Here is my collection of trends and predictions for year 2014:
It seems that PC market is not recovering in 2014. IDC is forecasting that the technology channel will buy in around 34 million fewer PCs this year than last. It seem that things aren’t going to improve any time soon (down, down, down until 2017?). There will be no let-up on any front, with desktops and portables predicted to decline in both the mature and emerging markets. Perhaps the chief concern for future PC demand is a lack of reasons to replace an older system: PC usage has not moved significantly beyond consumption and productivity tasks to differentiate PCs from other devices. As a result, PC lifespan continue to increase. Death of the Desktop article says that sadly for the traditional desktop, this is only a matter of time before its purpose expires and that it would be inevitable it will happen within this decade. (I expect that it will not completely disappear).
When the PC business is slowly decreasing, smartphone and table business will increase quickly. Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone: the mobile business is much bigger than the computer industry. There are now perhaps 3.5-4 billion mobile phones, replaced every two years, versus 1.7-1.8 billion PCs replaced every 5 years. Smartphones broke down that wall between those industries few years ago – suddenly tech companies could sell to an industry with $1.2 trillion annual revenue. Now you can sell more phones in a quarter than the PC industry sells in a year.
After some years we will end up with somewhere over 3bn smartphones in use on earth, almost double the number of PCs. There are perhaps 900m consumer PCs on earth, and maybe 800m corporate PCs. The consumer PCs are mostly shared and the corporate PCs locked down, and neither are really mobile. Those 3 billion smartphones will all be personal, and all mobile. Mobile browsing is set to overtake traditional desktop browsing in 2015. The smartphone revolution is changing how consumers use the Internet. This will influence web design.
The only PC sector that seems to have some growth is server side. Microservers & Cloud Computing to Drive Server Growth article says that increased demand for cloud computing and high-density microserver systems has brought the server market back from a state of decline. We’re seeing fairly significant change in the server market. According to the 2014 IC Market Drivers report, server unit shipment growth will increase in the next several years, thanks to purchases of new, cheaper microservers. The total server IC market is projected to rise by 3% in 2014 to $14.4 billion: multicore MPU segment for microservers and NAND flash memories for solid state drives are expected to see better numbers.
Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future’s flash, cache and cloud article tells that the flash is the tier for primary data; the stuff christened tier 0. Data that needs to be written out to a slower response store goes across a local network link to a cloud storage gateway and that holds the tier 1 nearline data in its cache. Never mind software-defined HYPE, 2014 will be the year of storage FRANKENPLIANCES article tells that more hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical. The only innovation is going to be around pricing and consumption models as vendors try to maintain margins. FCoE will continue to be a side-show and FC, like tape, will soldier on happily. NAS will continue to eat away at the block storage market and perhaps 2014 will be the year that object storage finally takes off.
IT managers are increasingly replacing servers with SaaS article says that cloud providers take on a bigger share of the servers as overall market starts declining. An in-house system is no longer the default for many companies. IT managers want to cut the number of servers they manage, or at least slow the growth, and they may be succeeding. IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers. The shift will slow the purchase of server sales to enterprise IT. Big cloud providers are more and more using their own designs instead of servers from big manufacturers. Data center consolidations are eliminating servers as well. For sure, IT managers are going to be managing physical servers for years to come. But, the number will be declining.
I hope that the IT business will start to grow this year as predicted. Information technology spends to increase next financial year according to N Chandrasekaran, chief executive and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest information technology (IT) services company. IDC predicts that IT consumption will increase next year to 5 per cent worldwide to $ 2.14 trillion. It is expected that the biggest opportunity will lie in the digital space: social, mobility, cloud and analytics. The gradual recovery of the economy in Europe will restore faith in business. Companies are re-imaging their business, keeping in mind changing digital trends.
The death of Windows XP will be on the new many times on the spring. There will be companies try to cash in with death of Windows XP: Microsoft’s plan for Windows XP support to end next spring, has received IT services providers as well as competitors to invest in their own services marketing. HP is peddling their customers Connected Backup 8.8 service to prevent data loss during migration. VMware is selling cloud desktop service. Google is wooing users to switch to ChromeOS system by making Chrome’s user interface familiar to wider audiences. The most effective way XP exploiting is the European defense giant EADS subsidiary of Arkoon, which promises support for XP users who do not want to or can not upgrade their systems.
There will be talk on what will be coming from Microsoft next year. Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch a series of updates in 2015 that could see major revisions for the Windows, Xbox, and Windows RT platforms. Microsoft’s wave of spring 2015 updates to its various Windows-based platforms has a codename: Threshold. If all goes according to early plans, Threshold will include updates to all three OS platforms (Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone).
Amateur programmers are becoming increasingly more prevalent in the IT landscape. A new IDC study has found that of the 18.5 million software developers in the world, about 7.5 million (roughly 40 percent) are “hobbyist developers,” which is what IDC calls people who write code even though it is not their primary occupation. The boom in hobbyist programmers should cheer computer literacy advocates.IDC estimates there are almost 29 million ICT-skilled workers in the world as we enter 2014, including 11 million professional developers.
The Challenge of Cross-language Interoperability will be more and more talked. Interfacing between languages will be increasingly important. You can no longer expect a nontrivial application to be written in a single language. With software becoming ever more complex and hardware less homogeneous, the likelihood of a single language being the correct tool for an entire program is lower than ever. The trend toward increased complexity in software shows no sign of abating, and modern hardware creates new challenges. Now, mobile phones are starting to appear with eight cores with the same ISA (instruction set architecture) but different speeds, some other streaming processors optimized for different workloads (DSPs, GPUs), and other specialized cores.
