Business News Holding

Tag: idc

  • IDC: 450 Million Mobile Internet Users Worldwide in 2009, One Billion by 2013

    There were more than 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009, a number that is expected to more than double by the end of 2013, according to IDC.

    IDC’s Worldwide Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast finds that most popular online activities of mobile Internet users are similar to those of other Internet users: using search engines, reading news and sports information, downloading music and videos, and sending/receiving email and instant messages.

    Over the next four years, IDC expects some of the fastest growing applications for mobile Internet users will be making online purchases, participating in online communities, and creating blogs.

    Accessing online business applications and corporate email systems will also grow rapidly as businesses move to empower their mobile workforce.

    Highlights from IDC research include the following:

    • More than 1.6 billion devices worldwide were used to access the Internet in 2009, including PCs, mobile phones, and online videogame consoles.

    • China continues to have more Internet users than any other country, with 359 million in 2009. This number is expected to grow to 566 million by 2013. The United States had 261 million Internet users in 2009, a figure that will reach 280 million in 2013. India will have one of the fastest growing Internet populations, growing almost two-fold between 2009 and 2013.

    • Presently, the United States has far more total devices connected to the Internet than any other country. China, however, is the leader in in the number of mobile online devices with almost 85 million mobile devices connected to the Internet in 2009.

    • Worldwide, more than 624 million Internet users will make online purchases in 2009, totaling nearly $8 trillion (both business to business and business to consumer). By 2013, worldwide eCommerce transactions will be worth more than $16 trillion.

    • Worldwide spending on Internet advertising will total nearly $61 billion in 2009, which is slightly more than 10% of all ad spending across all media. This share is expected to reach almost 15%% by 2013 as Internet ad spending grows surpasses $100 billion worldwide.

    "With a wealth of information and services available from almost anywhere, Internet-connected mobile devices are reshaping the way we go about our personal and professional lives. With an explosion in applications for mobile devices underway, the next several years will witness another sea change in the way users interact with the Internet and further blur the lines between personal and professional," said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC.

  • IDC: EMC Led The Overall Storage Software Market in Q3

    According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced another decline in year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2009 with revenues of $2.87 billion, representing –7.9% growth over the same quarter one year ago, but a 1.2% growth from the previous quarter.

    IDC report shows EMC led the overall market with 23.4% revenue share in the third quarter of 2009. Symantec held onto the second position with 17.8% revenue share, while IBM finished in the third position with 12.2% revenue share.

    NetApp finished in the fourth position with 7.6% revenue share while CA rounded out the top 5 with 3.9 revenue share.

    For the second quarter in a row, only two of the top 5 vendors displayed a positive growth over the previous quarter. EMC and IBM displayed positive growth rates of 5.7%, and 6.9% respectively, while Symantec, NetApp, and CA each had negative growth rates from the previous quarter of –2.1%, –8.9%, and –3% respectively.

    “Two out of the top three vendors in the data protection and recovery market grew sequentially (IBM and EMC) while the leader Symantec declined at 1.2%,” said Michael Margossian, research analyst, Storage Software at IDC.

    Symantec is still the market leader with 31.1% market share, and IBM and EMC having 14.1% and 12.8% market share respectively.

    EMC regain the top spot in the replication market, with 10.7% growth over 2Q09, while NetApp declined 10.1%.

    “The storage software market was barely able to maintain a positive sequential growth rate in the third quarter of 2009,” concluded Margossian.

  • Research: Bringing Cloud into the Datacenter Transformation

    “Datacenter transformation is a stark reality facing most customers in the Asia/Pacific region,” says IDC.

    Based on its recent datacenter research, the ageing and somewhat inefficient datacenters that were built seven-ten years ago are struggling to keep up with the current technology – leading to high operational costs, poor utilization levels and increasing complexity.

    “However – the report says – the current economic environment has led many CxOs to mandate CAPEX restrictions, which has forced CIOs to look for ways they can do more with the same.”

    Datacenter transformation is a broader discussion than cost and capacity, and one which aims at building an IT architecture that is more agile and adaptive for the business. IDC states that this need is driven by the increasing pervasiveness of IT, which is driving businesses to use the same or even more IT than before- even when the IT budgets are not expanding.

