Tag: Ovum

Microsoft must recover from Windows 8 debacle

Posted on January 21, 2015 by - News

Windows-8As reported earlier this week, Microsoft will show off more features of Windows 10 today.
But it faces uphill challenges, according to Ovum.
Richard Edward, principal analyst of enterprise mobility and productivity said a number of challenges face the software giant.
He said that chief information officers (CIOs) and corporate IT managers will monitor the event closely.
“There could also be announcements that will materially affect business user computing strategies, as Microsoft and its Windows hardware partners  try to reboot the PC industry and gain a foothold in smartphone and tablet markets,” he said.
Further, he said Microsoft: “is no stranger to debacles where Windows is concerned – remember Microsoft Vista – but the effort, resources and time required to extricate the company from each predicament increases with every occurrence.”
Edward said that getting Windows 7 users to upgrade to Windows 10 will be hard because there are two distinct markets to engage – business users and home users.
Ovum thinks businesses will carry on deploying Windows 7 for now.  Extended support will continue until January 2020, he said, “so there is compelling reasons for organisations to make the upgrade”.

 

ICT survey reveals huge reseller opportunity

Posted on November 19, 2013 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeA comprehensive survey conducted by market research company Ovum has revealed that IT vendors are failing to address their customers’ needs.

The survey, conducted in 60 countries worldwide of CIOs and IT decision makers is the largest ever ventured.

CRM, it appears, has been widely adopted by higher education with only 10 percent of institutions not using the software.

But there are opportunities aplenty because over 50 percent of these institutions will replace their LMSes in 24 months.  Incumbents, Ovum suggests, will be switched to new providers.

“To secure their position in the market, LMS providers must be quick to expand their platforms to seamlessly incorporate compelling features such as social media, video, analytics, and other learning objects, keeping customer satisfaction high and prices low,” said analyst Navneet Johal.

But less than 20 percent are using cloud computing for their enterprises,

“A myriad of factors is holding institutions back from moving core applications to the cloud, the absence of viable solutions in some cases, the questionable return on investment from switching out existing solutions, the difficulty of supporting highly customized solutions in a hosted environment, and even lingering (albeit somewhat irrational) doubts about security,” said Johal.

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.”

Global telco revenues to stay flat

Posted on September 25, 2013 by - News

smartphones-genericWorldwide revenues for the telecoms industry are expected to stay mostly flat over the coming years, according to a report.

A deep decline in spending on voice services will be offset by growth in mobile and fixed broadband data services, according to analyst house Ovum. Total telco IT spending is expected to reach US$60 billion in 2017, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 0.6 percent between now and then. It will be emerging markets such as APAC, Middle East and Africa, and South and Central America that will drive top spending.

For North America, it’s predicted spending will run a CAGR of 0.8 percent to hit $17.5 billion by 2017.

Telcos will have to get their thinking caps on about tariffs and services to build revenues over the next five years. LTE, network optimisation and “creative” approaches to partnerships will become ways for businesses to save cash, according to report author Shagun Bali.

“Telcos need to monetise new business models, leverage customer data by investing in analytics, and define their response to over-the-top players,” Bali said.

Ovum has mapped the overall trend as reducing internal IT spending while increasing spending on external IT projects. Telcos will have to outsource maintenance of legacy systems, and make use of trusted partners that can provide expertise in segments such as big data analytics.

“The combination of middling profits, high capital requirements, high risk, and uncertain economic growth requires telcos to place their bets carefully, including investing in growing revenue streams and managing customer experience more than ever before,” Bali said. “The result is increased opportunities for the IT industry. In the long term, telcos will place more focus than they have before on software to drive innovation”.

Alcatel-Lucent moves to IP networking

Posted on June 20, 2013 by - News

Alcatel-Lucent_Murray_HillAlcatel-Lucent has told the world+dog that it is going to be the second telecom network equipment provider to re-invent itself as an IP networking and ultra-broadband access company.