Just another new USB connector type will be pushed to market. Lightning strikes USB bosses: Next-gen ‘type C’ jacks will be reversible article tells that USB is to get a new, smaller connector that, like Apple’s proprietary Lightning jack, will be reversible. Designed to support both USB 3.1 and USB 2.0, the new connector, dubbed “Type C”, will be the same size as an existing micro USB 2.0 plug.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Releases New Tonga GPU, Lowers 8-core CPU To $229
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/09/02/1243232/amd-releases-new-tonga-gpu-lowers-8-core-cpu-to-229
AMD looks to continue addressing the mainstream PC enthusiast and gamer with a set of releases into two different component categories. First, today marks the launch of the Radeon R9 285 graphics card, a $250 option based on a brand new piece of silicon dubbed Tonga.
On the CPU side AMD has refreshed its FX product line with three new models (FX-8370, FX-8370e and FX-8320e)
Intel is already sampling 14nm parts these Vishera-based CPUs continue to be manufactured on GlobalFoundries’ 32nm process. The result is less than expected performance boosts and efficiency gains.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is that a 64-bit ARM Warrior in your pocket? Nope, it’s MIPS64
It’s just your Imagination: When two tribes go to war
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/02/mips_warrior_64_bit/
Chip designer Imagination Technologies today went public about its new processor design, the 64-bit MIPS Warrior I6400.
It’s an ambitious blueprint, aimed at car dashboards, digital TVs and tablets – the usual space for Imagination – all the way up to data center-grade compute, storage and networking kit. In other words, wherever arch-rival ARM is attempting to spread its limbs.
The I6400 CPU is pretty much a MIPS64-friendly version of the 32-bit Warrior P5600 that was talked up last fall, with a few extra features thrown in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How a new HTML element will make the Web faster
Today, the average size of a webpage is 1.7MB—1MB from images—but change is afoot.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/how-a-new-html-element-will-make-the-web-faster/
The Web is going to get faster in the very near future. And sadly, this is rare enough to be news.
The speed bump won’t be because our devices are getting faster, but they are. It won’t be because some giant company created something great, though they probably have. The Web will be getting faster very soon because a small group of developers saw a problem and decided to solve it for all of us.
That problem is images. As of August 2014, the size of the average page in the top 1,000 sites on the Web is 1.7MB. Images account for almost 1MB of that 1.7MB.
If you’ve got a nice fast fiber connection, that image payload isn’t such a big deal. But if you’re on a mobile network, that huge image payload is not just slowing you down, it’s using up your limited bandwidth. Depending on your mobile data plan, it may well be costing you money.
What makes that image payload doubly annoying when you’re using a mobile device is that you’re getting images intended for giant monitors loaded on a screen slightly bigger than your palm. It’s a waste of bandwidth delivering pixels most simply don’t need.
Web developers recognized this problem very early on in the growth of what was called the “mobile” Web back then. So more recently, a few of them banded together to do something developers have never done before—create a new HTML element.
Browsing the Web on your phone hasn’t always been what it is today. Even browsing on the first iPhone, one of the first phones with a real Web browser, was still pretty terrible.
Browsing on a small screen back then required constant tapping to zoom in on content optimized for much larger screens. Images took forever to load
These dedicated mobile URLs—often referred to as M-dot sites—typically lacked many features found on their “real” desktop counterparts. Often, sites didn’t even redirect properly, leaving you on the homepage when you wanted a specific article.
In 2010, Web developer Ethan Marcotte wrote a little article about something he called Responsive Web Design.
Marcotte suggested that with the proliferation of mobile devices and the pain of building dedicated M-dot sites, it might make more sense to embrace the inherently fluid nature of the Web. Instead, he argued, let’s build websites that were flexible. Marcotte envisioned sites that used relative widths to fit any screen and worked well no matter what device was accessing it.
Talk soon moved to lower-level solutions, including a new HTML element that might somehow get around the image prefetching problems in a way that JavaScript never would.
In the final proposal, what happens is Picture wraps an img tag. If the browser is too old to know what to make of a element, then it loads the fallback img tag. All the accessibility benefits remain since the alt attribute is still on the img element.
The Web only wins if browsers actually support a proposed standard. And at this time last year, no browser on the Web supported Picture.
While Firefox and Chrome both committed to supporting it, it might be years before it became a priority for either. Picture was little more than a nice theory.
The story of the Picture element isn’t just an interesting tale of Web developers working together to make the Web a better place. It’s also a glimpse at the future. The separation between those who build the Web and those who create Web standards is disappearing. The W3C’s community groups are growing, and sites like Move the Web Forward aim to help bridge the gap between developer ideas and standards bodies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How a new HTML element will make the Web faster
Today, the average size of a webpage is 1.7MB—1MB from images—but change is afoot.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/how-a-new-html-element-will-make-the-web-faster/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish overclocked world record
AMD says that its 8 core FX-8370 processor has been overclocked to a new world record: The Stilt” accelerated processor clock frequency to 8722.78 MHz. The chip was manufactured in 32-nanometer process and designed for 4 GHz operation.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1731:suomalainen-ylikellotti-maailmanennatyksen&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Firefox 32 Arrives With New HTTP Cache, Public Key Pinning Support
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/09/02/2139238/firefox-32-arrives-with-new-http-cache-public-key-pinning-support
Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 32 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include a new HTTP cache for improved performance, public key pinning support, and easy language switching on Android.
Tomi Engdahl says:
You have your Windows in my Linux
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/you-have-your-windows-in-my-linux-249483
Ultimately, the schism over systemd could lead to a separation of desktop and server distros, or Linux server admins moving to FreeBSD
I’ve seen many declarations of victory for systemd, now that Red Hat has forced it into the enterprise with the release of RHEL 7. I don’t think it’s that easy.
Yes, we saw systemd rise in Fedora, and we knew it was going to be part of RHEL 7. We saw systemd’s inclusion in Ubuntu and Debian, and that was that — for a certain segment of the Linux user base. The rest of us who run big Linux-based services and application stacks on CentOS and RHEL were possibly derelict in not speaking out about our disdain for systemd before these developments came to pass. But it’s not too late to speak out.
I see one common thread in the heated discussions over systemd. The most vocal proponents of systemd seem to be singular desktop users, whereas server admins and architects lean the other way.
