Digital Lifescapes

The personal computing device market continues to demonstrate remarkable resilience despite recent fluctuations. According to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), global PC shipments are projected to reach 273 million units in 2025—a modest but significant 3.7 percent increase over the previous year. This growth reflects the market's adaptation to post-pandemic realities and evolving technology needs across the globe. Personal Computing Market Development While COVID-19 initially triggered unprecedented demand for computing devices during the shift to remote work and online education, we now see a more measured growth pattern. IDC has slightly adjusted its projections downward, indicating a market growing steadily rather than explosively. "In light of so many challenges around the world, Japan is a much-needed source of double-digit growth this year. Enterprises there as well as SMBs have been quickly replacing PCs in advance of the Window...

Digital transformation goals continue to influence large enterprise IT spending. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has now emerged as a transformative technology. Its ability to create entirely new business models or designs holds immense promise across industries. Still, a recent market study by ABI Research, presented at the 'Hannover Messe 2024' event, paints a somewhat cautious picture of GenAI adoption in the global manufacturing sector. ABI Research highlighted a strong presence of GenAI at the event, with industrial software vendors showcasing its application in the form of AI assistants and co-pilots. They forecast revenue from GenAI use cases in manufacturing will reach $10.5 billion by 2034. Manufacturing GenAI Market Development "The dominant use cases leverage core strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) programming, code generation, step-by-step work instructions, and data enrichment and consolidation," ...

The field of enterprise software development has long been driven by human ingenuity. Programmers have meticulously crafted lines of code, bringing complex apps and systems to life. However, a new era is dawning, one where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to fundamentally change the way software is created, tested, and deployed. According to the latest market study by Gartner, a significant shift is on the horizon. By 2028, 75 percent of enterprise software engineers will be utilizing AI-powered code assistants. This statistic paints a clear picture: AI is not here to replace software programmers, but rather to augment their capabilities and usher in a new era of collaborative co-creation. AI Code Assistant Market Development The rise of AI code assistants can be attributed to several factors. Firstly, the ever-increasing complexity of software demands new tools to streamline development. Modern applications are intricate networks of code, often built upon a foundation of existin...

When you hire qualified talent for a key role and trust them to perform, you'll likely achieve the best outcome. Skilled and experienced people will deliver results, regardless of the challenges. That's a key lesson learned from the pandemic experience as most knowledge workers were asked to work from their homes. However, some resist returning to an open-plan office. It's unacceptable. Meanwhile, forward-thinking leaders decided a "return to normal" is undesirable, and in hindsight, everyone should aspire to be more accomodating than before. Therefore, location flexibility is okay. Hybrid Workforce Market Development How will people adapt to these changes? They'll apply the modern IT tools at their disposal. They'll learn new skills and thrive. Nearly 80 percent of employees are now successfully using online collaboration tools for work in 2021 -- that's up from just over half of workers in 2019, according to the latest market study by Gartner. This g...

Enterprise CIOs crave practical insights and guidance to help them drive digital business transformation projects. They've been tasked to develop comprehensive IT investment strategies across hardware, software, professional services, and telecom networks. That, in turn, drives IT vendor revenue growth. Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.1 trillion in 2021 -- that's an increase of 8.4 percent from 2020, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. The source of funds for new digital business initiatives will more frequently come from groups outside the traditional IT organization and charged as a cost of revenue, or cost of goods sold. Business Technology Market Development Gartner’s IT spending forecast methodology relies heavily on the analysis of vendors across the entire range of IT products and services. They use primary research, complemented by secondary research sources, to build a database of market size data on which to base their forecast. ...

Modern business communication and collaboration solutions are an essential platform for a distributed workforce. The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought these platforms to the forefront of digital transformation. Together, they'll form a foundation for many 'digital workspace' deployments. These multifaceted offerings aren't deployed because they're the best technology. They're used to drive meaningful advances in employee productivity, agility, and flexibility that are proven to help achieve desired business outcomes. The Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) market grew 29.2 percent year-over-year and 7.1 percent quarter-over-quarter to reach $13.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020 (4Q20), according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). IT vendor revenue growth was also up by an impressive 24.9 percent for the full year of 2020 to reach $47.2 billion. Regardless, not all the IT vendors benefited from...

How agile organizations enable online communication and collaboration for their distributed workforce is top of mind for most senior executives today. More savvy CEOs, across all industries, have rapidly increased investments in IT systems and services that empower employees to work from anywhere. The global unified communications & collaboration (UC&C) market grew 26.7 percent year-over-year and 6.6 percent quarter-over-quarter to $12.2 billion in the third quarter of 2020 (3Q20), according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). As enterprise leaders moved their teams from the crisis phase to the recovery phase, in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide growth of UC&C applications was driven by organizations across all business types and sizes. Unified Communications Market Development The IDC study uncovered a special interest in cloud-based solutions for voice, video, messaging, and collaboration for driving initiatives...

