Tag: Gartner

Gartner’s chickens predict high IT spending

Posted on April 10, 2018 by - News

alectoromaney-roosterSoothsayers in the analyst outfit Gartner have been looking at the way the chickens have been running around and come to the conclusion that we are about to enter a period of high IT spending.

Big G claims that worldwide spending will hit $3.7 trillion this year thanks to an unusually overweight bantam hen running back to the chicken coup and refusing to come out, according to Gartner.

The analyst outfit is expecting spending in 2018 to jump 6.2 percent outpacing last year’s $3.5 trillion, with enterprise software set to be the fastest growing of Gartner’s five spending categories, at 11 percent.

All five categories are expected to see growth, but the rate of data centre spending is expected to decline to 3.7 percent, compared with 6.3 percent last year. All of the other four categories are expected to see stronger growth than last year.

Gartner John-David Lovelock, vice auger said the overall increase in spending to currency fluctuations and political uncertainty.

“Although global IT spending is forecast to grow 6.2 percent this year, the declining US dollar has caused currency tailwinds, which are the main reason for this strong growth,” he said. “This is the highest annual growth rate that Gartner has forecast since 2007 and would be a sign of a new cycle of IT growth.

“However, spending on IT around the world is growing at expected levels and is in line with expected global economic growth.

“Through 2018 and 2019, the US dollar is expected to trend stronger while enduring tremendous volatility due to the uncertain political environment, the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiation and the potential for trade wars.”

Gartner said that data centre sales would continue to face challenges, particularly in storage, and the brief renaissance at the end of 2017 was actually a component shortage which inflated prices.

The devices segment will, however, continue to flourish, even if fewer users are buying new devices.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Well, we at Channel Eye couldn’t, anyway.

 

IoT continues to grow

Posted on March 23, 2018 by - News

fings-ain-t-wot-they-used-t-be-all-star-studio-cast-recordingWorldwide spending on Internet of Things (IoT) security will reach $1.5 billion in 2018, according to the bean counters at Gartner.

A recent Gartne survey found that nearly 20 per cent of organisations had at least one IoT-based attack in the past three years.

Gartner research director Ruggero Contu said that organisations often don’t have control over the source and nature of the software and hardware being used by smart connected devices.

“We expect to see demand for tools and services aimed at improving discovery and asset management, software and hardware security assessment, and penetration testing.”

Contu said organisations would look to increase their understanding of the implications of externalising network connectivity.

“These factors will be the main drivers of spending growth for the forecast period with spending on IoT security expected to reach $3.1 billion in 2021.”

Gartner predicts that through 2020, the most significant inhibitor to growth for IoT security will come from a lack of prioritisation and implementation of security best practices and tools in IoT initiative planning. This will hamper the potential spend on IoT security by 80 percent.

“Although IoT security is consistently referred to as a primary concern, most IoT security implementations have been planned, deployed and operated at the business-unit level, in cooperation with some IT departments to ensure the IT portions affected by the devices are sufficiently addressed”,  said Contu.

“However, coordination via common architecture or a consistent security strategy is all but absent, and vendor product and service selection remain largely ad hoc, based upon the device provider’s alliances with partners or the core system that the devices are enhancing or replacing.”

AI will soon know you better than your family

Posted on January 9, 2018 by - News

Roman-mosaic-know-thyselfCrystal ball gazers at Gartner, who appear to have binge-watched Black Mirror, are convinced that pretty soon the AI in our computers will know us better than members of our family.

We can’t see it, at the moment Cortina thinks we want to search the internet using Bing when we want to open a news story we were writing last night, but the soothsayers at Big G believe that will change by 2022.

The analyst outfit claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) is “generating multiple disruptive forces” that are reshaping the way people interact with personal technologies, with emotion being at the fore of the next AI development.

“To remain relevant, technology vendors must integrate AI into every aspect of their devices, or face marginalisation.”

The current wave of emotion AI systems is being driven by the proliferation of virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and other AI-based technology for conversational systems, found Gartner.

It continued that as a second wave emerges, AI technology will “add value” to more and more customer experience scenarios, including educational software, video games, diagnostic software, athletic and health performance, and the autonomous car.

“Prototypes and commercial products already exist and adding emotional context by analysing data points from facial expressions, voice intonation and behavioural patterns will significantly enhance the user experience,” said Cozza.

“Beyond smartphones and connected home devices, wearables and connected vehicles will collect, analyse and process users’ emotional data via computer vision, audio or sensors capturing behavioural data to adapt or respond to a user’s wants and needs.”

