Tag: Gartner

PC market will grow again next year

Posted on July 6, 2017 by - News

hope springs eternalThe PC market will start growing next year according to Gartner, as buyers come to the end of their evaluation periods for Windows 10.

Worldwide PC shipments are expected to hit 267 million units in 2018, a 1.9 percent increase on 2017 when shipments are forecast to reach 262 million. By 2019, shipments are pegged to hit 272 million units.

This year’s PC sales are however expected to fall yet again for the sixth consecutive year, with shipments dropping three percent when compared with 2016.

According to Gartner, further adoption of Windows 10, as PC buyers come to the end of their evaluation periods, and a higher need for security will drive PC shipments.

“PC buyers continue to put quality and functionality ahead of price,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner.

“Many organisations are coming to the end of their evaluation periods for Windows 10, and are now increasing the speed at which they adopt new PCs as they see the clear benefits of better security and newer hardware.”

 

AI Eptica gets in on Gartner’s magic roundabout

Posted on May 22, 2017 by - News

magic-roundaboutEptica has been included in Gartner “Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC)” for the fourth year running.

This is the fourth consecutive year that Eptica has appeared in this Magic Quadrant.

Olivier Njamfa, CEO and co-founder of Eptica said that the digital customer experience market is changing rapidly, driven by the rise of artificial intelligence and increasing consumer demands, and is becoming ever-more central to business success.

“I am therefore very proud that Eptica has retained its position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center,” Njamfa said.

According to Gartner, this Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center examines the global market for customer service and support applications designed to enable customer service and support agents to engage customers through their preferred communication channel.

The functionalities evaluated in this Magic Quadrant include those for knowledge-enabled service resolution, social media/community management and offer management.

Also evaluated are interaction assistance tools and service analytics dashboards. Ideally, the applications should have tools for both agents and customers, and the vendors should have a clear point of view on how to escalate customer support from self-service to human agents and back again, while retaining the context of the interaction for reporting and future customer engagements.

Gartner evaluated vendors on their completeness of vision and ability to pull it off.

Eptica has been pouring cash in to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and linguistics.

“Coupled with our strong, self-learning knowledge management capabilities, this means we are ideally positioned to help brands deliver digital CX across email, chat, social media and self-service, through a single, cloud-based platform, ” Njamfa said.

Robots are after your job

Posted on May 10, 2017 by - News

robotsSmart machines and robots may replace skilled professionals in medicine, law and IT by 2020, warned beancounters at Gartner who are presumably seeing R2D2 cleaning out their desks as we speak.

Analyst group Gartner has predicted that by 2022, smart machines and robots could replace highly trained professionals in tasks within medicine, the law and IT. CIOs need to prepare now to ensure that their organisations are ready for the impact that AI will have over the next five or ten years.

Stephen Prentice, vice president and Gartner fellow, suggested that the economics of AI and machine learning will lead to many tasks performed by highly paid professionals today becoming ‘low-cost utilities’.

This means that all this will force an organisation to adjust its business strategy. Many competitive, high-margin industries will become more like utilities as AI turns complex work into a metred service “that the enterprise pays for, like electricity,” he said.

Prentice cited the example of lawyers, who must spend a lot of time and money on education and training.

Any organisation that hires lawyers must therefore pay salary and benefits sufficient not only to compensate each successive lawyer it hired for this training, but a sum that is commensurate with their knowledge, expertise and experience.

A smart machine that could act as a substitute for a lawyer would also require a long, expensive period of training – or ‘machine learning’ but once the first smart machine is ready, the enterprise could add as many other similar machines as it wants for little extra cost.

Employment numbers would be hit in some industries, with some routine functions at risk of replacement, such as systems administration, help desk, project management and application-support roles.

Others would see the technology as a benefit as AI takes over routine and repetitive tasks, leaving more time for the existing workforce to improve in other areas of the business. The mix of AI and human skillsets will complement each other in these roles.