The traditional enterprise software landscape has evolved significantly over the last decade. CTOs and line of business leaders look to online service offerings that deliver functionality via a usage-based pricing model. It's often the fastest path to demo application software and determine user acceptance. Furthermore, while new agile software development methodologies have replaced legacy waterfall approaches that were common during the mainframe and client-server computing era, today's app developers seek on-demand IT infrastructure solutions that they can easily provision and deploy themselves. Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4 percent in 2021 to total $304.9 billion -- that's up from $257.5 billion in 2020, according to the latest market study by Gartner. Public Cloud End-User Market Development "The pandemic validated cloud’s value proposition," said Sid Nag, vice president at Gartner . "The ability to use on-...

Digital data growth is already an ongoing challenge for many enterprise organizations across the globe. That said, the global pandemic has accelerated the digital data deluge, with a surge in video-based content, and other emerging trends that will fuel additional growth in 2020 and 2021. More than 59 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created, captured, copied, and consumed in the world this year, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). The COVID-19 pandemic is contributing to this growth by causing an increase in the number of remote employees, and that's fueled more adoption of video conferencing applications and a significant increase in streaming video webcasts or events. Digital Data Analytics Market Development IDC measures the amount of data created and consumed in the world each year. The ratio of unique data (created and captured) to replicated data (copied and consumed) is roughly 1:9 -- but the trend is a slow migrati...

As more progressive business leaders choose to support mobile, team-oriented and non-routine ways of working, an increasing number of them are looking for assistance in adopting digital workplace technology. But why are they searching for actionable information and qualified guidance? According to the findings from the latest Gartner survey, only 7 to 18 percent of organizations possess the 'digital dexterity' to adopt New Ways of Work (NWOW) solutions -- such as virtual collaboration and a mobile workplace. Furthermore, it's already apparent that forcing employees to accept rigid and inflexible workplace mandates are a recipe for poor performance. Ongoing Change Reshapes the Workforce According to the Gartner assessment, an organization with high digital dexterity has employees who have the cognitive ability and social practice to leverage and manipulate media, information and technology in unique and highly innovative ways. By country, organizations exhibiting the...

While there's less commentary about the challenges of "Shadow IT" projects within the enterprise market, the underlying issues that created this phenomena are still very apparent in the workplace. Bypassing the legacy IT organization is a common practice. It's now somewhat expected. As many IT workers develop greater technology skills and apply them to advance their careers, savvy digital workers in non-IT departments believe their CIO is out of touch with their technology needs. Less than 50 percent of workers (both IT and non-IT) believe their CIOs are aware of digital technology problems that affect them, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. The Gartner survey further revealed that European workers said that their CIO is more aware of technical challenges (58 percent) than U.S. workers believe they are (41 percent). Clearly, it's a big problem. Ongoing Indifference to Legacy IT "Non-IT workers aren't likely to use the IT h...

I recall when some of the first videoconferencing systems were installed in multinational enterprises across America, more than two decades ago. Since that time, there have been many new developments in video communication-related technologies and associated services. The introduction of Telepresence was a significant advancement. However, the arrival of software app and web-based services -- such as Microsoft Skype and Google Hangouts -- have raised expectations for online collaboration ease-of-use and transformed how video meetings are conducted across the public Internet. In the first quarter of 2016 (Q1 2016), video conferencing revenue declined 22 percent quarter-over-quarter to $701 million due to lower seasonal demand, according the the latest worldwide market study by IHS Technology . Video Communication Market Development Videoconferencing revenue is also trending down slightly on a year-over-year basis, primarily due to decreases in infrastructure sales. Demand for...

Software as a Service (SaaS) applications continue to lead the ongoing enterprise migration to cloud-based service offerings. Given the recent trends, corporate email is a SaaS application that's likely to experience significant new growth during 2016. The cloud email market is still in the early stages of adoption with 13 percent of identified publicly listed companies globally using one of the two main cloud email vendors, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner. Gartner found that 8.5 percent of public companies use cloud email from Microsoft's Office 365 service, while 4.7 percent use Google Apps for Work. The remaining 87 percent of companies surveyed have on-premises, hybrid, hosted or private cloud email managed by smaller vendors. These findings are based on an automated examination of a large number of publicly available email routing records. Gartner used the email server addresses in the domain records of nearly 40,000 public companies globall...

