Business News Holding

Tag: market-data

  • Mass Adoption of Web-to-TV Video Will Be "Rapid"


    Millions of viewers already watch Internet video on their TVs but that number is set to climb dramatically, according to In-Stat.

    It forecasts that by 2013 web-to-TV video streaming services will drive nearly USD $3 billion in revenue.

    The under-35 adult population in the US has already adopted Web-to-TV video capability, with over 40 per cent viewing Internet video on the TV at least once per month.

    But within five years, the number of US broadband households viewing Web-to-TV content will grow to 24 million.

    Recent research from the Consumer Electronics Association showed that nearly half of prospective TV buyers in the US intend to purchase an Internet-ready TV in the next year.

    Keith Nissen, In-Stat analyst, said that once Web-to-TV video becomes simple and convenient, mass consumer adoption will follow quite rapidly.

    "Our primary research shows that users want a variety of their consumer devices to enable a web-to-TV video experience," he said.

    Other In-Stat findings include:

    • Already, 29 per cent of US 25-34 year olds with game consoles use the devices to watch streaming video off the Internet
    • In five years, there will be 7.4 million US broadband households that use media center PCs for streaming Web-to-TV content.
    • TV networks and pay TV operators currently view online TV as additive to pay TV services, but Web-to-TV will ultimately force a complete restructuring of today’s video services.
    • Video content will be optimized for broadcast or Web-to-TV based on content type

  • Blackberry Curve Overtakes iPhone To Be Q1 Best-Seller


    Helped in no small part by aggressive promotions, RIM’s Blackberry Curve became the best-selling US smartphone in the first quarter of 2009 – overtaking Apple’s iPhone.

    The Curve’s popularity helped increase RIM’s consumer smartphone market share by 15 per cent over the previous quarter to almost 50 per cent, according to market research firm NPD.

    Apple’s iPhone – the previous top-seller – and Palm each saw their market share slip by 10 per cent during the three-month period ended March.

    NPD’s director of industry analysis, Ross Rubin, attributed the changes to an aggressive "buy-one-get-one" promotion by Verizon Wireless.

    "The more familiar, and less expensive, Curve benefited from these giveaways and was able to leapfrog the iPhone, due to its broader availability on the four major US national carriers," he said.

    The promotion also helped RIM secure two additional top five positions.

    In the third slot was the BlackBerry Storm, and the fourth was made up of all BlackBerry Pearl handsets with the exception of flip models.

    T-Mobile’s G1 handset running Google’s open Android software was the fifth most popular smartphone during the quarter.

    Based on US consumer sales of smartphone handsets in NPD’s Smartphone Market Update report, the first-quarter 2009 ranking of the top-five best-selling smartphones is as follows:

    1. RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models)
    2. Apple iPhone 3G (all models)
    3. RIM BlackBerry Storm
    4. RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip)
    5. T-Mobile G1

    Smartphones, which represented just 17 per cent of handset sales volume in Q1 2008, now make up 23 per cent of sales.

    Rubin said this showed that even in a challenging economy, consumers are migrating toward Web-capable handsets and their supporting data plans to access more information and entertainment on the go.

  • Oracle Readies Take-Over As Sun's Loss Grows


    As Oracle prepares its USD $7.4bn acquistion of Sun Microsystem, figures have emerged about the server and software maker’s latest quarter losses.

    Sun announced on Tuesday that it lost USD $201 million in the three months ended March 29. A year ago, Sun lost USD $34 million.

    The surprise deal, announced last week, takes Oracle into a whole new area – hardware, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    In a letter to partners and customers Oracle president, Charles Phillips, wrote: "Our customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly-optimized standards-based product stack.

    "Oracle plans to deliver these benefits by offering a broad range of products, including servers and storage, with all the integrated pieces: hardware operating system, database, middleware and applications."

    The general opinion in the market, however, is that IBM was a better fit for Sun than Oracle. IBM was already in the storage business.

    Wedbush Morgan’s analyst, Kaushik Roy, said Oracle is getting into totally new markets in which they have no expertise or history.

    "I am skeptical. Oracle is more likely to hold on to the entire storage business," he said.

    "Sun bought StorageTek and destroyed the company because of poor execution. But Oracle has been much better in execution, and it is very likely that the current storage group within Sun will have a better opportunity to grow."

    Oracle president, Charles Phillips

    The impact on other storage players and their relationship with Oracle will be determined in time.

    EMC–Oracle had a good relationship. Now they will be competitors.

    Kaushik Roy said: "But now with Oracle and Sun selling HDS at the high end, it would compete with EMC.

    "We will wait to see how those relationships pan out."

    As a result of this merger, Oracle is likely to wind up Sun’s storage hardware business in the long term.

    However, for the present the operation may continue.