Gartner also stated that by 2021, 10 percent of wearables users will have changed lifestyles, and thereby extend their lifespans by an average of six months.

By 2020, 60 percent of personal technology device vendors will use third party AI cloud services to enhance functionality and services, the analyst claimed.

AI will start to create more jobs by 2020

Posted on December 15, 2017 by - News

sat-ai-head-640x353AI will start to create more jobs than it eliminates by 2020, according to beancounters at Gartner.

While most of the news has been focusing on how many jobs AI will kill off, Gartner has now given a timeframe to when some of the changes will be felt in the workplace with the analyst house forecasting that 2020 will be the moment when AI starts to create more jobs than it eliminates.

In just over two years 2.3 million positions will have been created thanks to artificial intelligence with 1.8 million roles having been killed off thanks to the technology.

Gartner research vice president Svetlana Sicular said, any significant innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and AI will likely follow this route.

“Unfortunately, most calamitous warnings of job losses confuse AI with automation — that overshadows the greatest AI benefit — AI augmentation — a combination of human and artificial intelligence, where both complement each other”, she added.

She urged IT leaders to start looking at ways to get people facing the end of their jobs ready for new roles.

“Now is the time to impact your long-term AI direction. For the greatest value, focus on augmenting people with AI. Enrich people’s jobs, reimagine old tasks and create new industries. Transform your culture to make it rapidly adaptable to AI-related opportunities or threats,” she said.

Cloud access security brokers could be the latest thing

Posted on December 11, 2017 by - News

Cloud TV-videomind-ooyala_1Analyst outfit Gartner claims that more than half of large enterprises will be using a cloud access security broker (CASB) by 2020.

The analyst is predicting a sixfold increase over the next two years, because big business want to protect their burgeoning cloud infrastructures.

Only 10 percent of large enterprises are employing the products of a CASB vendor right now. But the CASB market itself has seen mass consolidation over recent years – with Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, Symantec and Palo Alto Networks all acquiring CASB vendors to enter the space.

Gartner puts as the CASB market leader as Sky High Networks, which was recently acquired by McAfee.

It provides a gateway between an organisation’s on-premise infrastructure and a cloud provider’s infrastructure.

Gartner said the demand for CASB products will stem from a “need to secure the significantly increased adoption of cloud services and access to them from users both within and outside the traditional enterprise perimeter”.

 

 

Cybersecurity spend to increase

Posted on December 8, 2017 by - News

securityTarot readers working for analyst outfit Gartner claim that spending on cybersecurity will jump eight percent next year because of the spike in global breaches this year.

The analyst claims spending in 2018 will top $96 billion as end users protect themselves against threats, having seen the impact of WannaCry and NotPetya this year.

Gartner research director Ruggero Contu said a large portion of security spending is driven by an organisation’s reaction towards security breaches as more high-profile cyberattacks and data breaches affect organisations worldwide.

“Cyber attacks such as WannaCry and NotPetya, and most recently the Equifax breach, have a direct effect on security spend because these types of attacks last up to three years”, he said.

Gartner forecasts that services will make up over half of all security spending, at $57.7 billion. Services will also see greatest growth, at 8.8 percent.

The analyst claimed that regulatory compliance and data privacy have been “stimulating” security spending, citing GDPR and the US’ Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act as key factors.

One of the key drivers driving services spending is a global skill shortage which has forced organisations to turn to cybersecurity consultancies.

“Skill sets are scarce and remain at a premium and top organisations to seek external help from security consultants, managed security service providers and outsourcers,” he added.

“In 2018, spending on security outsourcing services will total $18.5 billion which is an 11 percent increase from 2017.

“The IT outsourcing segment is the second-largest security spending segment after consulting.”

 

Smartphone leaders saw growth this quarter

Posted on December 6, 2017 by - News

Samsung_Stonehenge_Galaxy_S8-20170410031501639The top five vendors leading the smartphone race all saw growth in the third quarter, according to numbers crunched by analyst outfit Gartner.

Global sales hit 383.4 million units for the quarter, which represents a three percent increase over third quarter 2016’s 372.2 million. North America sales grew 11.2 percent, Big G said.

North America was the third largest region for smartphone sales in the quarter (topped by Greater China and Emerging APAC, respectively), representing 12.4 percent of the market and selling 47.5 million smartphones, compared to 42.7 million in third quarter 2016.

Worldwide, Samsung led the quarter with 22.3 percent market share and 85.6 million units shipped. With 71.7 million units shipped in third quarter 2016, Gartner noted Samsung smartphone sales grew 19.3 percent for the quarter.

