Digital Lifescapes

Today's commercial smartphone and tablet users are demanding better, faster performance from their field service organizations. As a result, the pressure to excel is generating interest in new enterprise mobility technologies -- such as the various forms of mobile communication management. Frost & Sullivan has provided an overview of their recent worldwide analysis of the Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) market. The North American market is dynamic, with significant upside potential on a number of key fronts. Moreover, the MWM sector is accelerated by vendor mergers and acquisitions -- and the development of new end-user markets. According to the latest global market study by Frost & Sullivan, they now forecast that the annual pre-packaged MWM revenue will grow to reach $2.7 billion by 2019. "MWM is finding its way into the market at a somewhat slower capacity than vendors would like, however, actual results in the field and the money being devoted to creating a...

The emerging applications for IoT sensors that are designed to be worn will become vast. The wearable technology market is forecast to rise from $24.2 billion in 2015 to three times that size in ten years -- creating a market of $74 billion in 2025, according to the latest market study by IDTechEx Research . In addition to increasing demand for current enabling components and software, this market provides a large opportunity for new technologies as electronics move from being bulky devices to ones that can conform to the wearer. As the traditional markets for consumer electronics devices begin to saturate, new markets are being explored and foremost among them is the evolution of smart wearable technology. However, smart wearable gadgets thus far are mixed in terms of their success, consisting usually of bulky electronics with many limitations; power consuption being one of them. About $1 billion was invested in wearables during 2014. According to the IDTechEx assessment, this...

What is the Internet of Things (IoT), and why do numerous industry analysts now believe it could have a significant positive impact on most industries around the globe? Moreover, are there meaningful and substantive commercial applications that justify further consideration of this new technology? According to one definition, it represents the combination of devices and software systems, connected via the Internet, that produce, receive and analyze data with the aim of transcending traditional siloed ecosystems of electronic information in order to improve quality of life, efficiency, create value and reduce cost. Put simply, the IoT vision is to connect many of the previously 'unconnected' devices in the world to the public internet, with the intent to capture large amounts of 'data' that can be used to accomplish a goal(s) towards achieving a stated objective. Processing this abundant stream of 'big data' -- i.e. via automated software-enabled analysis and...

Applications for new categories of wearable devices are beginning to evolve into some interesting areas -- particularly within the medical arena, where innovation is likely to have a very positive impact on the professional healthcare sector. Consumer wearable devices targeting health and fitness applications have already demonstrated some promising early-adopter use-cases. Moreover, advancements in neuroscience technology research have several manufacturers preparing to launch Brain-to-Machine Interface (BMI) enabled products. According to the latest market study by ABI Research, revenues from both medical-grade and consumer BMI related products will already approach $10 million in 2015. That said, let's be clear about the potential applications, BMI technology is unable to read your thoughts. However, tapping into brain activity -- as a means of understanding human behavior, or controlling an external activity -- are now becoming possible. Example BMI Application Scenario...

Hybrid IT is the result of combining internal and external services -- usually from a combination of on-promise data center and public cloud computing resources. But what are the perceived benefits of hybrid IT? What does the hybrid IT market look like today? Here's recent research findings that offer answers to these questions. According to the latest market study by Technology Business Research (TBR), the need for better collaboration across traditional IT organizations and their Line of Business (LoB) internal customers -- for resource allocation decision making -- is primarily driving hybridization. Besides, there's growing demand for an open cloud infrastructure management solution that provides total visibility and control over all cloud computing assets, without the unwanted limitations of the traditional legacy proprietary IT vendors. TBR estimates the hybrid cloud integration market will generate $8 billion during 2015, with 14 percent year-to-year growth rate, ...

There's a significant mobile technology innovation that was originated where you might least expect it. To date, the most meaningful new financial services offering that was created specifically for delivery over mobile communication networks has occurred outside of the most mature markets. Moreover, as mCommerce via smartphones finally starts to gain traction across a few developed regions, a number of markets in sub-Saharan Africa and emerging Asia have already experienced a different kind of mobile money revolution. The basic mobile phone has enabled individuals in these highly under-banked markets to achieve first-time financial freedom, to the extent that by the end of 2014 more than 15 countries had more people with 'mobile money' accounts than those that had traditional bank accounts. According to the latest market study by Juniper Research, the number of mobile money transfers is expected to increase by nearly 150 percent in 2015 to more than 13 billion transa...