In another post, pro-systemd commenter Luya Tshimbalanga disparages runlevels as being “unclear.” He later says the basic 0,1,2,3,4,5,6 runlevels that have been part of every Unix derivative are somehow too complex. When asked to whom those runlevels are unclear, he states: “New generation of administrators and users”
I believe this thinking is pretty much in line with Microsoft’s train of thought back in the early 1990s. This is an end-user mindset — this has nothing to do with servers, and certainly not enterprise-level servers. This “learning is hard” mentality is very damaging for Linux as a service platform.
To pick another element out of the same comments, there’s suddenly an uptick in interest in FreeBSD. I’ve been a FreeBSD proponent for a long time, having run FreeBSD servers for two decades now. I’ve heard more than a few rumblings of veteran admins exploring the possibility of migrating services over to FreeBSD instead of Linux due to systemd, and I believe this idea may find more legs as time passes. Especially now with all the fervor over Docker, if suddenly people discovered what FreeBSD jails have long been able to do, it might trigger industrial-size changes.
It could very well be that the systemd schism results in a split along use-case lines — Linux gets the laptops, and FreeBSD gets the servers. Or perhaps we’ll see the rise of a new, pure Linux server distribution that jettisons systemd and the desktop element altogether
The beauty of Linux and open source software in general is that this would be a perfectly acceptable course of action, if all of the parts are played right.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Look out: The Far Eastern white-box boys are coming for EVERYONE
First the web barns, then enterprise servers, then storage. Be afraid – Gartner
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/09/03/odm_enterprise_servers_storage/
Far Eastern whitebox builders – the ones that have been eating into the market share of the branded server vendors they both build for and compete against – are set to move into new tech and customer segments.
The Original Design Manufacturers, the likes of Wistron and Compal Electronics, are delivering vast orders of custom built boxes for bit farms owned by web-services businesses at a relatively cheaper price point than normal branded server vendors can, by virtue of the lower cost resources they have access to.
More Reading
Server sales show signs of slight surgeHey cloud providers, HP wants your server biz back: Here’s one we made earlier in Far EastODMs a ‘threat’ to Euro server biz? Well, yes, says HP execInside Facebook’s engineering labs: Hardware heaven, HP hell – PICTURESBranded server vendors: Who ate our lunch?
This threat is already acknowledged by the world’s largest server seller HP, and it has widened a strategic alliance with Foxconn to build systems based on the specs and budgets demanded by likes of Facebook and Google.
Sales by these ODMs are forecast to represent 16 per cent of the global market in x86 units by 2018, equating to collective revenues of $4.6bn. This will account for 82 per cent service provider hyperscale spending in North America, Asia and Western Europe.
ODMs are “expanding their business scope to also include enterprises in the near term”
Most of the Far East manufacturers are already shipping storage (primarily internal) along with custom-built servers, said Mishra, and he warned storage vendors to beware of the looming threat on their patch.
“Open Stack storage solutions are slowly gaining traction with ODMs, which can disrupt the established external controller-based storage vendors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can ISO 29119 Software Testing “Standard” Really Be a Standard?
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/09/03/1411216/can-iso-29119-software-testing-standard-really-be-a-standard
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will soon publish part 4 of a 5 part series of software testing standards. According to the website, “ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 Software Testing is an internationally agreed set of standards for software testing that can be used within any software development life cycle or organisation.” However, many in the testing community are against it. Some wonder how the ISO/IEC/IEEE achieved consensus without their input.
Opponents of ISO 29119 have even started a petition aimed at suspending publication of the standard.
Comments:
In the late 80s and early 90s I was involved in 2 projects run under MIL SPEC 2167, which was supposed to ensure product quality. Both were epic disasters. IMHO, 2167 pretty much guaranteed mediocre at best software, taking 3x longer to do, at a cost at least 6x of non-2167
This sounds like the 21st century version of 2167.
MIL SPEC 2167, iirc, deals with documentation and deliverables. The actual software development process was “guidelined” by some other MIL SPEC. With that said, those were supposed to act as guidelines for a waterfall methodology (which surprisingly, it can actually be used in some contexts, or subverted into a spiral/iterative process.)
It’s just like CMM/CMMI – A CMMI level X or Y only indicates that, to some degree, an organization a) has a formal process, and b) follows such process.
It doesn’t indicate that the process is good – it doesn’t even guarantee that *it is not shit*.
First of all. I HATE WRITING UNIT TESTS!!! Know what I hate more? When I get bit in the ass because something that did work before stopped.
Unit testing is step one in any decent software development and I will never enter into or manage another project without unit tests being a critical component of the project. I’ll just hire a QA guy to unit test all my code… I don’t want to do it haha.
Second, there is absolutely nothing which can’t be automatically tested too. When you write code, GUI, Web, Command Line, message based, etc… An automated script to test the code is critical. There are tools for it.
Everything should be tested automatically… That even includes memory leaks when exiting. I would never hire someone even for a C#, Java, Python or even PHP position who doesn’t write code which cleans up properly after itself (even if that means correct use of the garbage collector).
I have worked on several multi-million line commercial applications, some with 500 million+ users. I have never seen a piece of code which could not be properly tested using the right tools. That can even include small embedded systems where we would have to actually implement a QEMU module or three.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Work in the tech industry? WAR in the Ukraine is coming to YOU
What weapon is more indiscriminate than bombing? SANCTIONS
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/04/russia_sanctions_and_western_tech_firms/
Anyone in tech who thinks that the conflict in Ukraine – which has been smoldering since the end of 2013 – is not their business should think again.
At the weekend Russia was given one week by European Union chiefs to reverse course in the Ukraine or face new sanctions.
The European chief of another major technology and systems supplier that competes with HP on PCs and servers, but who wished to remain anonymous, agreed. He told The Reg there’d been plenty of “rhetoric” from politicians but said his compliance staff hasn’t noticed any new details that change the way his business operates in Russia.
Analyst IDC has cut its forecast for IT spending in Russia. It now believes overall spending will fall by 0.3 per-cent in 2014 with tablets, PCs and high-end enterprise servers bearing the brunt.