Prentice said that CIOs need to develop a plan that can run alongside the company’s current digital transformation strategy. He warned that too much AI-driven automation could leave the enterprise less flexible.

“The CIO should commission the enterprise architecture team to identify which IT roles will become utilities and create a timeline for when these changes become possible. Work with HR to ensure that the organisation has a plan to mitigate any disruptions that AI will cause, such as offering training and upskilling to help operational staff to move into more-creative positions,” he said.

No one expects the European General Data Protection Regulation

Posted on May 4, 2017 by - News

6748f8ea516944e171a49983c7f5e696More than half of the companies affected by the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will not be ready by the end of 2018.

Beancounters at Gartner have added up some numbers and divided by their collective shoe size and worked out that when the GDPR goes live on 25 May 2018 more than half will eligible for fines of up to €20m – or four percent of turnover – for non-compliance.

Gartner research director Bart Willemsen said that the GDPR will affect not only EU-based organisations, but many data controllers and processors outside the EU too.

“Threats of hefty fines, as well as the increasingly empowered position of individual data subjects tilt the business case for compliance and should cause decision makers to re-evaluate measures to safely process personal data.”

All this opens the way for the channel to step in and provide customers with the advice they so desperately need.

They need someone to tell them their role under the GDPR. Outfits need to appoint a representative to act as a contact point for the data protection authority (DPA) and data subjects.

Most will have to hire a data protection officer (DPO). This is especially important when the organisation is a public body, is processing operations needing regular and systematic monitoring, or has large-scale processing activities.

Gartner said that too few organisations have found every single process where personal data is involved. Going forward, purpose limitation, data quality and data relevance should be decided on when starting a new processing activity as this will help to keep compliance in future personal data processing activities.

Organisations must prove an accountable ground posture and transparency in all decisions regarding personal data processing activities. Outside parties must also follow relevant requirements that can affect supply, change management and procurement processes. It is important to note that accountability under the GDPR needs proper data subject consent acquisition and registration. Prechecked boxes and implied consent will be in the past. A clear and express action is needed that will require organisations to implement streamlined techniques to obtain and document consent and consent withdrawal.

Security features are the top reason for Windows 10 upgrade

Posted on April 27, 2017 by - News, Products

magritte-windowThe killer reason why companies are upgrading to Windows 10 is the improved security functions, according to beancounters at Gartner Group.

The analyst outfit said that it took a long time for Windows 10 to start driving PC sales but the channel has witnessed the impact of the OS upgrades triggering hardware sales since the last quarter of 2016.

Gartner noting that the adoption of Windows 10 is faster than previous OS versions and the traditional refresh cycles are shortening. Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner said: “Organisations recognize the need to move to Windows 10, and the total time to both evaluate and deploy Windows 10 has shortened from 23 months to 21 months between surveys that Gartner did during 2015 and 2016.

“Large businesses are either already engaged in Windows 10 upgrades or have delayed upgrading until 2018. This likely reflects the transition of legacy applications to Windows 10 or replacing those legacy applications before Windows 10 migration takes place”.

The analyst house has found that security improvements are the top attraction for those migrating as well as the cloud integration capabilities offered by the OS.

But there are also technical problems with some users being driven to upgrade to make sure they can use the latest desktop and server processors. Meike Escherich, principal research analyst at Gartner said: “Respondents’ device buying intentions have significantly increased as organizations saw third- and fourth-generation products optimized for Windows 10 with longer battery life, touchscreens and other Windows 10 features. The intention to purchase convertible notebooks increased as organizations shifted from the testing and pilot phases into the buying and deployment phases.”

Figures from last month from Netmarketshare revealed that Windows 10 holds a 25 percent market share, which is still lagging behind the 49 percentheld by Windows 7. The number of users still using XP and 8.1 has now dipped below 20 percent

Gartner warns of currency woes

Posted on April 17, 2017 by - News

Databroker_scrooge_mcduckGartner has warned that currency headwinds will cause the market some major headaches and have already reduced IT spending forecasts

Gartner’s analysis of IT spending this year has been downgraded as a result of the position of the dollar. The analyst house is still expecting things to be up on 2016 but only by 1.4 percent instead of the previously expected 2.7 percent .

