Taking care of currency conversions is an essential job for an international market researcher and I’ve written about the process before. The US dollar keeps rising, making the value of spending in local measurements far in excess of current dollar value growth. As I begin to tackle the Q3 market I note that the changes have been even deeper than before. The Figure shows the growth of the $US against the deepest fallers for Q3 2015 v Q3 2014. China decided to lower its exchange rates recently, but remained one of the most stable. It’s interesting that some of the steepest falls have been in oil-rich countries, which are struggling to meet GDP targets due to sustained low prices.
Cloud services suffer massive regional currency discrepancies
Following my sizing and forecast for cloud services published yesterday, I wanted to expand on the regional growth stats. The rapidly falling value of almost all local currencies against the $US is making market planning very difficult at the moment, as many of you know only too well.
In the Figure I show the quarterly growth of revenues from cloud services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS combined) in the Americas, Asia Pacific and EMEA. For the latter 2 regions I’ve shown growth in current $US (as per my previous sizing) and in local currency (¥ and €). Read more »
Cloud services – SaaS, IaaS and PaaS forecast
We sized the enterprise IT hardware market at $143b in a recent research paper. Now it’s time to look at cloud services – Infrastructure and Platform ‘as a Services’ are alternatives to building and maintaining your own data centre, while Software as a Service is an alternative to running application software within them. The Figure shows the quarterly development of the three cloud service types with a forecast to 2020. The total was worth $94b in the year to the end of June and will grow to be $206b by 2020 and – while the majority of this will be SaaS, there are clearly a shift going on in data centre ownership away from enterprise customers and towards service providers and software companies.
You’ll be interested to learn more about the market leaders and revenue trends and the consequences for your IT usage going forward. Read more »
PC market by product type – desktops aren’t dead!
A couple of weeks ago we looked at the world market for all client devices. I’ve been doing some work to split out various extra form factors in the mean time and am pleased to be able to publish some stats here on PCs. You’ll want to know more about how laptop, desktop, workstations and thin clients contribute to this vital part of the IT market. Read more »
IBM LinuxONE – new brand and aspirations in open source computing
Back in January we took a deep look at IBM’s new z13 mainframe. In August it announced LinuxONE – the most comprehensive effort yet to bring the value of mainframes to enterprises building Open Source solutions. In this bulletin we’ll look at what IBM has announced and how it will affect the Linux and open source world. Read more »
Client IT hardware devices – the shipment perspective
Following our analysis of market shares for client devices by type last week, I wanted to share the shipment perspectives with you. This bulletin is designed for those of you who these markets measure success and opportunities in unit terms. In total there were 2.2 billion shipments of client hard devices in the year to the end of June – up 2.1% on the previous year. Smart devices predominate (see the Figure), having overtaken ‘other’ devices in 2013. See my earlier article for definitions of what’s included there. Read more »
Client IT hardware devices up 4.6% in the year to June 2015
Last week we looked at enterprise hardware, so I thought it was time to look at client devices. This is a much larger market – worth $614b in the year to the end of June 2015. It grew by 4.6% in total. I’ve split the underlying categories into 4. Smart devices are smartphones, smart tablets, smart wearables (including anything running iOS or Android operating systems). PCs are desktop, laptop, PC tablets and workstations (including all machines running Windows on x86 chips). Printers are laser and inkjet (including Multi-Functional Printers, but excluding dedicated copiers). Others are digital cameras, basic mobile phones and audio and media devices. I’ve included all product sales, irrespective of the type or size of user. Needless to say we can split them out in greater detail. You’ll want to know more about how these markets are developing. Read more »
The enterprise hardware market falls 2.1% in Q2 2015 – is going server-centric
I’ve been looking at the enterprise IT market over the last couple of days, combining server, enterprise network and storage system numbers together mainly to assess market growth and vendor successes. With the server market growing, storage systems declining and networks somewhere in the middle it looks to me as there is good evidence that we’re moving to a server-centric world. Software running on servers is taking chunks of money out of the dedicated array market now… and will do the same to dedicated network hardware in the future. You’ll want toread more about the market movements and vendor shares. Read more »
ITC spending -5.5% in Q2 2015 – we’re in another downturn
I’ve just finished assessing the revenues of 150 separate IT and C vendors and am sorry to report that their results continued to worsen. In fact the total market declined by 5.5% to $1.5T in Q2. For the year to the end of June the market was down 2.8% to $6.1T. The Figure shows my forecast for each of the 4 contributing categories on a rolling 4 quarter basis to the end of 2016. In the year to the end of June hardware was up 0.4%, IT service down 1.5%, software up 0.2% and telecom service down 6.5%. For the quarter itself, everything was down – hardware by 0.1%, IT service by 3.7%, software by a staggering 6.5% and telecom service by 5.5%.