But it’s difficult to conclude that EU and US trade restrictions are the root cause for Russia and her citizens’ decision to cut back. Rather, IDC says general pessimism is dampening IT spend in Russia.
“Business confidence is down, so businesses are delaying hardware upgrades and new projects,” IDC vice president Stephen Minton told us. “That was already the case, even before Ukraine, but recent events have just made things worse.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Somebody’s nightmare? I’m a veteran VNX array with a BADGE
A Lenovo badge, to be precise
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/04/lenovo_starts_selling_vnx_arrays/
Lenovo has started selling VNX arrays, adding a “VNX5150″ to its product line-up.
The VNX5100 is an entry-level SAN product that was effectively replaced by the block and file VNX5200 array in September last year. There is still a VNX5100 page on EMC’s website
The new box is branded the Lenovo|EMC VNX5150 and seems to be the previous VNX generation entry-level array gussied up in Lenovo branding and aimed at the SMB market. It supports “iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), and FCoE access for high-bandwidth and latency-sensitive block applications” from its 6Gbit/s SAS drives and 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drive bays.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is that a 64-bit ARM Warrior in your pocket? No, it’s MIPS64
Use your Imagination: When two tribes go to war
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/02/mips_warrior_64_bit/
Chip designer Imagination Technologies today went public about its new processor design – the 64-bit MIPS Warrior I6400.
It’s an ambitious blueprint, aimed at car dashboards, digital TVs and tablets – the usual space for Imagination – all the way up to data center-grade compute, storage and networking kit. In other words, wherever arch-rival ARM is attempting to spread its limbs.
The I6400 CPU is pretty much a MIPS64-friendly version of the 32-bit Warrior P5600 that was talked up last fall, with a few extra features thrown in.
For example, the I6400 has the simultaneous multithreading (SMT) seen in Imagination’s 32-bit Meta system-on-chip family: this technology essentially turns each physical core into two or four virtual cores. A hardware scheduler interleaves the virtual CPU threads into the processor’s execution queues, the meat grinders of the chip.
Where rival ARM’s shift from 32-bit ARMv7 to 64-bit ARMv8-a involved rewriting chunks of its instruction set and forcing some low-level engineers to learn a new assembly language, MIPS64 is basically MIPS32 with instructions for using 64-bit-wide data, and it runs MIPS32 code without a mode switch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The IT kit revolution’s OVER, say beancounters – but how do they know?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/03/worstall_weds_is_the_it_revolution_over/
One of the great problems within economics is in trying to work out what’s a structural change, what’s a cyclical change and what’s being buggered up just because you’re not measuring it properly.
This has some people, like Slate columnist David Autor, worrying that the white hot technology revolution that is computing is running out of steam.
The concern here is that we’ve done all the heavy investing in information processing that we’re ever going to do. We’ve had a structural change: modern companies must be IT-based. Now that we’ve managed that, from here on in IT spending will become more of a maintenance item than a breacher of new frontiers. But this development is bad for the future. Why? We’re pinning a lot of our hopes of being ever richer in the future on the idea that computing is going to create a goodly part of that wealth.
There was a vast amount of money wasted in dealing with Y2K, then we splurged way too much on dotcoms and it’s hardly surprising that we’re investing less in the wake of one of the largest recessions of modern times.
We’re all aware that different things change prices differently: IT equipment prices for a given performance level fall through the floor over time, while the cost of a haircut (a fixed performance level) increases over time. What’s perhaps less well known is that government statisticians desperately try to compensate for the improvement in tech capacity at the same price point. The year 2000′s $1,000 laptop is obviously a very different beast to the year 2014′s $1,000 laptop.
A Worstall Warning
Is it a structural change? Cyclical? Is it just moving our numbers from one definition to another without really changing the underlying spend?
I dunno.A Worstall Warning
Is it a structural change? Cyclical? Is it just moving our numbers from one definition to another without really changing the underlying spend?
I dunno.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel says NO MORE BLOOD PENTIUMS by 2016
Chipzilla plots roadmap for conflict-free metals policy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/03/intel_says_conflictfree_transition_set_for_2016/
Intel has set 2016 as the deadline for its transition to a 100 per cent conflict-free product line.
Under the plan, Chipzilla will look to receive gold, tantalum, tungsten, and tin only from those smelting facilities that it has certified as taking materials exclusively from ethically-mined sources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft gears up to mass produce large-screen touch displays
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-gears-up-to-mass-produce-large-screen-touch-displays-7000033257/
Summary: Two years after buying Perceptive Pixel, Microsoft is gearing up to start mass-producing large-screen touch devices.
Microsoft purchased PPI in July 2012 for an undisclosed amount. PPI’s large-screen touch displays originally sold in the $80,000 range. But Microsoft execs said they were exploring ways to make the displays more affordable. (The 55-inch PPI flat-panel display currently sells for about $7,500 via various retailers/resellers.)
As part of Microsoft’s July 2013 reorg, the PPI team was moved under the Devices team, now under Elop. But other teams across the company, including the unified Operating Systems Group, are engaged in work around making the touch- and pen-enabled interface on these devices more useful and more in-line with the “One Windows” work happening across the company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung could give virtual reality the kick in the pants it needs
http://www.cnet.com/news/samsungs-work-with-oculus-could-give-vr-the-kick-in-the-pants-it-needs/
While Oculus has been the pioneer in virtual reality, Samsung’s Gear VR, which uses Oculus software, could bring VR to the masses.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Future Fueled by Phablets – Worldwide Phablet Shipments to Surpass Portable PCs in 2014 and Tablets by 2015, According to IDC
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25077914
FRAMINGHAM, Mass. September 3, 2014 – According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker, worldwide phablet shipments (smartphones with screen sizes from 5.5 to less than 7 inches) will reach 175 million units worldwide in 2014, passing the 170 million portable PCs expected to ship during the same period. Next year, total phablet volumes will top 318 million units, surpassing the 233 million tablets forecast to ship in 2015.
