Tag Archive for Gartner

RB | November 8, 2011
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Gartner’s Top Tech Trends For 2012

GartCrystal ballner VP David Cearley described their top ten strategic technology trends for 2012 to attendees of the Gartner Symposium IT/Expo. Gartner (IT) defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Here are Gartner’s top strategic technologies for 2012.

GartnerMedia tablets and beyond: Bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) at work has become the norm, not the exception.  By 2015 tablet shipments will reach around 50% of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google‘s (GOOG) Android and Apple’s (AAPL) iOS. The net result is that Microsoft‘s (MSFT) share of the client platform, be it PC, tablet or smartphone, will likely be reduced to 60% and it could fall below 50%, Mr. Cearley says.

iPadThe implication for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is one of a variety of environments IT will need to support. Gartner says it expects iOS/Android will dominate the market with 80% of tablets shipped by 2015. IT leaders need a managed diversity program to address multiple form factors, as well as employees bringing their own smartphones and tablet devices into the workplace.

Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces. User interfaces with windows, icons, menus, and pointers which have been in place for more than 20 years are changing. The UI will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces emphasizing touch, gesture, search, voice and video. Applications themselves are likely to shift to more focused and simple apps that can be assembled into more complex solutions. By 2015 half the applications that would be written as native apps in 2011 will instead be delivered as Web apps.

Internet of thingsInternet of Things: The Internet of Things (IoT) describes pervasive computing where cameras, sensors, microphones, image recognition, everything, is now part of the environment. In addition, increasingly intelligent devices create issues such as privacy concerns. Gartner says. Driver of the IoT are:

  • Near Field Communication (NFC) payments allows users to make payments by waving their mobile phone in front of a compatible reader.
  • Embedded sensors which detect and communicate changes are being built into an increasing number of places and objects.
  • Image Recognition technologies identify objects, people, buildings, places logos, etc. that has value to consumers and enterprises.

General storeApp Stores and Marketplaces: Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year with an enterprise focus. With enterprise app stores, the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support entrepreneurs. Enterprises should use a managed diversity approach to focus on app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value.

Big data Big Data: The size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery exceeds the capabilities of traditional data management technologies; Gartner says it requires the use of new technologies simply to manage the volume alone. One major implication of big data is that in the future users will not be able to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. Logical data warehouses bringing together information from multiple sources as needed will replace the single data warehouse model.

Cloud computingCloud Computing: This topic is still an important trend. It will become the next-generation battleground for the likes of Google and Amazon (AMZN). Going forward, enterprise IT will be concerned with developing hybrid private/public cloud apps, improving security and governance, Mr. Cearley says. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and SAP (SAP) all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years. As Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offering, and these traditional enterprise players expand offerings, users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase.

Enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. Hybrid cloud computing which brings together external public cloud services and internal private cloud services, as well as the capabilities to secure, manage and govern the entire cloud spectrum will be a major focus for 2012. From a security perspective new certification programs will be ready for initial trial, setting the stage for more secure cloud computing. On the private cloud front, IT will be challenged to bring operations and development groups closer together using “DevOps” concepts in order to approach the speed and efficiencies of public cloud service providers.

Other key predictions Gartner had included:

  • Contextual and Social User Experience: Context-aware computing uses information about an end-user to improve the quality of interaction and anticipates the user’s needs and proactively serves up the customized content. By 2015, 40% of the world’s smartphone users will opt in to context service providers that track their activities with Google, Microsoft, Nokia (NOK) and Apple continuously tracking daily activities Mr.Cearley says.

 

  • The growing use of flash memory for In-Memory Computing as a long-term technology trend that could have a disruptive impact comparable to that of cloud computing.
  • The adoption of Extreme Low-Energy Servers built on low-power processors typically used in mobile devices will increase for non-compute intensive workloads or delivery of static objects to a website. Gartner says that 10%-15% of enterprise workloads are good for this.
  • Next-Generation Analytics Gartner says o ver the next three years, analytics will mature from structured and simple data analyzed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types (text, video, etc.) from many systems.