The troubled French-American maker of telecommunications equipment has been scratching its head trying to come up with a cunning plan to whisk its nadgers out of the fire. The company was created by the 2006 merger of the French company Alcatel and the North American player Lucent Technologies. It has since struggled to expand sales and restore profitability.

Reinventing itself will mean a package of cost cuts, planned job reductions and asset sales designed to raise at least 2 billion euros, or $2.7 billion, by the end of 2015.

The chief, Michel Combes, a former Vodafone senior executive hired in February to lead Alcatel-Lucent, which lost 1.4 billion euros in 2012, said he would refocus the company on selling wireless broadband equipment to carriers in France, China and North America, as an increase in mobile data traffic is prompting network operators to expand and upgrade their grids.

The company, created by the 2006 merger of the French company Alcatel and the North American player Lucent Technologies, has struggled to expand sales and restore profitability. The company has streamlined a costly inventory of old and new mobile network equipment technologies while fending off intense competition from larger rivals like Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks.

Ron Kline, principal network infrastructure analyst, at Ovum said that Alcatel-Lucent’s strategy change shows just how fast market dynamics have changed in a market once dominated by the large Tier-1 telecommunication providers.

These have been increasingly under siege by Internet content providers in the West. They have also been given a good kicking by Chinese vendors, most notably Huawei, and by other specialists.

Kline said the move will allow Alcatel-Lucent to focus on cloud and large-scale internet providers that are generating a growing portion of bandwidth demand.

From a Network Infrastructure perspective the plan will consolidate ALU’s R&D on high growth areas. But he warned that leaving legacy technologies markets is likely to prove to be difficult.

For example if it tries to find a buyer for its Submarine Network Solutions division, it is likely to face regulatory hurdles.

Ovum sees boost for optical components

Posted on June 19, 2013 by - News

rotsnakeThe optical component market is going to grow to a  peak of $10 billion in 2018, according to the analyst outfit Ovum.

In a report, Ovum said that the optical components market will grow four percent in 2013 thanks mostly to WAN and datacom demand.

Between 2012 and 2018 the total optical component market will expand at an eight percent rate  to a new high of US$10.5billion.

In a forecast, the independent telecoms analyst firm identifies datacom, which constitutes components used in data centres and enterprise networks, as the fastest growing segment.

This will be pushed by a demand for 10G, 40G and 100G components to support server, switch and storage connectivity.

Daryl Inniss, Practice Leader of Components at Ovum and author of the forecast, said that demand to support data centres for cloud services is a large driver for datacom sales.

High-speed transceivers are needed to support this segment and this means that the datacom market will grow by 16 percent between 2012 and 2018.

The wide area network market is still experiencing annual double-digit traffic growth, leading to high demand for 100G ports.

It is not all great though. The access segment, which includes FTTx, CATV and optical transceivers to connect base stations to antennae is declining primarily due to maturing FTTx deployments.

“We expect stable performance from fronthaul and CATV throughout the forecast period, but the access segment as a whole is expected to decline at a seven percent due to contracting FTTx revenues,” Inniss said.

Optical component revenue growth might be slowed if too many equipment vendors make their own components.

Inniss added:  “Datacom has depended on component vendors delivering standards-compliant products, but equipment vendors are now developing their own components.”

Component suppliers are now competing with their own customers, he said.

Optical component revenue depends on OC suppliers’ ability to drive out cost and deliver products at scale fairly quickly.

“While excellent OC execution minimises the impact of vendors’ captive supply, poor execution reduces the OC vendor revenue opportunity,” Inniss said.

Ovum eggs on BYOD market

Posted on June 5, 2013 by - News

ovumResearch outfit Ovum is telling the world+dog that the bring your own device trend is here to stay.

One of the findings of Ovum’s 2013 multi-market bring-your-own-anything employee study indicates that the trend is not only just “here to stay” it is also going to increase.

Corporate BYOD activity by full-time employees has remained steady at almost 60 percent over the past two years.

Already global industry analysts warn business leaders to respond and adapt now to this change in employee behaviour, rather than being steamrollered by it, the report said.