While phablets are a relatively new category of device, first picking up volume in 2012
the growth of smaller, 7 inch tablets has begun to slow. IDC expects more consumers to shift back toward larger-sized tablets with their next purchase. However, that trend hasn’t made up for the decreased shipments of smaller sizes, which has resulted in lower overall expectations for the tablet market in 2014 and beyond.
As the Smart Connected Device market matures, and emerging markets drive more of the growth, the percentage of the market made up of phablets plus regular smartphones is expected to increase.
In 2014 IDC expects smartphones to represent about 70% of the total market. By 2018 that will grow to 75.6%.
While consumers in places like the United States and Western Europe are likely to own a combination of PCs, tablets, and smartphones, in many places the smartphone — regardless of size — will be the one connected device of choice. Dropping average selling prices (ASPs) for phablets and smartphones will help drive this trend.
“Clearly, mobile computing is a space where consumers are still trying to figure out what mix of devices and screen sizes will suit them best,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Super Cheap Windows Devices Emerge At IFA
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323761&
Asus, Acer, and Toshiba announce some of the most affordable Windows devices ever at the IFA trade show in Berlin, with prices as low as $120. Is the user experience up to snuff?
Earlier this year, in an effort to bring down the prices of Windows devices and battle competition from budget-friendly Chromebooks, Microsoft introduced free and low-cost licenses for OEMs. Last month, HP introduced its $199 Stream laptop, one of a small number of devices produced under Microsoft’s new effort. Microsoft’s budget party got a little bigger this week at the IFA trade show in Berlin, where Asus, Acer, and Toshiba announced some of the most affordable Windows devices ever to hit the market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Kind of CIOs Will Millennials Make?
http://www.cio.com/article/2601741/leadership-management/what-kind-of-cios-will-millennials-make.html
Remember the adage, ‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’? You can bet millennials don’t. In fact, they like the energy of startups run by young people like themselves, according to a recent survey. Expect the CIO of the future to take a much different approach to tech decisions.
As millennials flood the workplace, climb corporate ladders and spread throughout the four corners of a company, they will eventually take on positions of leadership in marketing, human resources, finance, sales and IT. They’ll gain more influence inside an organization, along with purchasing power over technology.
What kinds of decisions will they make?
“They’ll probably look at different vendors if they think somebody is getting stale, if they feel like they’re not getting creative ideas,” says Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA. “If something is not working out, if they’re not being treated the way they want to be treated, then they’ll move. That’s not just for the products they buy, but the jobs they’re in.”
Millennials – born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s – are 80 million strong in the United States, according to CompTIA. By 2025, millennials will make up as much as 75 percent of the U.S. IT workforce, as some 40 percent of IT workers retire in the next 10 to 12 years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gee, everyone who wants a tablet has a tablet. Waiddaminute….
…There’s one group of people who can’t swallow their tablets. Now there’s an AARP for that
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/05/intel_elderly_tablet/
Perhaps looking to open a new niche for tablets in the wake of stagnating sales, Intel is teaming up with the American Association for Retired People (AARP) to make a tablet for the elderly.
Chipzilla said its Android KitKat (version 4.4) RealPad fogy-slab will sport a stripped-down user interface and troubleshooting software for technologically illiterate users.
AARP wanted a device that would be easy for older people unfamiliar with modern gear to set up, use and maintain. Along with the troubleshooting software and user support service, the companies are bundling the RealPad with 10 tutorial videos stored onboard.
“Our members have frequently expressed that the complexity, frustration and headaches of using technology just aren’t worth the trouble,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
WordPress 4.0 is here, complete with one-click upgrade process
Don’t relax yet, sysadmins, there’s still a chance for some big messes here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/05/wordpress_40_is_here_complete_with_oneclick_upgrade_process/
WordPress 4.0 has landed, which is kind of a big deal seeing as the blogging/content management software runs around 60 million websites.
As ever, users can upgrade with a single click should they choose to do so. Those who host their own WordPress installations will need to backup both the database and the content they’ve created before hitting the button.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Baidu Builds Largest Computer Brain for Online Queries
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-04/baidu-builds-largest-computer-brain-for-online-queries.html
Baidu Inc. is building the world’s largest and most powerful computer cluster to improve image recognition as online queries move away from text.
With about 100 billion digitally simulated neural connections, Baidu’s computing cluster will be 100 times more powerful than the 2012 Google Inc. project dubbed “Google Brain,” Andrew Ng, chief scientist at the operator of China’s biggest search engine, said in an interview yesterday. Engineers at a Baidu lab in Silicon Valley are designing the project, which will be built in Beijing and completed in about six months, according to Ng.
Tomi Engdahl says:
he Korean Samsung has been successful Android-based devices. Now the company has moved to multi-function printer on the same platform.
New Smart Multi Xpress series was introduced at a time of ten new machine. They are combined with the operating system Android.
Devices have been planted 10.1-inch touch screen, through which all displayed on the screen can be printed. When this tablet is normal browsers, email clients, and map applications, they can be printed directly from the tablet screen.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1741:samsung-siirsi-tulostimensakin-androidiin&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
IFA2014: Cheap Windows tablets will kill the Surface
Berlin started in the IFA trade fair will present a broad range of new consumer electronics. An interesting novelty equipment group consists of cheap Windows tablets, which have become available in each of these vehicles.
Asus, Acer and Toshiba presented its own Windows-novelty, the cheapest of which is already paying less than 100 euros. Asus EeeBookissa price tag is $ 199, or just over 151 euros. The Acer Iconia W costs 150 dollars, 115 euros, and the Toshiba Mini Encore gets 120 bucks, or just over 90 euros.
Cheaper price is based on the Atom processor, but above all to the fact that Microsoft currently licenses its Windows operating system free of small screen devices. It is estimated that the new cheap tablets will therefore get rid of 30 euro “Windows tax”.
