Business News Holding

Tag: market-data

  • NextGenTel Buys Tele2 Norge Broadband/VoIP Operations


    Norway’s second largest broadband supplier, NextGenTel, has bought the broadband and VOIP business of Tele2 Norway.

    The deal will strengthen NextGenTel’s position in the Norwegian market by adding 97,000 broadband subscriptions – of these 23,000 are VOIP subscriptions.

    It also brings with it technical assets and key supplier contracts.

    A subsidiary of TeliaSonera, NextGenTel is to pay NOK 100 million (approx. USD $15.5 million) for the business, cash and debt free.

    The acquisition requires the approval of the Norwegian Competition Authority.

    But once completed, NextGenTel’s market share on the ADSL market will increase from 15 per cent to approximately 22 per cent.

    Håkan Dahlström, president of broadband services at TeliaSonera, said that both the Tele2 national network and the customers’ equipment will be easily integrated with NextGenTel’s network.

    He said Tele2’s broadband and VOIP business is an attractive asset that will strengthen NextGenTel’s position in the Norwegian market.

    "The increased customer base will also result in improved capacity utilization of the network," he said.

  • IP Desktop Market Revenues to Decline Until 2011


    The IP telephony endpoint market will be affected by the economic downturn – despite the fact an increasing number of enterprises are recognizing the benefits of both IP desktop phones and enterprise soft clients.

    That’s the conclusion of Melanie Turek, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, which has just released its latest global study of the sector’s enterprise market.

    She says that IP desktop phones are rapidly proliferating in the enterprise, displacing their analog and digital predecessors.

    Today, this is largely due to declining prices and clear productivity benefits, according to Turek.

    "Last year, we anticipated that PC soft phones offered a natural transition to more sophisticated UC clients," she said in her No Jitter blog.

    Melanie Turek, principal analyst Frost & Sullivan

    "Today, we can confirm that this new generation of soft clients is quickly penetrating the market, often replacing their old counterparts."

    Turek said that thanks to the strong case around UC and the continued shift from hardware-based to software-based solutions, more telephony vendors are aggressively pursuing bundling strategies.

    This includes combining platforms, server software, advanced UC clients, and access to either a-la-carte or bundled applications.

    She said this has considerably boosted the penetration of enterprise soft clients such as PC desktop soft phones, advanced desktop UC clients, and mobile clients (FMC and UC).

    The world enterprise IP desktop phone market continued to grow in 2008, generating USD $2.57 billion in total revenues, a 3.1 per cent increase over 2007, according to the Frost & Sullivan report.

    Steady revenue decline is expected until the end of 2010, but the market is expected to gradually recover by 2011 and continue with a healthy growth pattern until at least 2015.

    Turek said the world enterprise IP soft client market has more than doubled its size, from 1.0 million units shipped in 2007, to almost 2.4 million clients in 2008.

    "This prominent increase in client shipments has been driven not so much by a swell of customer demand, but rather by the effective penetration strategies that many IP telephony providers have been implementing," she said.

    As a result, Frost & Sullivan estimates that less than 45 per cent of total enterprise soft clients shipped in 2008 are being used as a primary tool for voice communications.

    Although PC desktop softphone revenues are expected to considerably decrease over time as UC offerings penetrate the market, the higher profit margins granted by advanced UC clients and mobile FMC/UC clients are expected to largely offset this revenue decline.

  • China 3G Build Props Up Global Mobile Gear Market


    Huawei Technologies doubled its market share in the mobile network infrastructure market in the first quarter of 2009.

    The Chinese company’s success comes as domestic mobile operators prepare to spend over USD $20 billion this year on rolling out the initial phases of China’s 3G deployments.

    This has led to a record number of 3G base station shipments.

    However, while Huawei now occupies third position in the market, there appears to be little sign of cheer asides from the activity in China.

    A quarterly market report from Dell’Oro said the global mobile infrastructure market contracted by nine per cent in January-March compared to the same period a year ago.

