dell now has a much closer relationship with a wide range of partners aimed at introducing them to enterprise customers.

Zollo said that any major change to an organisation – such as recently happened with HP – tends to have a disruptive effect, and Dell will feed on the changes that are bound to happen.

IBM Lenovo sale is a done deal

Posted on September 29, 2014 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCLenovo’s offer to buy the remainder of IBM’s X86 business is likely to be concluded this Wednesday.

IBM is disposing of the deal to the Chinese manufacturer for $1.8 billion and when the acquisition is complete, it will finally have washed its hands of all of its X86 business.

That doesn’t mean its out of the hardware business completely, of course.  It will carry on selling its mainframes and a number of other high profit and enterprise standard appliances.

It was the first to launch an X86 personal computer back in the 1980s but its exclusive hold in the market was swiftly dented by competition from clone makers such as Dell and Compaq.

The deal will be completed because it waited approval from the European Union, China and the USA. But authorities in these territories have raised no objections to the sale.

When the deal is complete, it will catapult Lenovo into the major league of X86 players and will let it diversify its business by targeting the lucrative high end of the market.

BT: business doesn’t trust the cloud

Posted on September 25, 2014 by - News

Every silver has a cloudy liningA survey commissioned by BT showed that 70 percent of businesses worldwide are adopting storage and web apps in their organisations.

But they’re far from confident about cloud security, the survey revealed.

Over three quarter of the IT decisions makers surveyed said security is the main problem about using cloud services.  Half of the respondents said they were “very” or “extremely” anxious about security surrounding their cloud services.

Half think enterprise cloud apps and services are too expensive. Half think trusting third parties a problem while as many as 40 percent think all cloud services are inherently insecure.

Why is BT interested in this? Well, you’ve guessed it –  BY has its own portfolio of cloud products and services which is – yes, you’ve guessed it again, inherently secure.

The survey was carried out for BT last July with 640 IT decision makers in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and other countries.  The companies each has 1,000 plus employees.

IT ready for Big Data

Posted on September 3, 2014 by - News

clouds3A survey of 100 IT decision makers from top dollar firms has revealed that enterprises are more than dabbling their toes in the ocean of Big Data.

Syncsort, which is in the Big Data business itself, said that 62 percent of its respondents will optimise their enterprise data warehouses by sending data and batch workloads to Hadoop.

And 69 percent of the people it polled said they expect to make their enterprise wide data available in Hadoop.

Meanwhile just over half of the respondents are likely to spend between five to 10 percent of their budgets on Big Data projects.

Over seventy percent of the respondents work for companies with turnovers of over $50 million plus.

It seems that the IT guys don’t have problems proving the benefits of Big Data to the senior suits that authorise the buys.  It appears from the survey that less than 25 percent of those polled have problems allocating budgets to their Big Data plans.

Enterprise social networking is a waste of time

Posted on July 4, 2014 by - News

crystalballBig companies which thought that it would be a wizard wheeze to set up social networking sites on their corporate nets are regretting the investment.

It is not because the social networking sites are being misused, but rather that they are not being used at all.

Enterprise social networking (ESN) software, designed to boost interaction and collaboration, is being completely ignored.

It sounds so good on paper. A successful ESN deployment means you get a Facebook- and Twitter-like system for your workplace, with employee profiles, activity streams, document sharing, groups, discussion forums and microblogging and employee’s that work together.

The managers thought that staff could use it for brainstorming ideas, answering each other’s questions, discovering colleagues with valuable expertise, co-editing marketing materials, sharing sales leads and collaborating on a new product design.

Carol Rozwell, a Gartner analyst, told IT World   that between 70 percent and 80 percent of companies are struggling with Enterprise Social Networking.

She said it is often rolled out by leaders who are thrilled with the technology, and they see how quickly consumer social networks like Facebook have grown. They think they’ll accomplish the same growth rate and participation if they buy the right tool and staff will use it.

However Gartner predicts that through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve their intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.

However despite the fact that no one is using them, it seems that management still think they are a brilliant idea. MarketsandMarkets claims that spending on this type of software is expected to grow from $4.77 billion this year to $8.14 billion in 2019.  It sounds like it would be money better spend on a horse.

Companies start taking their tablets

Posted on October 9, 2013 by - News, Products

Keep taking the tabletsMore and more tablets are being used in companies with large numbers now being used to access corporate data and apps.

That’s according to a survey from Ovum, which points out that using tablets is changing the way people work.

The survey, conducted in the second quarter of this year, showed that 17.6 percent of people had been given tablets by their employers, compared to 12.5 percent in 2012.

And the number of personal tablet owners grew from 28.4 percent in 2012 to 44.5 percent in 2013, meaning that more personally owned tablets find their way into the workplace.

Richard Absalom, analyst at Ovum, said: “The primary route for tablets into the enterprise is through the consumer/employee channel. Over 66 percent of employees who personally own a tablet use them for work.”

Absalom said that employees use many different devices to get to corporate data and content – tablet or BYOD strategies should be put into that context. “Tablet deployments have the potential to change the way that businesses operate,” he said. “The primary challenge ofr the enterprise is to turn tablet usage into a genuinely transformative deployment.”

Big Data is underused

Posted on October 9, 2013 by - News

Big dataCompanies aren’t using Big Data for their own competitive advantage.

That’s according to a survey by Stibo Systems, which surveyed 200 “senior business decision makers” looking after IT.

And despite companies having zillions of bytes of data, 34 percent said they didn’t know what their firm does with the information.  Another 15 percent said their organisations keep too much data.

But there’s another problem. Stibo’s survey revealed that pan-European businesses have trouble managing their data. Some get third parties to look after it while some don’t make any use of it at all.

Companies managing their own data centrally can use it better than firms which have “siloes” all over the place.

Simon Walker, a director at Stibo, said: “With so much of a company’s data being used for marketing purposes to inform financial decisions, it begs the question of why it’s largely owned by IT departments and not those departments that are using it. There is a large number of enterprises being left behind in big data adoption simply due  to the lack of effective data management processes.”