There are so many ways of classifying computer products. Servers are at the heart of the IT industry. Today I wanted to share with you my proposal for how all servers can be classified by their physical attributes. This is work in progress, so your comments will be very helpful to make this a useful tool for research purposes.
The mobile device market was worth $439 billion with shipments of 1.15 billion and an installed base of 3.37 billion worldwide in 2020. It’s a massive global market under constant change – of which mobile phones accounted for 84% of the spend in 2020. Leading European (Nokia, Ericsson, …) and Japanese (Sony, NEC, …) phone suppliers have now entirely gone away to be replaced mainly by by American (Apple), Chinese (Huawei, Xiaomi) and South Korean (Samsung) ones, who proved capable of handling the scale economies and innovation needed to succeed (see my Figure above). Read more »
Service Express International (SEI) started business as an enterprise Third-Party Maintenance (TPM) supplier in 1993. Its business is primarily based on post-warranty hardware maintenance of data center IT equipment – made up of servers, storage systems and network devices and also offers data center relocations, asset recovery and OS support. Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in November 2019 it was itself acquired by New York-based private equity company Harvest Partners from Pamlico Capital.
At the beginning of this month, Service Express acquired its fifth company, UK-based TPM BlueChip, expanding on a business relationship they already had and making Service Express more international in the process. Read more »
Cisco’s success in the ITC industry is based on its invention of IP networking and early promotion of Local Area Networking. Its first-mover advantage has allowed it retain its position as the dominant player in the enterprise networking market, where it has maintained a market share above 50% for ever. Read more »
In comparison with many of its previous announcements IBM’s storage division is making an impressive, yet easy to understand, announcement today. It’s launching the FlashSystem 5015, 5035 and 5200, replacing three products launched almost exactly a year ago. FlashSystem 5015 and 5035 are 2U rack-mounted devices with many (usually unique) enterprise-class functions fitting in neatly with IBM’s overall storage and hybrid multi-cloud and container strategies. In contrast, the FlashSystem 5200 gives a unique turn by providing high end performance, availability, capacity, and data resilience in a 1U form factor. As always, I was able to pick up the details ahead of time from Eric Herzog (the division’s CMO and SVP) and his team. Read more »
Apple is the largest IT company in the world. It’s revenues were $294 billion in 2020 – the equivalent of everyone alive on the planet spending $26.52 on its offerings. It’s business grew substantially on the introduction of the iPhone, expanded as we recovered from the Credit Crunch and has proved resilient during the pandemic. It’s time to question whether it can continue to thrive as the severe economic effects of the pandemic spreads. Read more »
In the face of IBM’s breakup later this year I want to look at how HP’s disaggregated businesses have done after its decision to do the same back in 2015. In this article I’ll look at the changes in revenues, profit, profitability and headcount before seeing how IBM could learn from what happened. Read more »
IBM intends to spin off its Managed Infrastructure Services business by the end of the year into a new company yet to be named (see my Figure above) and dependent on certification by the usual regulators. Accounting for a third of its current business, this is a drastic, yet logical, move in line with both IBM’s business and long-term market developments (see my Figure below). Read more »
This is dedicated to my friend and colleague Chis Christiansen, who is sadly is no longer with us. It would have been better with his help. Read more »
Timing the release of a new console is the most strategic decision for the three suppliers. Read more »
In 2020 there was a mass movement of workers from offices to their homes, especially during the most restrictive lockdowns designed to slow the transmission of the Corona virus; Read more »
Towards the end of December Microsoft announced that it had discovered a major cyber attack, which had infected 40 government organizations, non-profit organizations, government contractors and IT companies (80% in the USA). Read more »
In 2020 there were five suppliers whose annual net income was above $10 billion (see my Figure in which I’ve included the year to the end of September 2020 values). Read more »
Part of my research process is to collect information on and break the whole market by customer type (see my Figure above for my forecast). Read more »
My Figure shows annual growth and absolute spending forecasts for the largest ITC offerings in 2021 (here the bubble sizes also show the spending total). Read more »
In terms of the four categories, spending will decline in all areas apart from Software; even here the growth (1,7% to $1,2 trillion) will be far less than in 2020 (8.0%). Read more »
ITC spending in China will grow the most (1% to $474 billion), the USA will remain the largest market ($2 trillion), but drop by 1.1%. The UK will drop the furthest (-4.0% to $275 billion) of the major markets. Read more »
The OECD forecasts GDP growth at –4.2%in 2020, +4.2% in 2021and +3.7% and 2022. The ITC market in my forecasts most likely grew in 2020 by 0.4% and has proved vital in allowing individuals and companies keep in touch digitally at a time when social distancing was the norm. Read more »
Massive storms, extensive flooding, forests burning for months, melting glaziers… there will be fewer people in 2021 who can deny the activities of a growing world population is a major cause.