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RB | August 25, 2010
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Acer Beats Dell

I recently wrote about the troubles at Dell. Here is more proof of the downturn at Dell.  BusinessInsider is reporting that Acer (LSE: ACID), the Taiwanese computer maker has posted another solid quarter of global PC sales, according to new data from Gartner.

The Asian and emerging markets drove Acer’s growth. It has also successfully ridden the explosion in netbook demand. The netbook market is drying up now, though thanks to Apple’s iPad. This could give Dell an opening, if it can execute well (a big if lately) and Taiwan based Acer has problems cracking the mainland China market.

Category: Hardware, PC | Tags: , , ,
RB | January 2, 2010
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Personal Laptops at Work?

CIO.com is reporting on a recent survey by Gartner which claims that 10% of a firms notebook computers are employee owned.  The research firm says that companies are starting to let employees use privately owned notebook computers for work purposes, according to a  survey of 500 IT managers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany and the IT managers said they expect that percentage to creep higher next year.

Gartner says that some employees like the trend because it means they can have more-powerful notebooks and newer designs than their companies’ IT departments provide. The survey found that 47% of workplaces have banned employee-owned PCs, 43% have policies that allow the use of employee-owned PCs for work-related purposes, and 10% have no policy on the matter.

Gartner believes this trend is popular with employers because of cost. When employees bring their own hardware to work, and the employer doesn’t pay for it or maintain it.

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Who was Gartner interviewing? What firm that is regulated ( SOX, PCI, HIPPA, etc.) would allow unknown  devices on their internal network. This trend needlessly exposes the company to malware and data theft risks. We encourage our clients to go in the opposite direction. We talk to them write and enforce policies to ban personal devices like USB drives and iPods for the data theft risk. We also suggest they get control of their remote access and private email on the corporate network.

This really seems to be a lax policy in this age of cyber-crime because privately-owned hardware could open the door for a hacker. What do you think?


Category: Policy, Security | Tags: ,
RB | December 9, 2009
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Which Anti-Malware is Best?

malwareIn a report release last month, AV-Comparatives compared the base performance of some of the top anti-malware products on the market. The objective of these tests was to identify how well antivirus scanners can detect new malware using their base functions, their proactive scanning and heuristics methods, without the advantage of downloading the latest signatures. Forcing a test without the latest virus signatures however, makes it possible to do an evaluation of the strength of the heuristic–or proactive, technology of the various anti-malware engines.

ArsTechnica summarizes the tests were two sets of malware: Set A, which contains malware from December 2007 to December 2008 (of which most products could detect over 97 percent), and Set B, which contained 1.6 million samples of malware collected between August 11, 2009 and August 17, 2009. This set included the following categories of malware: Trojans (69.5 percent), Backdoors/Bots (20.7 percent), Worms (6.1 percent), other malware (1.5 percent), and Windows viruses (0.4 percent).

Ars reported these proactive detection results (rounded to the nearest percent):

av-comp

After taking these results into consideration and adjusting for false positives, AV-Comparatives rated the security companies from best to worst in three categories:

  • Advanced+:
    • G DATA,
    • Kaspersky,
    • ESET,
    • F-Secure,
    • Microsoft,
    • Avast,
    • BitDefender,
    • eScan.
  • Advanced:
    • AVIRA,
    • AVG,
    • Symantec.
  • Standard:
    • McAfee,
    • TrustPort,
    • Sophos,
    • Norman,
    • Kingsoft.

In September of 2008 NetworkWorld reported on Gartner claims that enterprises are paying too much for security software. Gartner says vendors simply aren’t doing enough to keep up with the prevalence of threats on the Internet. Neil MacDonald, a research vice president at Gartner says that security vendors are “maintaining high profit margins on firewalls and antivirus software despite these products being nothing more than commodities.” NetworkWorld says that during his presentation at the Gartner’s 2008  IT Security Summit in London,  Mr. MacDonald was vociferous in his condemnation of how security products are actually increasing their prices over the years across a backdrop of lowered effectiveness, contradicting pricing schemes across the rest of the IT industry.  Security vendors have maintained a pricing scheme that contradicts the rest of the IT industry, MacDonald said. Typically with software or hardware, prices go down year after year with the introduction of new and better products. In some cases, however, security software often loses its effectiveness as new threats emerge, while prices stay high. “Why in antivirus year after year do we pay more for something that gives us less?” MacDonald asked. “It’s insanity. Why is information security immune from the trends of the IT industry?”

gartnerGartner recommends that firms use the commodity status of security software to their advantage, “I know it’s hard to switch but you have to seriously enter the negotiations,” MacDonald said. “Let the vendors know that you are not afraid to switch.”  And he recommends that buyers should aggressively negotiate for better prices.