The new Windows tablets will compete primarily with the Google Chromebook. The recording is both cloud-based and the prices are now close to each other.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1740:ifa2014-halvat-windows-tabletit-tappavat-surfacen&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Virtual Reality Expands Into the World of Rollercoasters with ‘The Augmented Thrill Ride Project’
http://hackaday.com/2014/09/04/virtual-reality-expands-into-the-world-of-rollercoasters-with-the-augmented-thrill-ride-project/
A rollercoaster company in Germany called Mack Rides joined forces with a team of virtual reality developers in the spring of 2014 to create an experience like no other.
The idea came from [Thomas], a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern who was working in the department of Virtual Design at the time. The thought of extending a real rollercoaster ride with an Oculus Rift was an intriguing one, so he approached Mack Rides with the experiment, and the ground-breaking research began.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung laptop withdraw from the Finnish market: “We focus on mobile”
Samsung announces its withdrawal from the Nordic Council of laptop on the market. The company’s Swedish Communications Erik Juhlin says that Samsung will thus correspond to market demand.
At the same time Samsung withdraws Chromebook-laptops on the market.
“This means, of course, that at the moment we focus on the mobile with our products, such as flat screen computers and smart phones,”
HP, in turn, believes in the Chromebook. The company has just announced a 14-inch ultra-slim device that will be sold in Finland in October.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/kaikki_uutiset/samsung+vetaytyy+suomen+lapparimarkkinoilta+quotkeskitymme+mobiiliinquot/a1009362
Tomi Engdahl says:
You know what Cisco needs? A server SAN strategy
So squawks the Vulture storage desk
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/05/cisco_needs_server_san_strategy/
Cisco has no SAN/filer legacy to escape from and, in a storage world where the hyper-converged server/storage/networking system is only getting trendier, it has a major opportunity on its hands.
Consider the mainstream storage vendors – Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HP, IBM and NetApp – their storage product line heartland is the shared, networked array. Taking advantage of the server SAN technology – where scale-out clusters of servers use their own direct-attached storage to construct a server SAN – means escaping from their shared storage legacy.
Much of the tech titans’ server SAN product development and marketing energy will be devoted towards protecting their shared storage array business and not cannibalising it.
This array business is under attack from new technology designs centred on all-flash arrays (Kaminario, Pure Storage, Violin Memory) and hybrid flash/disk arrays (Nimble, Tegile, Tintri). All the mainstreamers have entries in these product areas as well.
Cisco has an entry in one: all-flash arrays, with its Invicta product.
Tomi Engdahl says:
We’re not on the Gartner Magic Quadrant? Just imagine our concern, says HDS
Magicians might want to rethink what goes in their cauldron, maybe
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/03/hds_slaps_gartner_magic_quadrant_flash_array_not_listed/
Facing up to exclusion from Gartner’s all-flash array Magic Quadrant, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has come out fighting.
HDS ships an all-flash array (AFA) in the form of Hitachi Accelerated Flash Modules inside its VSP array, thus gaining access to all its VSP data management features. Yet this falls foul of Gartner’s AFA definition rule for Magic Quadrant consideration; the AFA must be a standalone AFA.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Webcast follow-up: HP makes the case for convergence
Moonshot on the launchpad
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/05/virtualisation_convergence/
One of the things that surprised many in our recent Regcast on converged infrastructure (CI) was the claim by HP’s Clive Freeman that hardware optimisation for well-defined workloads far outstrips the performance you would get for the same price using software optimisation on a standard platform.
HP’s internal data concentrates on Moonshot, the company’s new range of ultra high-density, low-power servers.
There are 45 Moonshot cartridges in a 4.3U chassis and each cartridge has either one or four servers, depending on the model. Each server consumes 10W.
HP refers to Moonshot as “software-defined servers”: the software load defines the specialised cartridge you choose. HP plans specialised systems for applications such as big data or desktop virtualisation across its entire range of converged systems.
The internal research shows that Moonshot’s low-power servers, based on Intel Atom or AMD Opteron CPUs, require 89 per cent less energy, 80 per cent less space and 77 per cent less cost than generic servers.
But this is not a general rule: HP anticipates that the market is for 19 per cent of the volume servers that will be sold between now and 2016.
What workloads can benefit? Converged systems are useful if you can define a predictable, specific workload or type of workloads. Optimising the hardware for these workloads, say the advocates of converged systems, offers both performance and management advantages.
Converged architecture is not so useful for compute-intensive apps or virtualisation
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell Demos 5K Display
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/09/05/174214/dell-demos-5k-display
Even though 4k displays are just making their way into consumer affordability, manufacturers are already pushing beyond. Dell has previewed a computer monitor it calls a “5k” display. The resolution is 5120×2880, stuffing 14,745,600 pixels on a 27″ screen.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Size matters – how else could Dell squeeze 15 million pixels into this 27″ 5K monitor?
With redesigned Latitudes and OptiPlexes to plug into it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/06/new_dell_5k_monitor_and_stuff/
When it comes to pixel size, monitor designers boast about who has the smallest. The new Dell UltraSharp 27-inch display has the smallest of the lot.
The ultra HD 5K monitor is the world’s first screen with a 5120 x 2880 pixel resolution. That’s 218 pixels per inch. That may sound a way off the LG G3 phone which offers 534 PPI, but there is a huge difference between a high resolution on a 5.5-inch screen you hold close to your face and a desktop display.
With 14.7 million pixels, there is a lot of data to move around, and it will be a challenge for anything but the most powerful graphics cards as it has almost twice as many pixels as a 4K screen. The monitor has dual DisplayPort 1.2 sockets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Munich Will Stick With Linux
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/09/05/1711243/why-munich-will-stick-with-linux
“There are many solved problems in open source. Groupware is not one of them,”
He calls out a few newly elected politicians that don’t like the current set-up, but says that thousands of users don’t have the same experience.
an upgrade is underway now. And, the solution they chose is agnostic to the desktop platform and will service LiMux and Windows alike.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can this free software company secure the future of Linux for the city of Munich?
https://opensource.com/government/14/9/kolab-for-city-munich
. For one, Outlook will never be the client for the Linux desktop. And, the web is a good answer for a lot of things, but not all.