Applications for a variety of video-based communication and collaboration use-cases have grown significantly over the last decade. Overall market adoption has been fueled by free services -- such as Microsoft Skype and Google Hangouts -- which enables more people to become familiar with the process of impromptu or scheduled online face-to-face meetings. That being said, there are still issues with market shifts that increase the volatility for vendors of enterprise products and services. According to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC ), there were mixed results in the third quarter of 2015 (3Q15) with overall videoconferencing equipment revenue increasing 0.8 percent quarter over quarter but declining -3.3 percent year over year. The total worldwide enterprise video equipment market revenue in 3Q15 was over $511 million -- that's up from $507 million in 2Q15. The total number of videoconferencing units sold in 3Q15 decreased both quarter...

The legacy online communication market has already been disrupted by mobile messaging apps -- such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Moreover, increasing competition and the ongoing upheaval of the telecom services industry will continue to transform the enterprise collaboration sector. The North American telecom conferencing services market is in a state of rapid transition as visual collaboration gains precedence over legacy audio conferencing. As emerging video communication services are driving expansion, the commoditization of mature technologies is tempering overall growth. As a result, the hosted audio, web, video and managed video conferencing service segments will each experience varying growth rates over the next seven years, according to the latest market study by Frost & Sullivan. Their recent analysis found that the conferencing market earned revenues of $4.5 billion in 2014 -- it's estimated to reach $5.9 billion by 2021, at a compound annual growth rate (...

The commercial applications for social networking and social media platforms in the enterprise has experienced mixed results. Part of the challenge stems from the use of the term Social Business to describe this phenomena -- since many executives still question the value of Social technologies. That being said, there are encouraging signs that the market for these offerings is maturing, as software vendors expand the definition to incorporate more familiar business-oriented solutions. The Social Business Applications Market is expected to grow from $13.9 billion in revenue in 2014 to $37 billion in 2019, according the the latest worldwide market study by 451 Research. The specific market segments included in the analysis are Marketing Automation, Social Media Monitoring & Management, Enterprise Collaboration, and Web Experience Management. As end-users and enterprises continue to embrace the Social Business movement, 451 Research believes this will lead to a healthy market ...

Online collaboration, and videoconferencing in particular, has been a significant catalyst for business productivity during the last decade. However, the demand for expensive telepresence systems and traditional room-based videoconference installations has reached its pinnacle. Enterprise videoconferencing infrastructure and endpoint hardware revenues are forecast to be relatively flat through 2020 -- growing slightly at a 2.1 percent CAGR -- according to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research. Software solutions are becoming a more popular choice, with the ability to extend existing infrastructure and endpoints and lessen the need for installing new permanent hardware. "With the current market focus on cloud computing and hardware virtualization, dedicated hardware sales will see little growth in all video delivery markets, including videoconferencing and telepresence hardware,” said Eric Abbruzzese, research analyst at ABI Research . According to the ABI asse...

The shift to cloud computing, the rise of open-source solutions and the ongoing adoption of hybrid cloud models will continue to change the dynamics of the global enterprise software market. Emerging applications with significant new compute and storage requirements, such as Big Data analytics, will most likely migrate to cloud service platforms. The shifting demand has a resulting effect on traditional software licence sales growth. International Data Corporation (IDC) released the latest forecast from the Worldwide Semi-annual Software Tracker. For 2014, the worldwide software market is forecast to grow 5.9 percent year over year in current US dollars (USD). In constant USD the growth rate has been revised to 5.7 percent -- that's down from the 6.2 percent year-over-year growth forecast in November 2013. IDC believes that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2013-2018 forecast period will remain close to 6 percent. Structured Data Management Software, Collabo...

According to the latest market study by ABI Research, as 3G and 4G mobile network deployment expands worldwide, and more enterprise employees adopt smartphones and media tablets, many ICT industry players are assessing the upside potential for mobile video collaboration services. Some consider this market to be primarily about video conferencing applications on the mobile device. However, the most immediate return on investment is likely gained when mobile video collaboration is used to support business processes -- particularly service operations. "For business operations support, there are over 500 million employees worldwide that could benefit from mobile video collaboration services. However, by 2017 less than 2 percent of these employees will generate service revenues, totaling about $500 million worldwide," said Dan Shey, enterprise practice director at ABI Research . The current low frequency of use creates much of the disparity between the size of the addressabl...

The time has come to think seriously about enterprise social networking and consider its role within the commercial online collaboration strategy development process, according to the latest market study by Ovum. In a new report, they say that the enterprise social networking market is starting to mature and is now moving from the introduction phase into the growth phase. Strategic acquisitions have already been made by start-ups and establish vendors alike. That being said, I'm still left wondering -- are there examples of substantive applications that make the resource investment worthwhile? "Ovum's current assessment of the enterprise social networking market indicates that Jive and Yammer are the two vendors that organizations are most eager to compare and contrast, but other vendors are generating significant business and revenues from their offerings," said Richard Edwards, analyst at Ovum . A recent vendor recap suggests that IBM Connections produced $1...