Gartner research director Anshul Gupta said: “Renewed pushes of the newly designed Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note8 smartphones have brought back growing demand for Samsung smartphones, which helped it compete against Chinese manufacturers and deliver a solid performance in the quarter. The Last time Samsung achieved a double-digit growth was in fourth quarter 2015.”

Apple controlled 11.9 percent market share and shipped 45.4 million units, compared to 43 million in third quarter 2016.

“The arrival of Apple’s new flagship iPhones at the end of the third quarter 2017 has delayed smartphone purchases into fourth quarter 2017. Following compelling offers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the holiday season will likely boost sales of smartphones before the end of the year. We estimate fourth quarter ‘s smartphone sales will boost total sales for the full year. We expect smartphone sales will reach 1.57 billion units in 2017.”

Huawei rounded out the top three with 9.5 percent market share. The Shenzhen, China firm shipped 36.5 million units for the quarter, compared to third quarter 2016’s 32.5 million.

Dongguan followed Huawei, China-headquartered firm OPPO, which earned 7.7 percent market share by shipping 29.4 million units (versus third quarter 2016’s 24.6 million), and then Xiaomi, which had seven percent market share and shipped 26.9 million smartphones (versus third quarter 2016’s 14.9 million)

Gartner also noted increased customer demand for “high-priced” smartphones, with North America and Western Europe’s market growth being attributed to such purchases.

 

 

 

 

Cloud will see double digit growth this year – claim

Posted on October 16, 2017 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudThe crack team of divination experts at Gartner Group are predicting that cloud services will see double digit growth this year thanks to strong SaaS and IaaS sales.

By the end of the year, cloud services revenue is predicted to reach $260 billion which is an 18.5 percent year-on-year increase.

The highest growth will come from IaaS offerings, which are projected to grow 36.6 percent in 2017 to reach $34.7 billion and SaaS revenue will grow 21 percent in 2017, to hit $58.6 billion.

Research director at Gartner Sid Nag said that the acceleration in SaaS adoption can be explained by providers delivering nearly all strains of application functional extensions and add-ons as a service. Pretty thrilling, eh?

“This appeals to users because SaaS solutions are engineered to be more purpose-built and are delivering better business outcomes than traditional software. SaaS is also growing faster in 2017 than previously forecast, leading to a significant uplift in the entire public cloud revenue forecast”, he said.

He added that strategic adoption of PaaS offerings are also outperforming previous expectations, as large enterprises are becoming confident that PaaS will be their primary form of application development platform in the future.

“This accounts for the remainder of the increase in this iteration of Gartner’s public cloud services revenue forecast.”

Gartner predicts that the total market will be worth $411.4 billion by 2020. That’s a lotta dosh and very thrilling!

 

Public cloud expands

Posted on October 13, 2017 by - News

cloudGartner  Group has been shuffling its tarot cards and reached the conclusion that worldwide public cloud services continue to rise, which will reach $260 billion for the year 2017.

The market research firm said that strong SaaS and IaaS performance is driving growth for the calendar year. The latest report projected the market to grow by 18.5 per cent year-on-year to total $260.2 billion, up from $219.6 billion last year.

Gartner research director Sid Nag said the final data for 2016 showed that software as a service (SaaS) revenue was far greater in 2016 than expected, reaching $48.2 billion.

“SaaS is also growing faster in 2017 than previously forecast, leading to a significant uplift in the entire public cloud revenue forecast.”

He said: “Strategic adoption of platform as a service (PaaS) offerings is also outperforming previous expectations, as enterprise-scale organizations are increasingly confident that PaaS will be their primary form of application development platform in the future. This accounts for the remainder of the increase in this iteration of Gartner’s public cloud services revenue forecast.”

SaaS revenue is expected to grow 21 percent in 2017 to reach $58.6 billion, as the acceleration in SaaS adoption can be explained by providers delivering nearly all application functional extensions and add-ons as a service.

The highest revenue growth will come from cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service [IaaS]), which is projected to grow 36.6 percent in 2017 to reach $34.7 billion.

Gartner still expects growth to even out from 2018 onwards, because it has obtained mainstream status and maturity. Gartner expects 70 percent of public cloud services revenue to be dominated by the top 10 public cloud providers through 2021.

PC sales hit by component shortages

Posted on October 12, 2017 by - News

e21f00fd35d518495a603ad37c3dfdd4The industry’s major suppliers have been hit by component shortages which will bedevil the industry for at least another year.

Beancounters at Gartner have been adding up numbers and dividing by their shoe size and reached the conclusion that a scarcity of DRAM components, has put a hole in the PC profits of major vendors including Dell EMC.

