Unfortunately although much of the news has been positive for the TelcoTV market, there have also been negative announcements, such as Swisscom's postponement of their commercial deployment named Bluewin. Microsoft announced that Motorola will integrate Microsoft's IPTV platform into its IP set top boxes. Scientific-Atlanta is also showing the Microsoft TV IPTV platform in their booth. Network access equipment providers continue to partner with IPTV middleware vendors. We have Microsoft and Alcatel, Siemens and Myrio, and now Lucent has a strategic alliance with Orca. In other middleware news, Myrio announced its Myrio Interactive Creator, which will enable the service provider to truly customize their user interface by designing the layout and appearance of the content. Amino, the second largest supplier of IP set top boxes based on 2004 unit market share, announced a standard definition IP set top box capable of decoding MPEG-4 AVC. UK competitor Pace announced an IP set top box with hardware MPEG-4 AVC decoding in May, but it will not be available until September.
Even the savviest CEO's desire for a digital transformation advantage has to face the global market reality -- there simply isn't enough skilled and experienced talent available to meet demand. According to the latest market study by IDC, around 60-80 percent of Asia-Pacific (AP) organizations find it "difficult" or "extremely difficult" to fill many IT roles -- including cybersecurity, software development, and data insight professionals. Major consequences of the skills shortage are increased workload on remaining digital business and IT employees, increased security risks, and loss of "hard-to-replace" critical transformation knowledge. Digital Business Talent Market Development Although big tech companies' layoffs are making headlines, they are not representative of the overall global marketplace. Ongoing difficulty to fill key practitioner vacancies is still among the top issues faced by leaders across industries. "Skills are difficul