    It said the GSM market experienced its largest year-over-year decline and without China’s 3G tenders in WCDMA and CDMA base station deployments, the market would have fallen further.

    Scott Siegler, senior analyst at Dell’Oro Group, said China Unicom’s WCDMA deployment is shaping up to be the single largest 3G deployment in history.

    He said it was the primary contributor to the most ever – 100 thousand – Node B shipments in the quarter.

    "With the CDMA market declining elsewhere around the world, China Telecom’s spending resulted in the most CDMA base station shipments in over four years," he said.

    "As the two GSM operators, China Mobile and China Telecom focused their spending on the rapid deployment of their 3G networks, spending on their GSM networks significantly declined.

    "We expect this spending to accelerate in the second half of the year."

    During the quarter, Huawei experienced the greatest rate of growth, almost doubling its share of the total infrastructure market to 15 cent compared to the same quarter last year.

    Meanwhile, market leader Ericsson increased its share slightly to 33 per cent of the market in January-March, while Nokia Siemens Networks dropped to 21 per cent from 24 per cent a year ago, according to Dell’Oro.

    Alcatel-Lucent saw its share fall to 14 per cent from 16 per cent.

    Even less fortunate was North American’s largest maker of telecommunications gear Nortel, which saw its market share halving to 4 per cent from a year ago.

    The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in US federal court and for creditor protection in Canada’s Ontario Superior Court of Justice in January.

    With the market expected to remain tight and extremely competitive, other’s could well be going down the same path.

  • NetApp Buys Data Domain For $1.5bn


    NetApp announced this week that it has agreed to buy data backup and disaster recovery systems provider Data Domain Inc. for USD $25 per share in cash and stock, or about USD $1.5 billion.

    The data storage company said it will operate Data Domain as a product line.

    The result should accelerated growth and market adoption, according to NetApp, since Data Domain has the distribution channels and global reach to offer its products to more customers.

    Data Domain’s board has unanimously approved the deal, which is expected to close in the next two to four months.

    On Wednesday, NetApp reported a drop in fiscal fourth-quarter profit as revenue declined amid the economic turmoil.

  • US HDTV Ownership Shoots Up


    A third (33.3%) of US households now have HDTVs, up from 19.3% a year ago, according to a Nielsen survey.

    However, only 28.8% of all US homes received HD programming as of February 2009.

    In January, In-Stat reported that more than 39 million US households have an HDTV set yet 43% – or 17 million – either don’t have or don’t watch HD content.

    The Nielsen findings also showed that the average household has 2.6 sets (2.0 SD sets; 0.5 HD).

    Among homes with HDTVs, the average is 3.0 sets (1.4 HD; 1.6 SD).

    Steve McGowan, Nielsen’s SVP of client research initiatives, said in a blog post the results showed that not since color TV was introduced more than 50 years ago has a new TV technology been so rapidly adopted.

    "And despite the recession, Americans seem willing to continue to spend their hard-earned money on this new technology," he said.

    Other Nielsen findings include:

    • HD penetration was greatest among Asian homes (41.8%) followed by white (34.3%), Hispanic (32.0%) and African-American homes (25.9%)
    • 62.7% of all HD sets in the U.S. were located in common areas
    • More than 75% of all tuning on HD sets happened in living rooms or other common areas
    • A higher percentage of HD sets (30.6%) were attached to video game consoles than were SD sets (19.9%)

  • Smartphone Sales Keep Growing As Mobile Market Suffers


    Smartphone sales grew 12.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2009 despite sharply falling sales of mobile phones generally – down 9.4 per cent year-on-year.

    Leading the charge in high-end device sales were RIM’s Blackberry handsets and Apple’s iPhone, along with a number of other touchscreen phones, according to research firm Gartner.

    Sales of RIM handsets totalled 7.23 million in Q1, or 19.9 per cent of the smartphone market, up from 13.3 per cent in the same period last year.