The public cloud computing sector continues to thrive, as more enterprise CIOs seek sustainable ways to free themselves from the burden of updating the inflexible high-cost proprietary software platforms in their own data center. According to the '1Q15 Public Cloud Benchmark' study by Technology Business Research (TBR), the public cloud market will reach $80 billion in 2015 and continue growing quickly -- now forecast to reach $113 billion by 2018. "The public cloud market is as hot as ever right now," said Jillian Mirandi, senior analyst at TBR . "After a few years of incumbent vendors trying to scare the market away from public clouds, they now offer and promote public clouds as part of their hybrid IT strategy." Public cloud pure-play service providers will continue investing in IT security, new data centers and geographic expansion in a successful effort to win more large enterprise deals. Integrated SaaS, PaaS and IaaS Offerings In addition, T...

While it's true that cloud computing infrastructure is often primarily deployed to enable an IT organization achieve a business agility goal, there's always the expectation that an operating cost reduction will also be the outcome -- as a direct result of cloud service adoption. In particular, the tier-one hyperscale public cloud service providers are able to influence Line of Business leaders by demonstrating how they can offer limitless access to more IaaS resources for a lower cost. This trend continues to raise the bar of expectations for CIOs that currently rely upon legacy IT infrastructure. Make no mistake, the competitive cost assessment of IT services will likely remain a constant KPI -- used as a peer-group benchmark test that's applied to the performance evaluation of every CIO and IT manager in a large enterprise. Why Superior Negotiation Skills Matter According to the latest Cloud Price Index from 451 Research, while on-demand pricing has fallen only sl...

Historically, the competition within the mobile handset marketplace has been unrelenting. Prior success was never a guarantee of future prospects -- just consider the rise and fall of Motorola, Nokia and BlackBerry. The ongoing battles in the American smartphone arena were indicative of this trend. However, there's been a noteworthy shift in consumer sentiment. U.S. smartphone demand in Q2 2015 dropped steadily and has declined by 8 percent, compared to June 2014, according to the latest market study by Argus Insights. Consumer interest has apparently peaked. What happened? With data compiled from approximately 622,000 consumer reviews since January 2014, their study reveals that despite the introduction of the new flagship phones from Samsung and Apple customer acceptance of the latest iPhones, overall consumer demand and interest has fallen off significantly. "This last quarter showed a very dramatic decline in consumer interest in the available smartphones in the U.S....

Driven by the requirement for more flexible and cost-effective data center infrastructure models, the combined market for cloud hardware and software components will grow at a 12 percent CAGR through 2019 to reach $38.3 billion, according to the latest market study by Technology Business Research (TBR). “Vendors are seeding the cloud components market with both product portfolio and go-to-market enhancements that will drive opportunity growth,” said Allan Krans, principal analyst at TBR . According to the TBR assessment, the participants in this market are enabling more service providers to embrace cloud delivery through enhanced management platforms, a growing number of managed service capabilities and open source software standards such as OpenStack . Revenue opportunities for server, storage and data center networking hardware are robust, accounting for more than two-thirds of cloud computing components revenue in 2014. Moreover, they will continue to rise as a percentage of...

Across the globe, eCommerce is about to enter the next phase of market development. This transition started back in 2013, when the value of mobile and online physical goods sales exceeded $1 trillion for the first time and last year exceeded $1.4 trillion. Based upon the ongoing adoption of smartphones and media tablets, the momentum for growth comes from the rapidly evolving mobile applications sphere -- with the Chinese marketplace, in particular, experiencing stellar increases. According to the latest worldwide market study by Juniper Research, global eRetail sales are expected to reach $1.7 trillion in 2015 -- that's up by more than 17 percent on the 2014 total. While recent growth had been buoyed by factors such as more free public Wi-Fi access and 4G cellular network deployments, the next wave of eRetail growth activity will be enacted by social media companies that use their mobile software apps to enable direct sales to consumers. Juniper observed that leading socia...

The ongoing adoption of an emerging Internet of Things (IoT) within mainstream industrial settings will result in a substantial growth of the number of connected industrial devices. In particular, industrial control devices, such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs). According to the latest global market study by ABI Research, over the period from 2014 to 2020, the number of connected industrial controllers will triple -- growing at an average rate of 20 percent. "Compared to the general-purpose conventional networks, industrial networks are characterized by a large variety of technologies and communication protocols, whose combination is determined by the requirements of the specific application they address," said Eugenio Pasqua, research analyst at ABI Research . As a consequence, there is typically little interoperability with conventional networks, but also between different industrial networks. ABI believes that sharing data among different facilities or with ...

