Business News Holding

Tag: market-data

  • HDTVs in More than Half of All U.S. Homes

    A recent Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) report shows strong growth over the past year in HDTV ownership.

    In 2009, 53 percent of total U.S. households report owning a high definition television, an 18 percentage point increase in ownership over 2008, when 35 percent of households reported owning an HDTV (23 percent in 2007). Among HDTV set owners, 69 percent now subscribe to high definition service, compared to 56 percent a year ago.

    Ownership of large screen televisions –32 inches and larger – has also seen solid growth. In 2009, 59 percent of households owned one, up from 52 percent in 2008 (44 percent in 2007).

    The CTAM tracking study also took a look at recent movers and which technologies they are likely to purchase and services they’re likely to subscribe to over the next year. Movers are more likely than non-movers to buy an HDTV set (26 percent vs. 15 percent), a laptop (24 percent vs. 16 percent), and a video game system (23 percent vs. 7 percent); as well as subscribe to HD programming service (15 percent vs. 8 percent) and DVR service (17 percent vs. 7 percent).

    In 2009, digital cable market penetration was 34 percent, satellite was 28 percent, and telephone company penetration was 6 percent. Overall, cable has 53 percent of the market.

    “Cable continues to be the preferred provider for television services. Cable launched the digital tier well after satellite started selling an all-digital service, yet its customer numbers surpass those of the combined DBS companies,” said CTAM President and CEO Char Beales.

  • 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."

  • US Blu-ray and HDTV Households Growing


    Blu-ray Disc player household penetration is up to 12.3 million in the US for the first quarter of 2009, a 71 per cent gain year over year, according to a survey.

    Research firm Centris also found that the number of American households with an HDTV is up to 50.5 million – a gain of 33 per cent from the first quarter of 2008.

    Both satellite and cable industries appear to have matured, however, with satellite subscribers up only slightly to 32 million and cable subscribers mostly unchanged at just less than 63 million.

    Centris’ US Communications and Entertainment report also notes large year over year gains in household penetration for all three next generation gaming systems: 15.2 million for the Nintendo Wii (up 85%), 11.4 million for Xbox 360 (up 28%) and 7 million for PlayStation 3 (up 52%).

    Centris president William Beaumont said that as with its previous research findings, there are several key observable trends as technology developments, marketing programs and the economy take their toll on the industries in which our clients compete.

    "In some areas, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in consumer use of home technology, which flies in the face of what one might expect in this economic landscape," he said.

  • Seagate Loses $81m in Q2, Ships 40.6 million HDDs


    Seagate reported a loss of USD $81 million on revenue of $2.35 billion for the second quarter of this year.

    Despite the poor results, the company said it is seeing signs that the storage market is improving and it is making progress toward returning to sustained GAAP profitability as soon as possible.

    Seagate said it shipped 40.6 million hard drives during the quarter and a total of 163.8 million units for the fiscal year ended on July 3, 2009.

    Revenue for the year was revenue of USD $9.8 billion, the net loss was $3.1 billion.

    Steve Luczo, Seagate’s CEO, said the overall organizational, operational, technical and product progress made during the last six months is reflected in the company’s financial results for the June quarter.

    "We are also seeing signs that the storage markets are improving and are providing better visibility into the demand environment," he said.

    Steve Luczo, Seagate’s CEO

    "Our approach to the September quarter with respect to our production volumes and product mix is to continue to manage our factories with an intense focus on maximizing our return on invested capital while satisfying our customers’ requirements."

    The company remains cautious on its business outlook and mentioned that it is difficult to predict product demand and other related matters.

    For the September quarter, the company is planning for the overall industry demand for disk drives to be between 135 and 140 million units.

  • Iron Mountain Unveils First UK Cloud-Based File Archiving Customer


    Iron Mountain Digital has announced that it has signed its first European customer for its recently launched Virtual File Store service.

    The provider of STorage-as-a-Service (STaaS) for backup and archiving’s Virtual File Store solution is an enterprise-class cloud-based data archiving service designed to help companies reduce the costs of storing and managing inactive data.

    Iain Douglas, IT director at multinational IT security company Integralis, said they chose Virtual File Store due to its proven ability to achieve efficiencies for businesses.

    "Integralis has experienced exponential growth in internal data generation and is currently storing 3.5 terabytes of data on its system," he said.