    Over the same period, the iPhone’s market share more than doubled from 5.3 per cent to 10.8 per cent, with sales of 3,94 million devices.

    The growth makes Apple the third-largest smartphone maker in the world and gives it twice as much share as HTC.

    Nokia remained the leading maker of smartphones in Q1 but saw its market share drop to 41.2 per cent from 45.1 in Q1 2008. It sold 14.99 million devices, up slightly from 14.58 million in the same period last year.

    The Finnish giant’s smartphone sales were helped by the introduction of its 5800 device into more regions.

    Nokia started shipping its 5800 touch screen smartphone at the end of 2008.

    Overall Smartphone sales were 36.4 million units, which accounted for 13.5 per cent of all mobile device sales in the first quarter of 2009 compared with 11 per cent in the first quarter of 2008.

    However, worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 269.1 million units in Q1 2009, a 9.4 per cent decrease from the first quarter of 2008.

    Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner, said the positive performances by RIM and Apple showed that services and applications are now instrumental to smartphones’ success.

    She said that much of the smartphone growth during the first quarter of 2009 was driven by touchscreen products, both in midtier and high-end devices.

    "Touch for the sake of touch was enough of a driver in the midtier space, but tighter integration with applications and services around music, mobile e-mail, and Internet browsing made the difference at the high end of the market," she said.

    Symbian accounted for 49.3 per cent of worldwide smartphone operating systems (OS) market share in the first quarter of 2009, but this was down from 56.9 per cent share in the first quarter of 2008.

    Nokia maintained its leading position in the overall mobile market, although its market share dropped to 36.2 per cent from 39.1 per cent a year earlier.

    Samsung’s market share rose 4.7 percentage points to 19.1 per cent and Gartner said the announcement of its first Android-based product, the i7500, will help Samsung in a highly competitive second half of 2009.

    LG’s market share increased slightly to 9.9 per cent, with the company benefitting from a very strong portfolio of touchscreen, messaging and imaging devices.

    Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner, said there are some signs of a recovery in markets such as North America and China.

    But she said that overall sales in the first quarter of 2009 registered the biggest quarter-on-quarter contraction since Gartner began monitoring the market on a quarterly basis in 2001.

    "This was also the first time the market contracted year over year during the first quarter, a period traditionally helped by strong seasonality in the Asia/Pacific market," she said.

  • Smartphone Market Will Remain Buoyant in 2009


    Lee Williams, chief of the Symbian Foundation, is confident that sales of smartphones will remain buoyant with growth of 12-15 per cent in 2009.

    While his forecast falls short of some estimates which predict 30 per cent increases, it underlines the growing confidence felt in the smartphone sector of the mobile market.

    This is expected to be boosted with the launch of the Palm Pre on June 6th – and the scene is all set for what is likely to be an exciting summer for the smartphone industry.

    Speaking at the Reuters Global Technology summit in Paris earlier this week, Williams said larger display sizes and more memory for media such as music were also encouraging consumers to buy smartphones.

    "For the first time people are realizing you don’t have to carry your digital camera with you and your phone, for the first time people are realizing that you can do your email and access Internet services on your mobile phone," he said.

    Williams’ comments were echoed by Frank Esser chief executive of France’s second-largest mobile operator SFR.

    He said the company was seeing strong demand for smartphones.

    This growth, couple with the contractions taking place in the wider mobile market, will see smartphones becoming increasingly widespread as mass market devices.

    A report just published shows that smartphone sales grew 12.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2009 despite sharply fallings sales of mobile phones generally – down 9.4 per cent year-on-year.

    Sehat Sutardja, chief executive of Marvell Technology, said smartphones will make up half of the mobile phone market in the next few years.

    He predicted multimedia-enabled smartphones will account for at least 50 per cent of all mobile phones in the next three to four years, and grow even more popular in the following years.

    "Smartphones today are only addressing the tip of the pyramid," he told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York.