Ovum said that nearly 70 percent of employees who own a smartphone or tablet choose to use it to access corporate data. The personal tablet market continues to grow, and with personal tablet ownership by FTEs rising from 28.4 per cent to 44.5 per cemt over the last 12 months, more businesses will see these devices on their networks.

The report said that this will happen whether the CIO wants it to or not. More than 67.8 percent of smartphone-owning employees bring their own smartphone to work, and 15.4 percent of these do so without the IT department’s knowledge and 20.9 percent do so in spite of an anti-BYOD policy.

Richard Absalom, consumer impact technology analyst at Ovum said that it was impossible to stand in the path of consumerised mobility.

“We believe businesses are better served by exploiting this behaviour to increase employee engagement and productivity, and promote the benefits of enterprise mobility,” he said.

Ovum’s research also depicts the rise of a “bring-your-own-application” trend.

While email and calendar remains the most commonly used application on both corporately provisioned and personally owned devices, the usage of new-generation cloud productivity applications, such as enterprise social networking, file sync and share and IM/VoIP, is growing fast.

What worries Ovum is that these types of apps are increasingly being sourced by employees themselves and not through managed corporate channels. A quarter of employees discovered their own enterprise social networking apps, while 22.1 percent of employees discovered their own file sync and 30.7 percent found their share apps and IM/VoIP apps.

If employees are sourcing their own applications to do their job, then IT is not delivering the right tools or a good enough service for employees, Absalom said.

 

Cloud integration platform spending to soar

Posted on May 24, 2013 by - News

clouds3Cloud integration is one of the hottest tech trends around and spending on cloud-based services is set to continue for years to come.

Ovum predicts worldwide spending on cloud integration platforms will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 31 percent between 2012 and 2018. It is expected to hit $3.7 billion by the end of 2018.

Spending in America will grow at 27 percent, while EMEA should see a rate of 34 percent. Spending on cloud-based integration platforms in the UK and Ireland should grow even faster, at a CAGR of 36 percent, eventually reaching $170 in 2018. Other parts of Western Europe, such as Benelux and DACH regions will grow at 32 and 36 percent.

Ovum senior analyst Saurabh Sharma said the emergence of integration-as-a-service ushers in a new era – “middleware-as-a-service”. He pointed out that such services are focused on enabling faster SaaS integration at a lower cost of ownership, reports Cloud Pro.

“Integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) is an extension of the functionality provided by [integration-as-a-service]. iPaaS solutions enable users to create, manage, and govern integration flows connecting a wide range of applications or data sources,” he said.

Sharma said most organisations originally adopted iPaaS as a tool to achieve SaaS integration, but eventually extended it to on-premise and B2B integration.

Blackberry hit by yearly revenue drop

Posted on March 28, 2013 by - News

ripeunripeBlackberry lost two percent of revenue in its fourth quarter of fiscal 2013, down $49 million, and a massive 36 percent drop from $4.2 billion year on year. However, it forecasts breaking even for the next quarter and a mobile analyst has told us the company should be financially viable for some time to come.

For the quarter, hardware accounted for 61 percent of the revenue, 36 percent for service and three percent for software and other revenue. It shipped six million Blackberry smartphones and roughly 370,000 Playbook tablets.

One half of the two-headed dragon that founded and used to run the company, Mike Lazaridis, will be leaving the company.

For its outlook, Blackberry said it will be increasing marketing spend for Q1 of fiscal 2014 to support Blackberry 10. This is a planned 50 percent increase in marketing, and the firm thinks it will be near breaking even, citing lower cost base, a more efficient supply chain and better hardware margins.

Jim Dawson, analyst at Ovum, told ChannelEye that every other company that’s suffered a severe drop in device revenues has struggled because cust cotting at a rapid rate is difficult. “Blackberry appears to have done a great job executing on its CORE strategy which includes reducing costs, and has managed to bring costs down significantly,” Dawson said. “As such, it was profitable this past quarter and should break even next quarter”.