    "We have worked with Iron Mountain Digital over the past two years to help us manage this growth, and solutions such as Iron Mountain’s automated, online LiveVault server backup solution have helped us to ensure that more control and flexibility of access to data has been achieved for our IT department."

    Douglas said that by piloting, and now taking on the Virtual File Store service, they had not only been able to maintain the high levels of flexibility and accessibility to theirs data but also to make cost efficiencies as inactive data can now be stored in the cloud.

    "This service complements our mixture of server and tape based backup perfectly and has allowed us to gain a lot more control over our information," he said.

    Integralis currently uses the Virtual File Store solution to store inactive data and Iron Mountain’s LiveVault server backup and recovery solution to protect its active operational data.

    With the Virtual File Store service in place, Integralis anticipate a 30 per cent reduction in storage spend in the future.

    In particular, the company has found that specifically by combining LiveVault and Virtual File Storage services, significant cost efficiencies can be made to the business.

    "We use three other services from Iron Mountain Digital and now with the addition of Virtual File Store, it’s the missing link in their portfolio," said Douglas.

    Integralis currently combines Iron Mountain Digital’s Connected Backup for PC, Connected Backup for Server and LiveVault server backup and recovery solution for protecting and managing its information.

    Richard Ellis, manager of the UK & Ireland’s direct and channel business at Iron Mountain Digital said: "We are delighted to announce Integralis as our first European customer to use the Virtual File Store service.

    "After an audit, Integralis had 20 percent of its records marked as ‘inactive’ which was a huge area where cost savings could be made.

    "The Virtual File Store solution allows Integralis to store vital, yet inactive records safely and still have on-demand access to them whilst reducing costs."

  • HSBC Fined $5.2 Million in UK for Data Loss


    Three units of HSBC Group have been fined GBP 3.185 million (USD $5.2 million) by Britain’s financial regulator for failing to protect consumer data from loss or theft.

    The Financial Services Authority (FSA) said all three firms had been warned by HSBC Group Insurance’s compliance team about the need for robust data security controls in July 2007.

    But in February 2008 an unencrypted CD containing the details of 180,000 policy holders was lost in the post.

    The FSA said HSBC Life UK Ltd was fined GBP 1.61 million, HSBC Actuaries and Consultants Ltd was fined GBP 875,000 and HSBC Insurance Brokers Ltd was fined GBP 700,000.

    HSBC said that no clients had reported losses as a result of these failures.

    It said it found that large amounts of unencrypted customer data had been sent by post or courier to third parties.

    Confidential information about customers was left on open shelves or in unlocked cabinets, and staff were not given sufficient training on identifying and managing risks like identity theft, the regulator said.

    Margaret Cole, the agency’s director of enforcement, said all three firms failed their customers by being careless with personal details which could have ended up in the hands of criminals.

    "It is also worrying that increasing awareness around the importance of keeping personal information safe and the dangers of fraud did not prompt the firms to do more to protect their customers’ details," she said.

    The largest previous fine for data protection failures was the GBP 1.26 million pounds assessed against Norwich Union.

    HSBC said it had contacted customers who were potentially affected, and said 33,500 employees had received data protection training.

    "We hold ourselves to the highest standards, but it is clear that in these instances we have fallen short, which we sincerely regret," said Clive Bannister, group managing director of HSBC Insurance.

  • EMC Q2 Results Better Than Expected, Completes Data Domain Acquisition


    EMC has reported a slight increase in revenue last quarter and provided an optimistic forecast for the second half of the year.

    The announcement came as it completed the USD $2.1 billion acquisition of data deduplication specialist Data Domain.

    The company said that IT budgets have stabilized and customers are more confident about their visibility.

    It reported net income of USD $205.2 million on revenue of USD $3.26 billion, down 11 per cent from a year ago.

    On the revenue front, EMC now projects 2009 sales of USD $13.8 billion compared with previous estimates of $13.5 billion.

    Data Domain, whose acquisition closed today, will contribute USD $200 million in revenue for 2009 and will be neutral to non-GAAP earnings.

    Meanwhile, third quarter revenue is expected to rise 2 to 3 per cent sequentially excluding Data Domain results. Data Domain’s inclusion results in sequential growth of four to five per cent.

    EMC CEO, Joe Tucci, said that EMC expects the company to generate double-digit revenue growth rates.