The city of Munich is another good case to look at; they successfully completed a Linux migration that has saved them millions of Euros. But now, the newly elected mayor and his deputy have made the news by publicly considering a migration back to Windows. To explore this further, let’s first ignore for a moment that the City Council would need to approve any change in strategy and has renewed its dedication to LiMux. Let’s also ignore the fact that the City employees do not consider it a good idea to go back to Windows.
So, what was it that prompted LiMux to be put into question in the news?
If you guessed that Office interoperatbility may have something to do with it, you would be right. As long as there are competing standards there will be incompatibility between the dominant vendor and the rest of the market. Document exchange remains a constant issue that is ultimately only solved at the political level. This particular problem is not technical and the UK has recently demonstrated that they will choose open documents as the standard format to deal with it.
The other main criticism with their use of LiMux was the lack of an integrated groupware system. Until today, the city of Munich is using the same stand-alone calendaring and email systems it had used when it was still fully operating on Windows. Updating these systems had a lower priority than the migration to LiMux then. But an upgrade is underway now.
In other words: The very problem used to criticise the LiMux desktop is already being solved. By Kolab, the same collaboration solution used for over 10 years at the German Federal Agency for IT Security (BSI). It’s particular strength? The ability to service highly heterogeneous environments in a secure, scalable, and controlled fashion. As the only groupware solution on the market with a true native client that is available for Windows and Linux,
Tomi Engdahl says:
LLVM 3.5 Brings C++1y Improvements, Unified 64-bit ARM Backend
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/09/05/2045218/llvm-35-brings-c1y-improvements-unified-64-bit-arm-backend
LLVM 3.5 along with Clang 3.5 are now available for download.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LLVM 3.5 Is Finally Available For Download
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4MDk
LLVM 3.5 brings many new features ranging from better support of new C++ standards to improved back-end compiler targets. Benchmarks on conventional x86_64 Linux targets have shown LLVM/Clang 3.5 performing well but the in-development GCC 5.0 still performing better.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Micron eyes Sandisk with 128GB Lexar microSD card
One big micro SD and a dual input thumb drive
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2363775/micron-eyes-sandisk-with-128gb-lexar-microsd-card
MICRON HAS ANNOUNCED two storage devices aimed at the mobile market.
The 128GB Lexar High Performance microSDXC UHS-I card rather explains itself in the name. The Class 10 drive comes with a USB 3.0 adapter for fast transfers between devices, and claims 633x transfer speeds, equivalent to 95MB per second.
128GB is enough to capture 15 hours of HD quality video.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IFA: Intel launches 14nm fanless Core M processor for 2-in-1 devices
Promises to ‘reinvent the notebook’
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2362935/ifa-intel-launches-14nm-fanless-core-m-processor-for-2-in-1-devices
BERLIN: INTEL LAUNCHED its first fanless chip family based on 14nm architecture, named Intel Core M, at the IFA German trade show on Friday.
Previously codenamed Broadwell-Y, the dual-core 14nm Intel Core M chip boasts 1.3 billion transistors on a die size of 82mm and promises to “reinvent the notebook”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IT Job Hiring Slumps
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/09/06/0613235/it-job-hiring-slumps
“The IT job hiring bump earlier this year wasn’t sustained in July and August, when numbers slumped considerably, InfoWorld reports. ‘So much for the light at the end of the IT jobs tunnel.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IDC: Hard drive market is shrinking due to cloud shift
Four of the five big vendors show falling demand
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2363694/idc-hard-drive-market-is-shrinking-due-to-cloud-shift
HARD DISK STORAGE sales are almost at a standstill, according to recent figures that show just 0.3 percent growth, most of it in emerging markets.
The International Data Corp (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, which reports statistics on purchases of hard drives, has shown revenues falling 1.4 percent year on year to $5.9bn in the second quarter, as more homes and businesses move from local hard drives and onsite servers to centralised cloud storage.
“High-end storage sales fell for the fourth consecutive quarter in 2Q14,”
Of the top five suppliers, only HP showed any growth, with a nudge of 0.4 percent in the right direction compared with the biggest loser, Hitachi, which lost 12 percent year on year.
In total, 11.5 exabytes of storage were shipped during the quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Core M Puts PC Back on Map
New 14nm processor for 2-in-1s could soar x86
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323785&
With traditional deskside PCs on the decline and laptops being refreshed less and less often, Intel is setting out on a plan to revitalize x86 CPU sales with its Core M processor being announced today at the IFA (Consumer Electronics Unlimited, Berlin, Germany). Intel’s strategy, says Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, is to provide the Core M (code-named Broadwell Y) processor to 2-in-1 makers giving them up to a 700 percent performance boost over aging PCs and laptops, while consuming only 25 percent of their power.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The unstoppable TI-84 Plus: How an outdated calculator still holds a monopoly on classrooms
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/09/02/the-unstoppable-ti-84-plus-how-an-outdated-calculator-still-holds-a-monopoly-on-classrooms/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oracle’s MySQL buy a ‘fiasco’ says Dovecot man Mikko Linnanmäki
The first rule of open source club: don’t sell to Oracle if you want to live
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/03/oracles_mysql_buy_a_fiasco_says_dovecot_man_mikko_linnanmki/
A co-founder of the widely-used IMAP server Dovecot has outlined his three rules for open source success, in terms Larry Ellison may not enjoy.
“The first rule is don’t sell your company to Oracle if you want to keep your product alive,” he told World Hosting Day in Singapore yesterday.
“The second rule is also don’t sell sell your company to Oracle.”
Linnanmäki’s remarks were, of course, made in reference to Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL, a transaction he feels was a “fiasco” but has turned out “not that bad because the only one suffering is Oracle.”
Which brings us to his third law, namely that the open source community routes around obstacles and re-groups on the other side.