There should be about $3.5 trillion spent on IT this year but billions have been shaved off the potential amount because of ongoing issues around the dollar.

John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner said that the strong US dollar has cut $67 billion out of his 2017 IT spending forecast.

“We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of U.S.-based multinational IT vendors through 2017.”

The big US firms have already been forced to react to exchange rates with price rises and the chance of more problems will not be welcome to resellers or users.

Gartner is hoping that with the benefit of its warnings the industry can deal with the challenges and try to mitigate some of the impact.

The other headache that the analyst house has identified is the move away from physical servers towards hosted cloud services. The trend is helping the data centre market return to growth after being in a negative position in 2016, but it is hitting some of the established hardware brands.

“Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This has created a reduction in spending on servers which is impacting the overall data center system segment,” said Lovelock.

Breaking down the forecast further there will be a dip in IT services, coming in at 2.3 percent in 2017, compared to 3.6 percent a year earlier.

On the hardware front the tablet demand will continue to wane but those selling Windows 10 business PCs will continue to enjoy growth as more customers invest in that technology.

Curse of the dollar plagues IT spending

Posted on April 11, 2017 by - News

dollarSoothsayers at Gartner group have been examining the entrails of a fat ram and are warning that the dollar will provide a major headache for IT spending.

Gartner’s analysis of IT spending this year has been downgraded as a result of the position of the dollar. The analyst house is still expecting things to be better than 2016 but only by 1.4 percent instead of the previously expected 2.7 percent.

On the plus said that is $3.5 trillion spent on IT this year but billions have been shaved off the potential amount because of ongoing issues around the dollar.

John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner said that the  strong U.S. dollar has cut $67 billion from our 2017 IT spending forecast.

“We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of U.S.-based multinational IT vendors through 2017.”

The big US firms have already been forced to react to exchange rates with price rises and the chance of more problems will not be welcome to resellers or users.

Gartner is hoping that with the benefit of its warnings the industry can deal with the challenges and try to mitigate some of the impact.

The move away from  physical servers towards hosted cloud services is not really helping much. The trend is helping the data centre market return to growth after being in a negative position in 2016, but it is hitting some of the established hardware brands.

“Enterprises are moving away from buying servers from the traditional vendors and instead renting server power in the cloud from companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This has created a reduction in spending on servers which is impacting the overall data center system segment,” said Lovelock.

Breaking down the forecast further there will be a dip in IT services, coming in at 2.3 percent in 2017, compared to 3.6 percent a year earlier.

On the hardware front the tablet demand will continue to wane but those selling Windows 10 business PCs will continue to enjoy growth as more customers invest in that technology.

Smart home channel opportunities just beginning

Posted on March 7, 2017 by - News

28aa8f108e881657229d88bf6ead4af5Beancounters from Gartner think that the UK is just at the start of its adoption of smart home technologies and there could be big opportunities for the channel.

Gartner said that it was still early days and those who had not got a smart home strategy probably have not missed out on much.

Gartner analysts said that of the UK, US and Australia America was ahead in adoption because the concept had been out there longer but there had been some movement here as the technology begins to gain popularity.

The most popular products were home security alarm systems followed by monitoring, energy management and then health and wellness management.

Big G suggested that the secret to pitching smart home products was to concentrate on an overall solution to help the user get more from the technology.

Jessica Ekholm, research director at Gartner said that messaging needed to be focused on the real value proposition that the complete connected home ecosystem provides, encompassing devices, service and experience.

“The emphasis needs to be on how the connected home can helps solve daily tasks rather than just being a novelty collection of devices and apps,” she added. Users liked to be able to manage their various smart functions through a single dashboard and thought that branding was important. More than half saw a value in products being certified.