Things got worse in the third quarter of 2017 when compared with the first half of the year.

Big G principle number cruncher Mika Kitagawa said: “The component price hike affected the consumer PC market as most vendors generally pass the price hike on to consumers, rather than absorbing the cost themselves.”

“We expect the DRAM shortage to continue to the end of 2018, but it will not be reflected in the final PC prices immediately.”

Worldwide PC shipments reached 67 million units in the third quarter of 2017, 2.6 percent down on the corresponding quarter last year, marking the twelfth consecutive quarter of declining PC shipments, Gartner said..

Windows 10 upgrades continued to feed PC demand among business, Gartner said, but refresh cycles have varied from region to region.

“Business PC demand, led by Windows 10 upgrades, continued to drive PC shipments across all regions, but its refresh schedule varies by region. The countries with stable economies, such as the US, have created a positive sentiment among businesses, especially for SMBs, which are more vulnerable to external events such as economic or political [ones]”, said Kitagawa.

The PC market stabilised in EMEA, Japan and Latin America, but the US market experienced a 10 percent year-on-year decline after a “very weak” back-to-school sales season.

 

Enterprise Software spending on the way up

Posted on October 4, 2017 by - News

shut-up-and-take-my-moneyEnterprise software will lead an upturn in IT spending next year, according to bean counters at Gartner Group.

The outfit has added up some numbers and divided them by its shoe size and worked out that  global IT spending will rise as the dollar weakens and total spending will rise by 3.3 per cent this year to $3.5 trillion, before jumping a further 4.3 percent in 2018 to hit $3.7 trillion.

The devices segment will exhibit growth for the first time in two years, with a rise of 5.3 percent in 2017 and five per cent in 2018, Gartner said.

Enterprise software will grow 8.5 this year and 9.4 percent next year.

Total device spending will reach $697 billion in 2018, with enterprise software spending of $387 billion next year.

IT services will grow fast, Gartner predicts, with spending forecast to grow by four percent this year and 5.3 percent in 2018, to reach $980 billion.

Datacentre systems will see a more modest growth, of 1.7 percent this year and 1.8 percent in 2018, to reach $176 billion.

Communications services will only grow by 0.9 percent in 2017 and 2.2 percent next year to reach $2.2 trillion, Gartner thinks.

 

Gartner sees opportunities in security services

Posted on August 17, 2017 by - News

funny-security-guardBeancounters at Gartner have had a quick look at the security market for the rest of this year and decided that there are opportunities on the services side.

It in its report, Big G said that the security market is set for a strong end to the year and a positive outlook for 2018, with those in the channel providing services in the best position.

Gartner is forecasting a seven percent year-on-year increase in global security spending in 2017 with the sector generating $86.4 billion in sales. That growth should continue into 2018, with the market hitting a value of $93 billion.

Punters apparently want infrastructure protection and security testing is popular area. DevOps will also drive a greater need for applications to be checked more closely, the Big G report said.

The fastest growing segment was security services, with those in the channel able to offer outsourcing consulting and implementation support the best placed to reap the rewards.

Managed security services will also become more blended with the offerings provided by MSPs over the next few years.

However the hardware is still pretty disappointing. Gartner claims that area coming under challenge from the growth of virtual appliances and the shift towards public cloud.

The security market is usually a strong segment given the need for customers to protect their data but the recent high profile breaches and ransomware attacks had also helped raise the levels of awareness.

Sid Deshpande, principal research analyst at Gartner said that rising awareness among CEOs and boards of directors about the business impact of security incidents and an evolving regulatory landscape have led to continued spending on security products and services.

He said the channel also has a role to play in continuing to educate customers about the basics of security to prevent further breaches.

“Improving security is not just about spending on new technologies. As seen in the recent spate of global security incidents, doing the basics right has never been more important. Organisations can improve their security posture significantly just by addressing basic security and risk related hygiene elements like threat centric vulnerability management, centralised log management, internal network segmentation, backups and system hardening,” said Deshpande.

White box servers are bucking the industry trend

Posted on August 9, 2017 by - News

9100-w_cube-favor-boxes476fe5f55ab9e9fbdd0d91e1da43bb0aWhile the server market is in the doledrums, white box servers are doing really well, according to beancounters at IDC.

The white box server market is growing and the IDC numbers from IDC merely serve to reinforce the point, with the revelation that the ODM Direct group of vendors grew revenue by 41.8 percent in the first quarter to $1.2 billion, accounting for 10.4 percent of the market, at a time when overall server revenues declined by 4.6 percent.