“Most of the main MySQL developers are doing MariaDB based on the open source version of MySQL,” he observed. “The community is moving to MariaDB. They are back on the good side.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s official: Vendors are NOT shifting that networked storage
EMC still top dog, reckons IDC’s tracker as woes spread from high-end to mid-range
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/08/idc_tracks_storage_market_downwards/
IDC’s second 2014 quarter storage tracker shows networked storage array revenues fell for the second quarter in a row, with both high-end and mid-range array sales affected. It marks 12 months of high-end storage revenue decline.
The tracker looks at networked arrays (external-controller-based storage) and also the total disk storage market (internal and external controller-based storage).
Network storage factory revenues of to $5.9bn saw a 1.4 per cent decline from the second 2013 quarter to the second 2014 quarter. Conversely, total disk storage revenues for the quarter were $7.8bn, 0.3 per cent higher than a year ago.
This IDC finding supports a view that server SANS, all-flash storage and cloud storage are eating into networked disk storage array sales.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IDC: Hard drive market is shrinking due to cloud shift
Four of the five big vendors show falling demand
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2363694/idc-hard-drive-market-is-shrinking-due-to-cloud-shift
Tomi Engdahl says:
GSOC Project Works To Emulate Systemd For OpenBSD
http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/14/09/08/0250207/gsoc-project-works-to-emulate-systemd-for-openbsd
Through a Google Summer of Code project this year was work to emulate systemd on OpenBSD. Upstream systemd remains uninterested in supporting non-Linux platforms so a student developer has taken to implementing the APIs of important systemd components so that they translate into native systemd calls.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is the all-flash data centre just a tantalising dream?
The real picture
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/08/datacentre_flash/
An all-flash data centre? It’s an intriguing idea. The hardware and software components may be there, but what about the business case, including the overall price/performance and total cost of ownership?
Yes, such a data centre will be free of power-gobbling and rack space-consuming spinning disk enclosures, bringing consequent savings in cooling, but storing data bits in NAND costs more than writing them onto disk-platter recording media.
Let’s look at where flash can realistically substitute for disk in data centres and where it cannot, moving from high-access rate and latency-sensitive applications to low-access rate ones – the spectrum from in-memory to offline data, in other words.
With data that is high value and needed very fast, flash is replacing performance disk – 15,000rpm and increasingly 10,000rpm drives at the moment. It is starting to appear as DIMM-connected flash, using the CPU memory bus and providing the lowest latency access outside of DRAM, meaning roughly 5-10µs write latency.
NAND is also appearing on PCIe-connected flash cards, with Fusion-io as the perceived market leader. Access latency is in the 75μs area, say seven times slower than flash DIMMs.
A server using disk instead of DIMM or PCIe flash would have data-access latency of 5-10 milliseconds, which is about 1,000 times longer than DIMM flash and 100 times longer than PCIe flash.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is SanDisk about to become the big daddy of enterprise flash?
El Reg takes a detailed look at runners and riders for the storage crown
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/04/sandisk_set_for_flash_stardom/
The hottest enterprise flash products company these days is SanDisk, and it has a great chance of becoming the most important non-volatile memory supplier of all – the EMC of enterprise flash.
SanDisk’s competitors are not well enough equipped in terms of technology, focus, channels and market footprint to match SanDisk in its capabilities and prospects.
They consist of:
Intel
Micron
Samsung
Seagate
SK Hynix
Toshiba
WD’s HGST
Why, in my view, are these competitors in a worse position than SanDisk?
Tomi Engdahl says:
UK server market is BACK… to business as usual
Revenues get that sinking feeling again, down 8% to $460m
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/09/08/uk_server_q2/
Call it a slide, a slump – whatever the preferred adjective – it was back to business as usual for the downbeat UK server market in Q2 as those dratted big iron systems tumbled off the edge of a cliff again.
Not every vendor had a tough time, but overall factory revenues declined eight per cent year-on-year in dollar terms to $460m, polarised by a 25 per cent hike in x86 systems to $380m and a 60 per cent non-ex86 crash.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Climbing Aboard the 3rd Platform
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2458700/data-centerlimbing-aboard-the-3rd-platform/data-center/climbing-aboard-the-3rd-platform.html
Recent news from IBM and Microsoft highlight the upheavals underway as the technology industry rapidly transitions to new realities.
IBM announced that profits were up even as revenue was down as it continues to shift away from hardware business lines and tries “to convert the future of technology into an opportunity rather than a threat.” Microsoft announced its largest layoff ever as it continues to “become more agile and move faster” toward cloud and mobile hardware!
These upheavals are due to the forces propelling mobile, social, cloud and big data into what IDC labels the 3rd Platform, “the emerging platform for growth and innovation.”
“The 3rd Platform will deliver the next generation of competitive advantage apps and services that will significantly disrupt market leaders in virtually every industry,” IDC seer Frank Gens said, in laying out the firm’s predictions for 2014, late last year.
When long-time nemeses Apple and IBM climb into bed you know the ground is shaking!
With access to cloud infrastructure and other resources, new companies can be created almost overnight – the advantages of size that large, established companies used to rely on have greatly diminished. Everybody needs to be more agile, more flexible and willing to sacrifice proprietary advantages when customers demand adherence to open standards.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Midyear jobs outlook: What to know about IT hiring, skills, benefits
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2456470/careersidyear-jobs-outlook-what-to-know-about-it-h/careers/midyear-jobs-outlook-what-to-know-about-it-hiring-skills-benefits.html
Companies in hiring mode say there’s a shortage of tech talent, while IT pros are upping their expectations for pay and benefits. Overall, the midyear jobs outlook is positive for IT pros.
Finding talent: Challenging
Among the CIOs polled by RHT, 61% said it’s somewhat or very challenging to find skilled IT professionals. The areas where it’s hardest to find skilled talent are applications development (cited by 17%), networking (17%) and security (12%). When asked which skills sets are in greatest demand within their IT departments, CIOs called out network administration (57%), database management (52%), and desktop support (52%).