    "I would say in the next three to four years, at least 50 per cent of the market will move to smartphones."

    Sutardja said this could grow to 90 per cent in six to seven years.

  • Green Datacenter Regulations Concern For Corporate Strategies


    Senior datacentre professionals in Europe are increasingly concerned about the potential impact of green regulations on corporate datacenters, according to a survey.

    A similar study carried out in the US found that significant shifts have occurred over the past 12 months in datacenter strategies – but concern for regulation is a major driver in 2009.

    The findings in Europe and the US came from two studies carried out on behalf of datacentre provider Digital Realty Trust.

    In Europe, the independent survey of senior datacentre professionals revealed heightened concerns about government regulation in the datacentre industry.

    Nearly 70 per cent of companies surveyed reported that they are extremely concerned or very concerned with the potential impact of Green regulations on data centres.

    Jim Smith, CTO of Digital Realty Trust, said the survey clearly showed a high level of concern about the impact of Green regulations on datacentre facilities.

    "While the new Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) regulations in the EU address a number of questions about the new rules, new concerns about how companies will achieve compliance have arisen," he said.

    "That uncertainty is reflected in these results in terms of how the new rules will impact operations, finance and customer relations."

    Those taking part in the survey were restricted to a minimum of director level in IT, MIS, IS or finance and they needed to represent companies with either EURO 500M or GBP 500M annual revenues or 2,500 plus employees.

    They also had to be responsible for managing a datacentre, implementing a new datacentre, executing contracts for a new datacentre or expanding existing datacentres. The survey was concluded at the end of March by Campos Research.

    Other findings from the European study include:

    • 60 per cent of surveyed companies now have Green datacentre strategies in place
    • Over half (57 per cent) felt there was now a clear definition of what constitutes a Green datacentre
    • Energy efficiency is viewed as the key criteria for a Green datacentre
    • While many mention a Green strategy as a factor in choosing a datacentre provider, no company emerges as a Green leader in the survey
    • Among companies that have a Green datacentre strategy, the qualities they are looking for in datacentre providers include:                           –

                               – Knowledge of current regulations and emerging Green standards

                               – Experience building facilities with LEED or BREEAM certification
                               – The ability to meet ISO 14001 and Green Grid standards
    • More than half (55%) would reject a provider with no Green strategy

    While energy efficiency was seen as the dominant characteristic of a Green datacentre, recycled materials, carbon issues and transportation were nearly equally important to those surveyed, who also included targeted cooling, efficient UPS and metering equipment among their "wish list".

    ISO 14001 and Green Grid were thought to be the leading standards for certifying a Green datacentre.

    Companies who have already adopted a Green strategy said that the most important goal of their strategy was in reducing energy costs, but other benefits including climate change, customer image, cost of compliance and updating datacentres were also important.

    Despite the challenges facing the global economy, 58 per cent of respondents had increased their focus on Green initiatives and 69 percent revealed that carbon credits were part of their strategy.

    The US study showed that concern for regulation is a major driver for green datacenter efforts in 2009.

    The survey indicates that significant shifts have occurred over the past 12 months in corporate green datacenter strategies.

    It, too, was based on a detailed survey of senior decision makers at large US corporations who are responsible for their companies’ datacenter and green IT strategies.

    Smith said that what dominated last year’s study was the need for clearer standards and best practices for green datacenters.

    "There has been significant progress in that area over the past year, including the publication of green datacenter case studies by industry leaders, the development of green building standards specifically for datacenters, and widespread efforts to educate datacenter professionals on the practical application of that information," he said.

    "We’re not there yet, but progress has been made, which is reflected in this survey.

    "By contrast, what dominates this year’s study is companies’ concerns about potential government regulation and how that would impact datacenter operations."