Gartner research director Adrian O’Connell found something similar – while there was a global decline of 4.5 percent in server revenues in the same period, revenues in the “others” category rose 4.4 percent. He wrote that leading server vendors are doing all they can to ensure that service providers don’t continue to shift their server purchases toward ODM suppliers.

“Combined with the significant inroads made by China-based suppliers, we expect to see continuing challenges and downward price pressure across the EMEA server market for some time to come,” he said.

HPE struck a deal with Foxconn to sell white box-like servers to cloud and telco providers three years ago. But CEO Meg Whitman recently admitted that server sales had been affected by declining orders from a single customer – probably Microsoft.

Supermicro is one of the key white box venders. In February, it was believed that Chipzilla was the unnamed customer in a deal for more than 30,000 Supermicro servers for a data centre in Silicon Valley.

Huawei about to crack firewalls

Posted on July 19, 2017 by - News

huawei-liveHuawei has been named as a potential challenger in the enterprise firewall market.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant report assesses vendors based on two criteria: completeness of vision and ability to carry it out.

Big G has moved Huawei was moved to the Challengers slot due to its position as a major player in the global firewall market as well as its innovative dimensional defence system consisting of high-performance hardware NGFWs, cloud-based virtual firewalls, and cloud sandboxes.

NGFWs are becoming rather important for security minded corporations.

Kevin Hu, President of the Huawei Switch & Enterprise Gateway Product Line, said: “We think that Huawei’s promotion to Challenger is a high recognition of Huawei’s persistence in providing customers with ACTUAL (Application, Content, Time, User, Attack and Location) awareness-based NGFWs.

“It’s also a recognition of Huawei’s efforts in joint innovations with industry customers, handling new security challenges, and holding fast to continuous product R&D investment. As cloud computing is gaining momentum, the range of attacks targeting enterprise infrastructure continuously expands, and enterprises are facing an increasing number of unknown threats. Enterprises need on-demand security protection capability, orchestration and scheduling, and the network security defense systems based on AI, and machine learning to proactively defend against unknown threats. Huawei is in the process of building service-based, intelligent, and automated next-generation network security and develop intelligent network-wide detection and proactive defense systems for enterprises.”

According to the Gartner said that many enterprises were looking to firewall vendors to provide cloud-based malware detection instances to aid them in their advanced threat detection efforts, as a cost-effective alternative to stand-alone sandboxing solutions.

” By integrating cloud-based sandboxing inspection services, Huawei NGFWs can inspect millions of files per day and detect zero-day vulnerabilities around 30 hours earlier than the average in the industry. Enterprise customers can rapidly obtain the latest threat intelligence worldwide as well as online security service support for deep inspection on suspicious traffic to perform proactive defense against unknown known and unknown threats,” the report said.

Revenue from 2015 to 2016 of Huawei firewalls saw a higher growth rate that year than any competing vendor in the industry. Huawei NGFWs are serving more than 100,000 enterprises in over 70 countries to help customers building a proactive, network-wide, and intelligent threat detection and defence system for digital transformation.

Global IT spending will grow to $3.5 trillion this year

Posted on July 14, 2017 by - News

consultoracleOracles at Gartner have been shuffling their tarot cards and claim that new disruptive technology like the Internet of Things (IoT) will mean that worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.5 billion in 2017.

The projection is a 2.4 percent increase from 2016. After consulting the liver of a particularly fat ram, Big G predicted that the declining US dollar for the growth rate is up from the previous quarter’s forecast of 1.4 percent.

Gartner vice president and analyst at John-David Lovelock said that digital business is having a profound effect on the way business is done and how it is supported.

“The impact of digital business is giving rise to new categories. For example, the convergence of ‘software plus services plus intellectual property.”

Lovelock said impactful industry-specific disruptive technologies include IoT in manufacturing, blockchain in financial services and other industries, and smart machines in retail.

The worldwide enterprise software market is forecast to grow 7.6 percent in 2017, up from 5.3 percent growth in 2016.

Gartner explained that as software applications allow more firms to grab revenue from digital business channels, there will be a stronger need to automate and release applications.

The increased adoption of SaaS-based enterprise applications, will see an increase in acceptance of IT operations management tools that are also delivered from the cloud, Lovelock predicted.

“These cloud-based tools allow infrastructure and operations organisations to more rapidly add functionality and adopt newer technologies to help them manage faster application release cycles.”

Gartner found worldwide spending on devices — PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones — is projected to grow 3.8 per cent in 2017, to reach $654bn.