As enterprise IT shifts from being a utility cost-center to an enabler of business outcomes, data center server and storage array revenues will rise at a 1.6 percent CAGR to reach $87.8 billion in revenue from 2014 to 2019, according to Technology Business Research (TBR). Their latest worldwide market study findings indicate that IT spend continues to increase, but the vendor opportunities are shifting. Demand for stand-alone proprietary servers and storage is declining as customers seek new open source software-defined ways to improve their IT agility and efficiency. This compelling transformation will make way for new converged systems, hyperscale servers and flash storage to lead the evolution of data center server and storage market growth through 2019. "As customers seek to harness big data growth, enable mobile computing and respond more fluidly to emerging opportunities, IT has grown more critical than ever to business," said Krista Macomber, data center analyst...

Mobile messaging today encompasses both the more traditional services offered by mobile network operators -- such as SMS or MMS -- and the popular Over the Top (OTT) messaging services from software application providers, such as WhatsApp and WeChat. SMS usage, specifically person-to-person (P2P) texting, has declined rapidly in many markets, while its growth has slowed in others. However, there are forms of SMS messaging which do continue to see some growth -- in particular, within the enterprise messaging sector. Furthermore, SMS has continued to succeed in less developed regions of the world, particularly those with a large number of feature phones, and those that have low 3G or 4G infrastructure penetration. According to the latest worldwide study by Juniper Research , mobile and online messaging traffic will reach 160 trillion per year by 2019, that's up from 94.2 trillion this year -- equating to approximately 438 billion messages sent and received by users on a daily b...

The global networked economy has gained new momentum in 2015, with more strategic mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity. According to the latest global market study by Mergermarket , the Technology, Media and Telecom ( TMT ) sector had a very active first half (H1) 2015. Total deal value reaching $396.3 billion -- that's a 26.1 percent increase compared to H1 2014. As a result, the TMT sector reached both its highest deal value and share in global deal making (22.8 percent) for any H1 period on Mergermarket record (since 2001). The announced domestic acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Charter Communications within the Technology sector influenced the overall value, constituting 19.6 percent of the sector's total sum. The high price of this deal reflects a trend of increasing valuations throughout the whole M&A market this year, demonstrated by the average size of a TMT transaction reaching the highest on record in H1 2015 at $504 million per transaction -- ex...

The healthcare information technology (IT) sector is evolving, albeit slowly. According to the latest study by Technology Business Research (TBR), global market growth in healthcare IT services (HITS) began to rebound in the first quarter of 2015 (1Q15), accelerating 170 basis points sequentially to 6.5 percent on a trailing 12-month basis. TBR attributes much of the increase to the inorganic impact of the strategic acquisitions made in 2014 by Cognizant (TriZetto) and Cerner (Siemens Health Services). Net of these acquisitions, TBR estimates average weighted year-to-year growth in 1Q15 would have been between 5.3 percent and 5.6 percent. "In 2014 TBR observed the electronic health record (EHR) market mature, primarily in North America, as large-scale implementations undertaken in prior years by major provider organizations began to wind down," said John Caucis, senior analyst at TBR . "However, many providers have discovered, much to to their dismay, that EHR in...

If you followed the evolution of the mobile communications sector, then you would notice that strategic blunders have humbled several large multinational companies -- including dominant telecom system manufacturers, mobile handset makers and proprietary software vendors. In all cases, companies once recognized as leaders in their respective field had to accept defeat. Most of the remaining industry players knew that their relative position in the mobile ecosystem was tentative and subject to ongoing change. That said, CEOs that believe their company is "too big to fail" is the folly that tends to be repeated, over and over again. The absence of strategic foresight at Microsoft has led to a somewhat predictable result -- a retreat from the battle for a sizable piece of the mobile marketplace, leading to an inevitable total surrender. It's an unfortunate outcome. However, there is still opportunity -- even in the most saturated markets. American Mobile Marketplace Up...