    "when IT markets resume to a more normal spending rate," he added.

    Meanwhile, the fate of EMC’s current data deduplication partner, Quantum Corp., remains unclear after EMC executives avoided mentioning the firm during the earnings call.

    To most industry watchers, the writing seems to be on the wall for Quantum.

  • Skype Users Rise by 37m, Revenues up 25% in Q2


    Skype’s subscriber base just keeps on climbing, with another 37 million people added in the second quarter – taking the total year-to-date increase to 75 million.

    Growing subscribers also means growing revenues and the VoIP company saw Q2 revenue jump 25 per cent year-over-year to USD $170 million.

    The Skype figures were contained within parent company eBay’s financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2009.

    Its news was not quite so good. The ecommerce company posted second quarter revenue of USD $2.10 billion, a $97.7 million year-over-year decrease.

    The year-over-year revenue growth of PayPal and Skype was offset by the effects of the stronger dollar and a modest decline in the Marketplaces business.

    Another healthy quarter of growth under its belt will do no harms to Skype’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) price as eBay prepares to take the VoIP company public in early 2010.

    Provided the P2P technology lawsuit gets settled first.

  • VOD Viewing Jumps 15% in June


    The number of people watching video-on-demand (VOD) programming in the US surged in June – fuelled by rises in the popularity of pay-per-view content and more children taking advantage of free programming, according to Rentrak.

    The increases made June the most-viewed month for video-on-demand this year, delivering more than 589 million transactions.

    According to Rentrak’s OnDemand Essentials service, year-to-year comparison for the month of June delivered a 15 per cent increase in overall VOD transactions and a 16 per cent increase in the number of unique set top boxes (STBs) accessing OnDemand.

    Additionally, free-on-demand (FOD) Kids content was up 7 per cent from May figures and delivered its strongest month of the year with more than 106 million transactions.

    June is historically a strong month for transactional-on-demand (TOD) viewing, and TOD continued this trend by delivering the highest number of transactions in a single month so far this year for the category.

  • Handset Vendors Eye Russian Smartphone-based Navigation Market


    More than a third of Russian consumers are interested in a smartphone-based navigation device – while nearly 63 per cent are willing to pay more than euro 4 per month for a vehicle tracking service based on a GPS-enabled smartphone.

    These are among the findings of research by Frost & Sullivan which also showed that global positioning system (GPS)-enabled smartphone technology is gaining ground over traditional portable navigation devices (PND) in the Russian navigation and telematics market.

    So much so that in 2009, the smartphone-based navigation market has already exceeded 350,000 units sold in Russia, while the PND market has failed to register even half that amount.

    The analysts conclude that the results indicate that firms must define a clear strategy – positioning products, services and business models around the ever-converging GPS-enabled mobile handsets market in order to expand telematics and navigation into the Russian market.

    The report says that Russian consumers’ desirability and willingness to pay for connected navigation, location-based services and features, finds that the Russian navigation market saw unit sales of 0.45 million in 2008, and will likely reach 2.0 million in 2012.

    This shift is attributable to exponential growth in the GPS-enabled, smartphone-based navigation market and to steady growth in the PND market.

    Praveen Chandrasekar, Frost & Sullivan programme manager, said: "Handset vendors like HTC, Nokia, and Apple are propelling the navigation market in a new direction by pushing more GPS-enabled smartphones into the Russian market.

    "In 2008 the balance shifted more towards the handsets-enabled navigation market rather than PNDs."

    Chandrasekar said this trend clearly shows that this market needs to be addressed with a smartphone-based portfolio in order to succeed.

    Eight out of ten current owners of navigation systems in Russia want to purchase another navigation system within six months.

    Of these, 49 per cent still prefer a PND, but a growing 30 per cent favour a smartphone-based navigation system.

    Russian consumers are willing to pay upwards of euro 100 for a smartphone-based navigation solution.

    In light of the current recession, this solution could clearly prove to be the low-cost killer alternative.

    The economic crisis has put a damper in consumer spending habits in Russia. Although Russian consumers indicate that they are willing to pay upwards of euro 300 for a navigation device, they might not necessarily be ready to do so in this economic climate.

    Chandrasekar said the recession has come at the "wrong time".

    "The navigation market, driven by GPS- enabled smartphones and PND, was on an upswing.

    "However, consumers are increasingly cautious and this might slowdown market development."