I know you’ll want to learn more, especially about the links with China’s economic troubles and the turbulent movements of currency I’ve been reporting for some time. Read more »
Toshiba’s woes and the Japanese triple whammy
Toshiba apologised yesterday for over-reporting its income statements from 2008 onwards, having delayed calculating its full-year financial results and setting up an independent investigation panel back in May. You’ll want to think more about its position as a Japanese vendor and global supplier. Read more »
BRUNS-PAK – a classical Data Center design consultancy
I had great fun talking to Mark Evanko – principal engineer of BRUNS-PAK – a short while ago. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year evaluating the technical consulting activities of a number of larger vendors (see the Figure for some stats on the largest IT services companies) as well as writing a paper on migration/relocation, so it is very interesting to see what this specialist vendor is doing. Mark is amused about me being an Oxford Classicist – so let me rise to the challenge and give some appropriate analysis! Read more »
Mobile device revenues up 17% in Q1 2015 – Chinese suppliers surge
I’ve been busy adjusting my mobile device model to accommodate the growth of new form factors – ‘Smart Wearables’ and ‘IoT Devices’. although they’re not yet shipping in multi millions, I want to be prepared. In the process I’ve made a number of changes to my smart phone, smart tablet and basic phone research, which I publish here for the first time. You’ll want to think about the implications of these very large numbers. Read more »
Dell Strategy – get ready for the ‘digital economy’, the ‘API economy’
I had the excellent fortune to attend Dell’s 5th annual Dell Annual Analyst Conference (DAAC) forum last week to hear from Michael and his team about the company’s latest achievements. I’m following Dell more closely than ever now, reviewing its actions and strategy in a turbulent market. You’ll want to learn more about how it’s positioned to take advantage of future opportunities. Read more »
Amazon publishes AWS stats – a fat, growing, profitable business
Amazon has been quite secretive when it comes to breaking out its revenues – for instance it has never told anyone how many Kindles have been shipped. However in its Q1 results it decided to split out the revenues and operating income of AWS for the first time. I’ve estimated both by quarter, showing them in the Figure, using a rolling 4 quarter analysis. You’ll want to think about the consequences for the growth of cloud services in general and IaaS in particular. Read more »
Symantec’s simpler, more integrated, capacity-priced Backup Exec 15
Barnaby Wood, Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing joined Veritas 15 years ago – before Symantec acquired it. He thinks of the announced spin-off and recreation of the Veritas name as ‘coming home’. Backup Exec (BE) is a key software solution for backing up, archiving and restoring data. It has 2.2m (typically) SMB and mid-range customers, while Symantec’s Enterprise customers tend to use NetBackup. I thought you’d like an update from the discussion we had recently. Read more »
Falconstor’s 15-year head start in SDS
FalconStor’s president and CEO Gary Quinn will ring the NASDAQ closing bell yesterday to celebrate the company’s 15-year anniversary. The company has simplified its market approach by launching Freestor – a product claimed as ‘the first truly horizontal, software-defined storage platform for unified data services’. You’ll want to learn more about this innovative company, which has always taken a ‘software-only’ approach to storage virtualisation and management. Read more »
IBM’s SAP HANA-certified Power8 goes head-to-head with Intel Xeon E7v3
SAP has certified Power8 systems for its HANA in-memory database and Business Suite application, allowing IBM to announce 2 new ‘solution edition’ systems today. Hitherto this software only ran on servers based on Intel’s Xeon E7 chips – version 3 of which has also been announced today. So there’s relief for the IBMers who thought the SAP business had walked out of the door as System x went to Lenovo and a potential for an interesting new fight between Intel and IBM over high-end chips. It’s early days, but you will want to think about the consequences. Read more »
VCE announces VxRack – extends itself from block to rack
What’s VCE Announcing?
VCE today introduced the VxRack – a rack-based addition to its converged infrastructure and integrated platform vBlock machines, expanding its participation in the CIandIS market from 2 to 4 of the 5 layers (see Figure). Read more »
How WD, Seagate and Toshiba ate the hard disk drive market
For our latest disk, nand and storage systems findings click here.
There’s a lot of supplier consolidation going on – especially in established markets where economies of scale in production favour the larger operators. I recently covered Nokia’s acquisition of Alcatel Lucent and Atos’s – of Xerox’s ITO business. The same is definitely true in the hard disk market, where there are only 3 suppliers left – Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba.
The Figure shows quarterly shipments by supplier between 2003 and 2015, underlying the dramatic changes in the vendor landscape.
You’ll want to learn more about who bought whom and how the market is performing now. Read more »
Atos acquires Xerox’s ITO business – better times ahead for outsourcing
Atos agreed to purchase Xerox’s IT Outsourcing business in the middle of December last year for $1.05B with an additional $50M for certain assets in a deal which should close in the first half of this year. I thought it would be fun to look at the consequences from a business and geographic point of view. Read more »