    “This has caused a dilemma for the CIO, and they are forced to think about new ways to build their IT fabric such that its more elastic, flexible and agile,” the company says.

    IDC says it has discussed this type of IT within the scope of what we called as the dynamic IT infrastructure.

    However, transforming the current IT complexities to reduce the rigidity has been an arduous task for most IT heads, and one that they have continued to battle with over the past few years. The arrival of cloud computing has revived the hopes of CIOs to consider a new way of attacking this old problem, as IDC claims.

    IDC believes that over the next few years, we will see increasing interest in cloud computing from organizations. But these organizations will have to start planning on building a more dynamic IT framework as a precursor.

    According to the research, this is especially true for enterprises that are considering to build their own private or internal clouds. The current chaotic IT environment with its complexities and redundancies will pose a huge challenge in migration, and indeed this has left many CIOs stumped about where to even start.

    "There is a lot of pent-up demand for revamping and building new datacenters that have been postponed due to the ongoing recession" says Avneesh Saxena, Group Vice President for Domain Research at IDC Asia/Pacific.

    "Meanwhile the demand for IT has not gone down and CIOs worry about coping with the turnaround as and when it comes through. This has to lead to the emergence of a adaptive and elastic IT framework – whether inside or outside the organization," he added.

  • Transformational Impact of Server Virtualization on IT Infrastructure

    A recent IDC survey investigating server virtualization deployments in various organizations reveals that the technology is transforming server, storage, and networking infrastructure and even more so the way their datacenters are and will be built and managed.

    "The accelerated adoption of virtualization is making the technology a crucial factor, changing buying behavior and deployments of customers throughout Europe," said Nathaniel Martinez, program director for IDC’s European Enterprise Servers group.

    According to him, customers are not only rapidly exploiting new and emerging virtualization functions such as high availability and VM mobility, they are also slowly adapting their infrastructure to virtualization requirements.

    “This in turn drives the acquisition of richer configured servers, expansion in fiber channel SANs, increased spending on iSCSI-based storage, and a boost in NAS adoption in large hosting environments," Martinez added.

    The survey also suggests that many users are pushing their virtual server environments to the limits, which is causing several problems, such as virtual server sprawl and storage I/O bottlenecks.

    22% of all survey respondents claim to have had I/O problems within the past six months and this number jumps to 40% of respondents that fit into the early adopter category.

    "Costs are obviously an important factor, but many storage administrators are looking for ways to ensure that storage supporting virtual server environments can meet current and future performance needs," said Eric Sheppard, program director for IDC’s European Storage service.

    The study, Status of x86 virtualization in European Organizations is based on a survey conducted among current server virtualization users in the U.K., Germany, and France.

  • Sohu Selects 3Com's H3C For Next-Generation Data Center


    3Com is to build a next-generation data center for Sohu, one of China’s premiere online community destinations.

    Sohu made its decision after a two-month field test of 3Com’s recently launched H3C data center solutions — including the S12500 Series core switch line and the S5800 Series 10-gigabit switch series.

    Sun Dehe, vice president of the H3C network product line, said Sohu was impressed with the performance levels and reliability the data center network products’ unified architecture delivered.

    He said the first third-generation interactive Chinese search engine launched by Sohu requires:

    • a data center platform that can support storage of 10 billion Web pages
    • a Web page update and rating system
    • high-performance, concurrent access to and from numerous server clusters
    • flexible expansion in years ahead

    Dehe said that since a traditional data center architecture could not meet these requirements, Sohu decided to utilize the H3C next-generation data center architecture for its new Internet data center (IDC) equipment room.

    "H3C had a long-term plan in mind when it began developing its next-generation data center solutions for enterprise customers," he said.

    "For example, our unified switching architecture enables users to more easily design future-oriented applications – a characteristic required of Sohu’s data center.

    "We believe more customers will adopt H3C next-generation data center solutions to take advantage of this and other technological breakthroughs to maximize the efficiency and performance of their data centers."