The ITC industry itself accounts for as much as 5% of carbon emissions (including manufacturing and distribution of hardware and the operation of IT and communication data centers, and other devices), but it has the ability to influence 95% of it.
2021 will not be the first year in which we address the issue of course, but there has never been a time when it has been more important. I’ve argued for years that the environment is a stakeholder in corporate and social responsibility strategies and it is positive that reporting and reducing carbon emissions is being legislated for. My hope for the year is that our industry can take the lead in going further to address the issues and make a difference. We need to think holistically. For instance:
One of the few positives of the pandemic has been a short pause in the constant pollution of modern society. When it’s finally overcome we shouldn’t aspire for things to return to normal, but use it as an opportunity to adopt cleaner activities. I will be involved in projects around this issue in the year – so please connect with me if you plan to as well.
Happy New Year!
Navigate our predictions – intro 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Its time to make predictions for 2021; but before I need to appraise those made for this year – which proved to be one of the most disrupted due to the pandemic. As always, I’ve marked each between 1 and 10 based on their accuracy.
| No. | My top 10 predictions | Score | Comment |
| 1 | The overall ITC market will grow by 0.8% to $6.849 trillion | 10 | I was spot on on the absolute value. ITC has proved a vital aid during the pandemic |
| 2 | The Americas will lead regional ITC spending growth | 10 | Growth in the Americas was 2%; Asia Pacific was -2%, EMEA was 0% (at current $ exchange rates) |
| 3 | Spending on software will grow most, while hardware spending will decline | 10 | Software grew 8%, hardware decline 4%; IT services grew 3%, Telecom services declines 3% |
| 4 | The business market grows; the consumer market continues to fall | 4 | Consumer spending grew by 0.8%, business by 0.9%. The pandemic changed demand |
| 5 | IT Services spending grows most on IaaS and PaaS cloud services, while other offerings ‘flat line’ | 8 | IaaS grew by 27%, PaaS by 25%; other IT service spending grew by 3%; again the pandemic raised demand |
| 6 | The only hardware spending growth will be on solid state disks and processors | 7 | Processor sales grew 2%, but so did gaming consoles (22%) and PCs (3%); everything else declined |
| 7 | Wider adoption of 5G allows spending on mobile telecom service to grow | 4 | Despite its vital role in the pandemic, telecom mservices declined; wireless was down 3%, while broadbandwas stable v 2019 |
| 8 | SaaS and Infrastructure will lead the software market | 7 | SaaS saw the strongest growth (14%), but Infrastructure (6%) was outgrown byOS (11%), application (8%) and database (7%) software |
| 9 | Raw storage shipments exceed 2 Zetabytes | 10 | The number was exceeded in the first 3quarters |
| 10 | Governments move against those trading data from social networking | 7 | The EU Digital Markets Act will address some concerns; on the whole governments were too busy with the pandemic to do much |
Overall I claim an 77% accuracy for the year – worse than last year hardly surprisingly.