Gartner says public cloud is bigger than Jesus

Posted on September 16, 2016 by - News

PAY-Lion-King-cloud-MAINBeancounters at the analyst outfit Gartner group claims that the public cloud just getting bigger, will be worth $200bn in 2016.

After adding up the numbers and dividing by its shoe size, Big G claimed that the global public cloud services market is set to grow by more than 17 percent in 2016.

According to Gartner, cloud services were worth $178 billion in 2015. This is set to increase to $208.6 billion in 2016, higher than the nominal GDP of Portugal.

Apparently all this will be driven by cloud system infrastructure services, which are projected to grow 42.8 percent year-on-year. Cloud application services, one of the largest segments in the global cloud services market, is expected to grow 21.7 percent to reach $38.9 billion.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner said that the growth of public cloud is supported by the fact that organisations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner’s 2015 cloud adoption survey.

However at the moment the aspiration for using cloud services outpaces actual adoption and while organisations might be keen to use cloud services, but there are still challenges for organisations as they make the move to the cloud.

“Even with the high rate of predicted growth, a large number of organisations still have no current plans to use cloud services,” Nag wrote.

Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner said that his outfit’s position on cloud security has been clear.

“Public cloud services offered by the leading cloud providers are secure. The real security challenge is using public cloud services in a secure manner,” he said.

Hybrid cloud faces challenges, however, and Gartner reported that organisations are concerned about integration challenges, application incompatibilities, a lack of management tools, a lack of common APIs and a lack of vendor support too.

Anderson said that while public cloud services will continue to grow. We also know that private cloud services (of various types) will become more widely used.

“Providers must focus on the top hybrid cloud challenges to be successful in meeting the growing demand for hybrid cloud solutions.”

Security vendor revenues rising as market contracts

Posted on July 15, 2016 by - News

securityBeancounters working for analyst outfit Gartner have added up some numbers and divided by their shoe size and worked out that security software revenues have risen  3.7 percent and were worth  $22.1bn in 2015.

The report said that security information and event management  remained the fastest-growing sub segment of the cybersecurity market and saw a 15.8 per cent growth. Consumer security software recorded a 5.9 percent year-on-year decline.

The top five vendors were Symantec, Intel, IBM, Trend Micro and EMC and they accounted for 37.6 percent of the security software revenue market share, down.

These vendors saw a collective decline of 4.2 percent in 2015, while the rest of the market grew strongly at 9.2 percent year on year. In fact, of the top five only Biggish Blue grew and increased its revenue by 2.5 percent to reach $1.45billion.

Both Symantec and Intel Security both suffered from the long-standing decline of the consumer market for anti-virus products and services. But Symantec still remained on top despite suffering a third consecutive year of revenue decline and its highest decline in revenue over a three-year period.

Still at least it did better than Intel which saw revenues fall from $1.83bn to $1.75bn between 2014 and 2015.

IT security market worth $170 billion by 2020

Posted on March 10, 2016 by - News

BouncerFoxFeatureThe IT security market will be worth $170 billion by 2020, which means growing by $100 billion from now.

India-based firm MarketsandMarkets says the 2020 total includes security technologies like data leak prevention, denial of service attack mitigation, and compliance, along with security services.

“MarketsandMarkets expects the global cyber security market to grow from US$106.32 billion in 2015 to US$170.21 billion by 2020, at a compound annual growth rate of 9.8 percent,” MarketsandMarkets said.

Gartner  said something similar its latest November figures predicted security spend pegged at $75 billion are reckoned be worth $91 billion by the end of the year. Big G said the security industry will be worth some $116 billion by 2019 with security services including consulting, hardware support, and outsourcing adding a further $73 billion by 2019.

Most of the cash appears to be being spend in North America  while significant revenue growth is expected from Latin America and Asia-Pacific regions. The most popular is expected to be managed security services.

 

90 percent of ERP projects will fail

Posted on March 4, 2016 by - News

Epic_FailResearch outfit Gartner has warned that 90 percent of ERP projects will fail because of integration disorder, greater complexity and cost by 2018.