Just published, the Private Cloud Customer Research report for the first-quarter of 2015 estimates that the private cloud computing market will grow from about $45 billion this year to a forecast $80 billion by 2019. According to the findings from a worldwide market study by Technology Business Research (TBR), more than half of the enterprises surveyed are already using some form of private cloud computing solution. This rate of adoption is expected to reach 85 percent by 2018, because the survey respondents perceive private cloud as more secure than public cloud offerings -- making private cloud the most adopted hybrid IT solution for commercial IaaS and PaaS requirements. TBR believes that private cloud computing adoption is the intersecting point between hybrid outcome-based adoption and public technology-focused adoption. Besides, enterprises are beginning to favor self-built cloud services to provide increased IT control and more centralized purchasing. "Private cloud...

The U.S. Government Department of Defense (DoD) agencies would like to move 57 percent of their IT applications to the cloud by 2020, but believe that current budget allocation will allow just 24 percent of workloads to make the transition. This latest market study by MeriTalk surveyed 150 Federal IT professionals from DoD and American military intelligence agencies to examine where they stand in their move to a cloud services model -- by either migrating legacy software applications to the cloud, or by developing new cloud-native applications. The advantages of open source cloud computing for these government IT users are apparently understood. Eighty-seven percent of the survey respondents cite improved agility, budget savings, and saved time as the top cloud benefits -- but the preferred approach to reach their IT objectives are split. To date, 57 percent of the DoD current cloud applications have been migrated from legacy software applications, while 43 percent have been des...

Hardware vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products  -- including server, storage, and ethernet switches -- for all cloud computing use-cases, grew by 25.1 percent year over year to nearly $6.3 billion in the first quarter of 2015 (1Q15). This was the second highest growth in the five quarters of tracking year-over-year revenue growth, and the second largest in terms of the total spending in nine quarters, according to findings from the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Cloud IT infrastructure spending climbed to nearly 30 percent of overall IT infrastructure spending in 1Q15 -- that's up from 26.4 percent a year ago. Revenue from infrastructure sales for private cloud grew 24.4 percent year over year to $2.4 billion while sales for public cloud grew 25.5 percent to $3.9 billion. In comparison, the non-cloud IT infrastructure segment increased by 6.1 percent in the first quarter, largely driven by increased sales of servers whi...

Enterprise spending on Information Technology (IT) budgets will reach a combined worldwide total of $3.5 trillion in 2015 -- that's a 5.5 percent decline from 2014, according to the latest market study by Gartner . Regardless, smart CIOs are undeterred and are meeting their objectives -- they know how to optimize their budget spend. Gartner's analysts attribute the current decline to the rising U.S. dollar. But there are clearly several other logical reasons why business technology spending is in a state of flux. One obvious reason is the growing movement towards Open Source technologies. In constant-currency terms, Gartner says the market is projected to grow by just  2.5 percent. Back in their previous forecast during April, they had forecast IT spending to decline 1.3 percent in U.S. dollars and grow 3.1 percent in constant currency. Communications services will continue to be the largest IT spending segment in 2015, with spending at nearly $1.5 trillion. However, this...

The ongoing success of open source software subscriptions continues to take a heavy toll on traditional vendors. Application software revenue grew by just 2.7 percent year-to-year for the twenty-three vendors tracked in Technology Business Research (TBR) "Applications Software Vendor Benchmark" study. Growth was supported primarily by subscriptions revenue of 48.9 percent, compared to 48.2 percent in 4Q14, but dragged down by a license revenue decline of 16.6 percent -- that's compared to a decline of 15.7 percent in 4Q14. According to the latest TBR assessment, vendor delivery models continue to shift in line with customer consumption patterns -- driving rapid subscriptions growth as open source cloud-based offerings gain traction, but eroding similar traditionally licensed enterprise software products. "Traditional software vendors must mitigate the impacts of lower revenue per solution as customers select cloud offerings by not only retaining their existing...

The software-defined capabilities of hyper-converged platforms are helping organizations overcome challenges related to internal IT processes and infrastructure management, according  to the latest market study by Technology Business Research (TBR). With strong budgets allocated for future hyper-converged purchases, TBR estimates a $10.6 billion U.S. addressable market over the next 12 months. "IT customers are smashing into roadblocks with traditional server and storage infrastructure. But they are finding quickly that there are alternatives that provide improved efficiency and better management," said Christian Perry, principal analyst at TBR . Hyper-converged platforms take converged infrastructure to the next level of streamlined, virtualized solutions, and customers are adopting for a wide range of use cases. According to the TBR assessment, these initial deployments represent tremendous opportunity for vendors across hardware, open source software and related pro...