    Key findings of the US study include:

    • 69 per cent of survey participants said they were extremely or very concerned about government regulation.
    • 81 per cent of survey participants said that carbon credits are now part of their green IT strategy – compared to only 18 per cent in 2008.
    • 53 per cent said that the industry now has a clear definition of what makes a datacenter green, compared to 82 percent in the 2008 survey who said that there was no clear definition.
    • 73 per cent of survey participants identified "energy efficiency" as the key aspect of a green datacenter.

    Smith said that concerns about potential regulations are driving companies to look closely at their datacenters and accelerate the process of implementing green initiatives to increase energy efficiency.

    "We applaud these green datacenter initiatives because they result in lower power usage and lower costs, even when companies take very basic steps toward designing and operating their datacenters in a greener fashion," he said.

    "However, it is important to note that some of the concerns about government regulation may not be warranted, given the good faith efforts that government agencies such as the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are making to work with the industry and advocacy groups like The Green Grid to spur self-management of this issue.

    "We believe that collaboration between the government and datacenter professionals is the most effective approach to addressing datacenter energy efficiency."

  • Consumer Network Storage Equipment Market Growing, More Promotion Needed


    Consumer demand for data storage is expected to drive Network Attached Storage (NAS) revenues to more than USD $1.25 billion in revenues by 2011.

    That’s the conclusion of ABI Research, which says the phenomenal growth of digital photography, audio, and video have focused consumers’ minds on the need for secure storage.

    Jason Blackwell, ABI Research senior analyst, says the need to store precious pictures, music, and movies has raised the profile of backup and media server solutions.

    He said that although most consumers still rely on single-computer backup scenarios, a small but growing number are opting for NAS.

    But the market needs to be promoted more to ensure an even greater uptake.

    "In order to move the consumer NAS market forward, vendors, including leaders such as Buffalo Technology and Linksys by Cisco, need to educate and inform consumers about NAS’s advantages," he said.

    Consumer NAS equipment falls into three groups:

    • Integrated NAS drives, which include the necessary networking software
    • Network storage enclosures, for those who wish to add the hard disk themselves
    • Storage routers and bridges, which allow attachment of standard USB or IEEE 1394 hard drives to a network

    Blackwell says that integrated NAS drives comprise the lion’s share of the market, but storage routers and bridges offer vendors the greatest growth opportunity.

    Challenges in this market have traditionally included consumers’ relative indifference to data security: backups have always been considered a bore.

    So marketing and customer education will be key to success. Cost has been an issue too: while prices continue to fall, they still pose a barrier to adoption.

    Blackwell says the rise of the home media server market, however, will provide some lift: DLNA and UPnP-enabled NAS devices can act as media
    servers and are being branded as such.

    "The fact that NAS devices are becoming more like media servers will certainly help them penetrate the digital home network," he said.

    "Vendors are making a concerted effort to market NAS for these more exciting purposes rather than simply for backup."

  • VIZIO HDTV Sales Boosted By Economic Downturn


    US TV-maker VIZIO remains the largest shipper of LCD HDTVs in North America – with an increased market share as consumers turn to value products.

    Shipments have increased 21.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2009, which is a 69 per cent increase year over year (YOY), according to iSuppli.

    VIZIO HDTVs are primarily merchandised through retail partners, such as Costco Wholesale, WalMart, Sam’s Club and Target stores.

    VIZIO also experienced quarter over quarter growth with a 46 per cent increase in Full HD 120Hz sets and 19 percent increase in 42" and above size TVs.

    LCD TV unit shipments grew 21 per cent from 1,116,428 in the final quarter of 2008 to 1,351,860 in first quarter 2009.

    When plasma HDTVs were added to the results, VIZIO’s shipping totals came to 1,400,207 TVs for the quarter and will also rank No.1 in US sales of total flat panel HDTVs.

    Riddhi Patel, principal analyst, television systems, for iSuppli, said that due to its aggressive pricing, VIZIO for some time has maintained its position as North America’s top-selling LCD TV value brand.

    "However, since the onset of the economic downturn, VIZIO’s share has risen dramatically," he said.