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HPE Launches the EL300 system- converging OT and IT worlds

HPE EL products

Here at HPE Discover in Madrid HPE has announced the EL300 edge server – a convergence of IT with OT (Operational Technology) components for use in industrial control organisations. It is a fan-less rack-mounted product using Intel’s i5 processors with maximums of 32GB memory and 3TB storage priced upwards from $2,532 in the US. It includes wired and wireless communications. It fits below the (already-introduced) EL1000 and EL4000); the model numbers alone show that it plans many more in years to come – utilising some of the $4b investment it declared in June it plans to spend over the next 4 years.

This isn’t a point product; it is an ‘OT Link’ platform allowing for a vast variety of cards to be added from HPE and partners over time. HPE’s industrial partners include ABB, Eaton, Schneider Electric, Keysight , National Instruments, sparkcognition GE Digital and many others. Read more »

IBM and Redhat discuss the acquisition

Following my earlier analysis of IBM’s planned acquisition of RedHat I had a chance to listen in to a conference call today in which Arvind Krishna (IBM Senior Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and Director, IBM Research) and Paul Cormier (Red Hat President, Products and Technologies) described their views and answered questions from analysts on the announcement. Several times they noted that the deal is not yet complete and is dependent on verification of regional administrators. I note that we now live in a less predictable world in which proposed deals can be quashed, as Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of Qualcomm was earlier this year. Read more »

IBM to buy RedHat for $33.4 billion to enhance its cloud, infrastructure software and Open Source businesses

IBM announced its intension to acquire RedHat for $33 billion yesterday – I contrast IBM software revenues with RedHat in the Figure, demonstrating how much smaller the latter is than the former. It makes good sense today – enabling IBM to integrate enterprise-ready Open Source code and services into its cloud and on premise portfolio and RedHat’s influence to grow internationally. Associating key infrastructure software companies with larger suppliers is a modern component of the IT market; There are many ways IBM can integrate RedHat into its business; I believe it should be aiming at something relatively loose, more akin to VMware’s role within Dell EMC rather than Simplivity’s within HPE. Read more »

IBM Storage October 2018 – Gen3 V7000, Spectrum Discover launched


 

In Q1 IBM’s storage announcements mainly concerned software; in Q2, flash storage systems; and this time round they’re about both and more. As before I had a chance to talk with Eric Herzog, CMO of the storage division ahead of time in order to bring you this analysis of today’s launch.
I’m very impressed with the continued and keen focus IBM puts on maintaining a relevant, coherent set of offerings despite this being such a comprehensive announcement that it’s hard to keep on top of the detail. It goes further than most of its competitors in fitting its products to new uses – whether as part of an infrastructure for autonomous self-driven vehicles, the use of tape backup by large public cloud suppliers, or the support for the use of hybrid applications spread across on-premise systems, public and private clouds. Read more »

ITCandor – a journey through Q2 2018 IT markets

PRESS RELEASE – Didcot, October 19, 2018

Strong ITC market growth in Q2 2018

In the last couple of weekswe’ve published the following research posts covering Q2 2018 and the full year to the end of June:

The development of the markets demonstrate solid growth across the board. We’re entering a phase in which IT is being embedded into almost every device and utility and the first generation of digital transformation has taken hold in most Western countries. Read more »

IT services market – massive, profitable and growing well in Q2 2018


The IT services market is very large ($1,740 billion in the year to the end of June – as sized in this post), quite profitable ($181 billion net profit) and growing (8% in the year to the end of June).

In my Figure I show these data elements for the seven subsectors I track. It’s important to note that – although far exceeding the other five areas in growth – IaaS and PaaS cloud services are still very small in terms of revenue and net profit (shown in the comparative size of each bubble in the chart). Read more »

Gaming market falls 24% in Q2 2018 as we wait for the next big thing

The gaming market has reached something of an impasse; the huge surge in sales of Nintendo Wii is over and neither Sony nor Microsoft have yet announced replacements for the PS/4 and Xbox, which will drive spending upwards once more. My Figure shows the revenues in the last year of the leading vendors, split by hardware and software sales. Nintendo is the current leader, followed by Sony and Microsoft.

The ‘lack of the new’ resulted in a 24% decline in Q2 sales over the previous year (don’t panic – big shifts in market value are typical in this ‘stochastic’ market, with peaks and troughs dependent on the launch and expectations of console users. Unit shipments declined by 11% to 7 million and the installed base of dedicated consoles stood at 168 million. Read more »

The rise, rise, rise of cloud computing


Cloud services sales continue to rise as user organisations find it useful to let someone else take care of the plumbing of enterprise computing. Suppliers are making huge upfront investments in – sometimes self-built – systems in large data centres and sweating their assets by signing up a rainbow of services types from software, platform and infrastructure. My Figure shows the growth of the three types of cloud services – Software, Infrastructure and Platform – ‘as a Service’. It demonstrates that the vision of suppliers such as HP was correct – we finally live in a period in which ‘Utility Computing’ exists, albeit as long as we’re prepared to let a modern, cut-down definition of the computing architectures we use are sufficient for the applications we want to build. Read more »

