Digital Lifescapes

Hybrid IT deployments continue to gain favor with CIOs and CTOs, but cloud computing will now drive a greater share of the ongoing investment in business technology. Those combined platforms are enabling digital transformation projects across the globe. Total spending on IT infrastructure products for deployment in cloud environments reached a total of $46.5 billion in 2017, with year-over-year growth of 20.9 percent, according to the latest worldwide market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Cloud Infrastructure Market Development Public cloud data centers will account for 65.3 percent of this spending, growing at the annual rate of 26.2 percent over the IDC forecast period. Hosted off-premises private cloud environments will represent 13 percent of cloud IT infrastructure spending, growing at 12.7 percent year-over-year. On-premises private clouds will account for 62.6 percent of spending on private cloud IT infrastructure, and will grow 11.5 percent year-over-yea...

The Internet is a collection of interconnected networks. It was designed to enable a computer or device connected to one of these networks to access information and services from any computer or device connected to any of the other networks. While the Internet is often abstracted as a cloud -- and may seem somewhat virtual or intangible to its users -- it relies on networks, facilities, and equipment including billions of discrete devices connected by millions of miles of telecommunication cabling, plus a vast array of other equipment. Investment in these networks, facilities, and equipment is incurred by a wide range of market participants -- Internet Backbone Providers, Internet Access Providers, Content and Application Providers, and a range of specialized service providers all invest in the networks that have come together as the Public Internet. According to the latest market study by Analysys Mason, Internet content and application providers invest over $30 billion per annu...

The market for computer server disk storage systems has had its ups and downs. The current downward trend is partly due to the effective use of virtualization software and the adoption of public cloud computing services -- whereby, the resulting IT operational efficiency has the effect of reducing hardware demand. Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues fell -5.2% year over year to $5.6 billion during the first quarter of 2014 (1Q14), according to the latest global market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). For the quarter, the total (internal plus external) disk storage systems market generated $7.3 billion in revenue, representing a decrease of -6.9 percent from the prior year's first quarter and a sequential decline of -17 percent compared to the seasonally stronger 4Q13. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped was 9.9 exabytes, growing just 19.9 percent year over year. "The poor results of the first quarter were driven by several fac...

Virtualization and the shift to cloud computing continue to refocus market demand. Revenue in the worldwide server market decreased -2.2 percent year over year to $10.9 billion in the first quarter of 2014 (1Q14), according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). This is the fifth consecutive quarter that the server market has experienced a year-over-year decline in worldwide revenue. Server unit shipments improved 2.1 percent year over year in 1Q14 to 2.1 million units as investments in hyperscale datacenter capacity were largely offset by consolidation, which continued to be a strategic focus for many large and small customers around the globe. On a year-over-year basis, volume systems experienced 3.9 percent revenue growth. This was the fourth consecutive quarter that volume system demand increased year over year.  At the same time, demand for midrange and high-end systems experienced year-over-year revenue declines of -4.8 percent and -25.6 pe...

As more people adopt using mobile internet access on a regular basis, broadband service providers continue to build-out their infrastructure to support the increase in predictable network traffic. Other related infrastructure investment is being aligned with anticipated market demand. ABI Research finds IMS Core Network deployments are edging up as mobile network operators put the necessary infrastructure and capacity in place for planned 2014 VoLTE launches. Spending for the core network products (HSS, CSC, Media Controllers and Gateways, MSF, IBCF, SBC and P-CSCF) integral to a functioning IMS network will reach $4 billion by 2017. "We see increasing IMS Core Network revenues through 2017, after which IMS revenues will flatten and reflect capacity expansion," said Joe Hoffman, research director at ABI Research . IMS spending for mobile 4G markets follows the LTE deployments, as mobile network operators seek to get their network coverage in place, stabilized, and com...

4G mobile broadband networks are launching fast and moving to a flat and distributed hierarchy. Dictated by performance needs, data management is moving closer to the network edge. According to the latest market study by ABI Research, this evolution of the mobile network -- from a centralized data center to a distributed architecture -- can be thought of as a data center without walls. The historical paradigm for mobile networks is the hierarchical and centralized core network. The advent of 3G and 4G mobile broadband greatly increases the data traffic to the IP Network and Internet point of presence. This gives rise to the specialist DPI and Optimization firms, such as Allot and Sandvine, who prosper with high performance, purpose built custom hardware that sits in the data stream for inspection and management. The major infrastructure vendors are stepping up their game by upgrading the performance of these functions in the Packet Data Network Gateway (PGW). The move to di...

It has always been predicted that small business expenditures on wireless communication services would someday exceed that of wireline voice communication. That day will happen in 2012 -- as wireless service offerings becomes the largest category of telecommunications spending for small businesses, according to the latest market study by In-Stat . Wireline data spending and cloud computing services round out the four high-growth spending categories. "Connectivity has become the life blood of business efforts, but it is particularly crucial to small businesses as many operate without a brick-and-mortar presence to customers," says Greg Potter at In-Stat. One can already see the strength of wireless in the 5-9 and 10-19 employee sub-segments. It is the 20-99 sub-segment, however, that will maintain the dominance of wireline voice through the end of this year. Additional insights from the latest market study include: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is set to gr...

The highly efficient approach that Google applies to storing and serving digital video content is apparently influencing the legacy video distribution value-chain to evolve. Proving once again, that necessity is the mother of invention -- particularly when meaningful new competition forces an industry to change. According to In-Stat , traditional Video-on-Demand (VoD) services, and their typical siloed video services currently use a great deal of proprietary -- or industry-specific (i.e. very expensive) -- equipment. They see traditional and pay-TV service providers migrating to more efficient Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and data center models based on server virtualization. In-Stat believes that this migration enables content portability and will have a direct impact on equipment vendors, service providers and content owners. Meaning, this will be disruptive to the legacy status-quo. "Increasing usage of over-the-top (OTT) Internet video is driving traditional TV service pro...

According to IDC, worldwide IT spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion, by 2012. As the cloud computing model offers an efficient way for businesses to acquire and use IT, IDC expects its adoption to be amplified by the cost-cutting needs of most organizations today. In a recent IDC survey conducted with 696 IT executives and CIOs across Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) to gather their views, understanding, current usage and planned usage of cloud computing, it was found that 11 percent of the respondents are already using cloud-based solutions. A further 41 percent of the respondents indicated that they are either evaluating cloud solutions for use in their businesses, or already piloting cloud solutions. When asked about their opinion of the current state of cloud computing, 17 percent of the respondents stated that although cloud computing is very promising, there are currently not enough services available to make it compelling. For IT vendors...

The datacenter network market reached $8.7 billion in 2007, up 17 percent from $7.6 billion in 2006, according to one of three new "Place in the Network" market studies published by IDC. The IDC study shows that the datacenter network continues to support strategic initiatives, including customer migrations to new virtualized dense computing in the datacenter. As a result, IDC predicts this market will continue to grow at a healthy 6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), reaching $11.9 billion in 2012. "The datacenter is in the midst of unprecedented change driven by a combination of factors all converging to make the datacenter a real-time responsive resource for organizations," said Lucinda Borovick, research vice president, Datacenter Networks. "Our research shows that the datacenter network has an important and unprecedented role to play in the datacenter of the future as infrastructure changes, such as multicore processors and server virtualization c...