It warned that nine out of 10 ERP projects will end in failure by 2018 as end users struggle to contend with the increasing complexity of “post-modern” ERP. .

Big G has urged systems integrators to “raise their game” as postmodern ERP represents a shift away from a single-vendor “megasuite” towards a “more loosely coupled and federated ERP environment”.

Despite this shift, by 2018 some 90 percent of firms will lack the ability to integrate postmodern applications, resulting in integration disorder, greater complexity and cost, Gartner said.

Carol Hardcastle, research vice president at Gartner said that this new environment promises more business agility, but only if the increased complexity is recognised and addressed.

The systems integrator partners responsible for rolling out ERP solutions need to take at least some of the responsibility, she said.

Hardcastle said ERP projects are still often compromised in time, cost and business outcomes more than 25 years after hitting the market.

“The focus of postmodern ERP is on improved business agility and flexibility, for example through deployment of solutions and services that are better targeted at the business capabilities and address other needs such as user experience,” she said.

 

PC sales slip back into the doldrums

Posted on April 10, 2015 by - News

pc-sales-slumpPC sales plunged lower than a Hollywood starlet’s dress in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner Group.

One big reason for the decline was businesses buying fewer desktop computers, according to the Gartner research firm. It noted companies have mostly finished replacing older PCs that used outdated Windows XP software.

PC sales may get a boost later this year when Microsoft releases its next version of Windows, analysts said, but they’re still expecting an overall decline in sales for this year.

Gartner added that there had been an sales of laptop computers and hybrid models that combine features of tablets and laptops. That could help drive a gradual return to growth by next year.

Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa estimates PC makers shipped 71.7 million computers in the first quarter, down 5.2 percent from a year earlier.

Some computer makers are doing better than others. China’s Lenovo saw an increase in worldwide sales, as did its nearest competitor, the maker of expensive printer ink HP.. However smaller companies, including Dell, saw sales decline.

Global PC sales have fallen steadily over the last three years, but Gartner are projecting a return to growth in 2016. Tablet users are giving up on the technology and are moving back to notebooks.

The internet of things is here in droves

Posted on November 11, 2014 by - News

Internet of ThingsNext year there will be 4.9 billion connected “things” – that is connected semiconductors with IP (internet protocol) connectivity.

But this is only the beginning, according to research from the Gartner Group.  It said that there will be 25 billion such devices in 2020 and next year’s figure of 4.9 billion is up 30 percent from this year.

Jim Tully, a VP at Gartner, said: “The digital shift instigated by the nexus of forces such as cloud, mobile, social and information, and boosed by the internet of things (IoT) threatens many existing businesses.  They have no choice but to pursue IoT, like they’ve done with the consumerisation of IT.”

Gartner estimates that the IoT will support $69.5 billion of service revenues in 2015 and a staggering $263 billion by 2020.

Tully estimates that the automotive industry will show the highest growth rate at 96 percent in 2015. This table shows how it believes things will pan out up to 2020.
internetoffangs

There are security implications here.  Gartner thinks that by the end of 2017, over 20 percent of organisations will have digital security services protecting devices and services in the internet of things.

Move your datacentres to Scandinavia!

Posted on October 23, 2014 by - News

datacenterWhile many multinational and pan-European businesses have their co-location centres in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London or Paris, IT managers should think about moving their datacentres to Norway or Sweden.

That’s according to analysts at the Gartner Group and there’s a number of reasons why Sweden and Norway are attractive.

Tiny Haynes, a research director at Gartner, said that power costs in Norway and Sweden have fallen by five percent since 2010. That contrasts with the EU average power costs that have risen 13 percent in the same period.

Also it’s cold in Norway and Sweden and that can give datacentres efficiencies by using outside air cooling.

Gartner believes that managers can save up to 50 percent by moving their infrastructure lock, stock and barrel.

Haynes said: “It’s likely that most organisations will find some workloads that can be moved to a lower cost location without impacting performance.”