“Given its good cash balance and lack of debt, it should be financially viable for quite some time at this rate, so I’m not overly concerned about the drop in revenues,” Dawson said. “I’m more concerned about the drop in subscribers, which is a longer-term indicator that it’s losing customers faster than it can win new ones”.

IT services market was poor last year

Posted on March 18, 2013 by - News

rubbish-tip1Beancounters at Ovum have officially ruled 2012 as bad for the IT services market.

Ed Thomas, Senior Analyst in the Ovum IT Services team said that 2012 was the worst for IT services contract activity since 2002.

He wrote that performance in the three months to the end of December 2012 fell well below the levels seen in the same period of 2011. This makes IT services contract activity the lowest than it has been for more than a decade.

In Ovum’s latest analysis, deals in the IT services market was only $20.8 billion, down 34 per cent on the same period of the previous year.

The number of deals fell 17 per cent in the same period and there was a notable lack of big deals. While the fourth quarter was slightly better than the beginning of the year, that really does not make things better across the year.

Thomas blamed the ongoing economic uncertainty afflicting key markets for IT services such as the US and Europe as a major factor behind the weak performance of the industry in 2012.

His research suggests that many enterprises remain wary of committing to major projects, with issues such as the Eurozone crisis having a particularly significant impact.

In addition, public sector activity has reduced as many governments come under pressure to cut public spending in the face of high debt levels, Thomas said.

Enterprises were just as bad, where the number of deals announced fell by 50 per cent. In healthcare contract volumes were down 39 percent and in the financial services market they fell 18 percent. The only industries in which contract activity was up on the previous year were telecommunications and technology sectors.

Europe was the leading market for private sector contract activity in 2012 but the number of contracts generated by European enterprises actually declined sharply during the year, falling 31 percent to $16.7 billion.

Private sector contracts in America slumped dramatically in 2011, rebounded in 2012, finishing the year up 48 percent at $10.5 billion.

This was mostly boosted by a couple of big contracts from Procter & Gamble and it is too early to tell whether or not this represents a significant shift in approach by enterprises in the region, Thomas said.

Ovum: the cloud is unstoppable

Posted on January 17, 2013 by - News

clouds3Analyst house Ovum has released a report that forecasts trends to watch in the cloud for 2013 which predicts the industry shows no signs of slowing down.

According to senior analyst Laurent Lachal, cloud computing will evolve to tackle two challenges it has faced so far, namely reducing implementation costs and boosting innovation. Vendors and enterprises face some problems with successfully building both private and public clouds, but Lachal insists they will “make it work” in 2013 – on their own and as part of increasingly complex ecosystems.

Public, private, and hybrid clouds are building momentum, according to Lachal, and increasingly approaching enterprise grade class, but Ovum believes it is “early days” for both vendors and enterprises. We can expect the cloud to begin reaching its maturity in 2013, however, it will take another five years before this is complete, according to Ovum.

Ovum believes that in 2013, cloud computing will begin to form its own ecosystem. Rather than being viewed as a single platform as part of a larger infrastructure, public clouds will be seen as a central ecosystem hub both for cloud service providers and consumers.

“They offer a new way to accelerate participation in the rapidly evolving social networking and mobile ecosystems of the internet age,” Lachal said. “Some industry sectores are benefiting from the data centre as a hub, an increasingly cloud computing-centric ecosystem of partners that assembles in a key location or data centre such as around financial exchanges, web and online services, or media content”.

Data itself will drive further adoption of the cloud. As cloud services along with the apps that run on it generate data, cloud services and applications are needed to make sense of it, Ovum said. This means that cloud will evolve in line with other upcoming industry trends such as machine to machine communication, smart cities initiatives, the consumerisation of IT, open government data, and big data.

Ovum notes that the market is currently focused on big data in particular, however, the group thinks that from this year onwards there’s going to be an interest in the shift from vendors and enterprises to turn data into a manageable resource – something they can make money from. The start, Ovum believes, will be data abstraction, sharing, and valuation.