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Canon top in peripherals, joint leader with HP Inc. in printer markets in Q2 2108

The peripheral (inclusive of printer) market has survived a period of significant decline to deliver growth in Q2 2018. Sales rose by 4.4% to $74b and units by 5.9% to 109m, although there was a 1.4% decline in the installed base. For the year to the end of June 2018 market revenues grew by 5.8% to $256b and units by 4.7% to 420m. Read more »

PCs in Q2 2108 – good growth in a market dominated by smart devices


PCs have been at the heart of access to the Internet and wider digital marketplace for many years. Despite falling behind smart phones in recent years it is still a major component of the ITC industry. In the year to the end of June 2018 236m PCs worth $163b were shipped, while the total installed base reached 842m (see my Figure for market shares of revenue, shipments and installed base). Read more »

Microprocessors – the $308b backbone of the $6.6T ITC market


The microprocessor market is very large in revenues ($79b in Q2,$308b in the year to the end of June 2018) and volume (33.4b chips were sold, 8.4b in the quarter)… and growing strongly (27.4% in the quarter, 22.5% in the year). Computer chips are an essential bedrock of the ITC industry – they are the beating heart of all computer usage and digital transformation. All chip areas have grown consistently (see my Figure which shows cumulative annual revenues by quarter since 2004). Note that the memory chip (NAND and DRAM) market peaks every three years – a ‘stochasticism’ based on the introduction of new ‘process’ sizes, which averaged over 25um in 2004 and now average under 25nm. Read more »

Storage in Q2 2018 – ‘system’ stagnant, ‘raw’ booms with 2 Zetabytes shipped


The storage hardware market is large and vital for the ITC industry; however while spending in the storage systems market was stagnant at $33b in the year to the end of June, raw storage grew by 14.5% to $159b (see my Figure above). A long time ago storage systems suppliers were the most important players – offering the security of directly attached devices to servers used by enterprise customers on premise; nowadays the leaders are the disk and solid state drive manufacturers, whose products are being used by self-building cloud suppliers and in all manner of mobile and mains-powered systems. The major storage systems suppliers (Dell EMC, HPE, NetApp and IBM) have transformed themselves into software and service vendors eager to provide data management accommodating the use of commodity and other vendors’ arrays and cloud services. Read more »

Server revenues grow 13% in Q2 2018, but most vendors are failing to sell to CSPs


The server market is large ($82b in the year to the end of June), growing (+8.9% in the year and +12.7% to $22b in Q2); unit shipments grew by 9.6% in the year to 26m and by 14.1% in the quarter to 7m; the installed base at the end of June grew 4.0% to 77m. Dell was the largest vendor (see my Figure above), non-virtualised servers still accounted for the majority of revenues (57.25), while x86 processors accounted for 85.6% and Microsoft Windows, 71.9%. However a significant proportion of servers, using approximately 10m server processors, are self-built by large cloud service providers, which has substantially reduced the market for branded products which are the subject of this research paper. Read more »

Network Q2 2018 – Asia service providers drive growth


The network hardware market is split between service provider ($124b spend in the year to June) and enterprise ($51b) types. The former is led by Huawei – a Chinese company behind the roll out of technology for telecoms companies to allow a massive growth in mobile devices over the last few years. The latter is dominated by Cisco – an American company responsible for the massive growth in the use of IP networks by businesses (enterprises) over a decade ago. Read more »

Mobile devices in Q2 2018 – ‘smart’ dominates, but we need something more secure

You cannot ignore the importance of this market; for instance… each day in the last year we spent an average of a billion dollars on 3.8 million mobile devices, resulting in the equivalent* of 18% of the world’s population purchasing a mobile phone tablet or smart wearable by the end of June… adding those to the ones we already had means that the equivalent* of 42% of us had some sort of device… on average we each spent $44 on devices and $155 on telecom services to make them work in the year. Read more »

Broadcom bids for CA – enters the enterprise market

Yesterday Broadcom made a bid to acquire Computer Associates (CA) for a price of around $18.9 billion. As CA is an enterprise software and services supplier it represents a significant change in strategy for Broadcom, who hitherto (and it its various guises) has expanded its business through buying other semiconductor companies. Read more »

IBM announces the FlashSystem 9100 – so much more than NVMe

I spent some time with IBM’s Eric Herzog (Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Channels for IBM’s storage division), Andy Wall (CTO for block storage flash, IBM fellow), and Eric Stouffer (VP of Offering Management for Distributed Storage Solutions) recently to take an early look at the announcements made by the company today, which entail the strong pairing of storage systems and storage software into a single solution for today’s data driven multi-cloud enterprise, while the theme of its last big announcement was primarily around storage software. Read more »

Europe ITC markets – €1.5 trillion, 0.8% growth, divided

Europe is a continent of many nations, natural languages and currencies. Uniting it is an on-going project begun after the second world war to create stability and prevent it from being the origin of future global conflict. The EC and latterly the EU corralled countries together in a common trading block. The fall of communism led to an extension eastwards with large countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria joining, giving millions of people the chance to share in the economic benefits. Read more »