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While the majority of malware writers are script kiddies with an affinity to making minor modifications to existing malware there are some very good black hat hackers out there that are not dummies.  These tests are important for buyers to understand which product’s core functionality is more efficient against new threats rather than rely on constant updates to augment their capabilities. In the face of new threats a superior heuristic capabilities is crucial to anti-malware software? The weekly, daily, or even multiple times a day, definitions updates are the lifeline of the anti-malware industry. The need for constant updates is what drives the annual payments for subscriptions.

Category: Malware, Security | Tags: ,
RB | October 30, 2009
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2010 Not Any Better – Maybe

recessionGartner says that IT spending experienced its worst year ever in 2009. The Stamford Connecticut research firm says the enterprise space saw a spending decline of 6.9 percent. ChannelInsider reports that the industry won’t reach 2008′s spending levels again until 2012 according to Gartner. In the mean time there will be some growth in 2010. Gartner projects a 3.3 percent increase over 2009 levels to $3.3 trillion.

“2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth,” says Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research, in a prepared statement. “For more than 50 percent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 percent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011.” On the other hand Forrester has a rosier picture. In their report released 10-08-09 “US and Global IT Outlook: Q3 2009“, Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels, says the global IT market will see an upturn, starting Q3 2009 in an article on Campus Technology.

According to Gartner things have been toughest on the hardware side of the computer market. Gartner says that worldwide computer hardware spending will total just $317 billion this year, a 16.5 percent decline, and in 2010 hardware spending will remain flat. Forrester says computer equipment sales will increase by 8.3 percent in 2010. Worldwide telecom spending is on pace to decline 4 percent this year and is forecast to grow by 3.2 percent in 2010 according to Gartner. Forrester claims communications equipment sales will show a bump at 3.6 percent

Additionally, Gartner forecasts IT services spending to total $781 billion in 2009 and to grow 4.5 percent in 2010.  In their report Forrester predicts IT consulting services will increase by 11.7 percent in 2010 Software spending will decline 2.1 percent in 2009, but is expected to grow by 4.8 percent in 2010. Forrester says software purchases will be up by 9.3 percent in 2010.

Three big trends will shape the IT spending and operational infrastructure in 2010, according to Gartner—a shift in IT budgets to more opex from capex, the ramifications of an older infrastructure made up of older IT hardware, and the need for IT to create business cases for spending.

Gartner says the shift from capital expenditure to operational expenditure in IT budgets will be accelerated by emerging cloud services and will make IT costs more scalable and elastic. The second trend comes from delays in computer hardware upgrades. As business has delayed buying servers, PCs and printers, and is expected to continue to keep wallets closed in 2010, they need to look at the impact of increased equipment failure rates. “Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3 percent of the global installed base. In 2010 it will be at least 2 million,” Gartner says.

“If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10 percent of the server installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement by 2011,” Sondergaard says. “That will impact enterprise risk. CFOs need to understand this dynamic, and it’s the responsibility of the CIO to convey this in a way the CFO understands.”

Third, Gartner says that IT needs to build compelling business cases, “2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.”

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From where I stand, the Gartner predictions seem more rational than Forrester’s. Forrester seems to basing their optimism on two fleeting factors, Obama-money and Microsoft. The only real beneficiaries of Obama-money has been Wall Street, not the rest of America, so stimulus spending is irrelevant to most American business. Forrester seems to believe that Windows 7 will save IT spending, another large leap of faith that businesses are going to jump on the bandwagon, but none of my clients seem ready to leap yet.

Category: Business, Recession | Tags: , , , ,
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