    Illuminata analyst John Webster said that he is going on the assumption that Oracle runs Sun as Sun for a while before it starts restructuring.

    Also unknown as yet, is the positon of Sun-NetApp and the patent dispute over the ZFS file system.

    Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers said that Sun’s Open storage may also hit a question mark.

    "We have often been intrigued by some of Sun’s storage technologies," he wrote in a research note.

    "However, we have continued to see limited traction from an execution standpoint."

    It is expected that the presence of Oracle in the storage market will enliven the scenario. NetApp, EMC or 3PAR must be feeling the heat.

  • IDC: External Storage Cost Efficiency Assumptions Must Change


    While economies of scale have helped reduce power and cooling costs, other costs related to external storage prove to be more expensive than the storage itself, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    A recent IDC report estimates that the total cost to manage the world’s installed base of external storage is around 60 per cent of all storage related spending.

    This includes software, power, cooling, administration, personnel and services and excludes the cost of acquisition of the storage.

    David Reinsel, group vice president, IDC Storage and Semiconductors research, said that power and cooling costs are not the only costs associated with external storage.

    "In fact, in the grand scheme of things, the cost to power and cool external storage pales in comparison with the cost to acquire and manage storage, including the costs for storage software and storage administrators," he said.

    In the context of the economic meltdown IDC’s study comes as a stark reminder that the costs to power, cool and manage enterprise storage must be scrutinized in detail.

    It is also important to calculate the total cost of managing the world’s installed base of external storage.

    It is a fact that for every dollar spent on storage hardware, managers will spend three dollars for managing the stored information.

    There is an urgent and growing pressure to change assumptions around the adoption of more efficient storage technologies.

    The report asserts that the focus on energy reduction technologies is a must and firms must recognize the full extent of firms’ overheads.

    Storage management must be recognized as the key issue in today’s exploding data environment.

    Hundred terabyte and even petabyte sites are not uncommon and managers must look beyond the traditional methods of storing and securing critical corporate information.

    They should appreciate that deduplication, compression and thin provisioning have low penetration but high costs in terms of power and cooling.

    Advances in storage hardware and software have made solutions, like Hierarchical Storage management, archiving and disk grooming and automation, attractive.

  • iPhone Beats Blackberry in Customer Satisfaction Survey


    The iPhone has come top of JD Power’s customer satisfaction study measuring consumer tastes.

    The Apple handset ranked highest among smartphone consumers judging five factors: ease of operation, operating system, features, physical design, and battery function.

    The only area where the iPhone didn’t score well was for battery life – an issue only too familiar with the devices’ owners.

    Overall the iPhone received 791 out of a 1,000-point scale, ahead of LG’s 772 points and Samsung’s 759 points. The trio were the only smartphone to rise above the industry average of 751 points.

    Those below the average were mainly companies making Windows Mobile devices, with HTC, Palm and Motorola earning scores of 744, 736 and 659 respectively.

    RIM’s BlackBerries also fared significantly lower than Apple with a 739 score.

    JD Power said that generally smartphone satisfaction has risen since its last survey in November 2008.

    Other findings include the fact that smartphone users send an average of 17 emails a day, and 82 per cent report that they use things like address books and to-do lists to stay organized.

    The survey included 2,648 smartphone users who owned their phone for less than two years.

  • Demand For Web-Enabled TVs Surging, CEA Finds


    TV makers have been quick to recognise consumer appetite for connected TVs – and their ability to act as a differentiator in a crowded market.

    Rightly so as new research shows that nearly half of prospective TV buyers in the US intend to purchase an Internet-ready TV in the next year.

    Now a study by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has confirmed the growing interest, with 14.5 million consumers likely to purchase an Internet-connected TV in the next year.

    Shawn DuBravac, CEA economist and director of research, said consumers want more from their TV experience and marrying traditional television with Internet access is providing the next frontier of the television experience.

    "Consumers are already using the Internet while they watch TV," he said.

    "The next frontier is to create a seamless experience bringing the two together."

    Uses consumers gave for connected TVs include:

    • 48 per cent would find out about upcoming shows and identify a song that played during the show
    • 44 per cent would find out more about the actors
    • The top benefits of connected TVs, according to the study, are anytime-access to content and accessing the Web and TV broadcasts simultaneously.
    • The activities most likely to be converted from the PC to a connected TV include: watching online video (62 per cent), checking the weather (59 per cent) and playing online games (57 per cent).

  • 2011 Peak For SD DTT STB semiconductors


    High-definition Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) set top boxes (STBs) offer semiconductor makers a short term spike in opportunity.

    But standard definition (SD) DTT STBs will be a more sustainable market for manufacturers, according to In-Stat.

    The researchers forecast that the semiconductor opportunity in SD DTT boxes will peak at nearly USD $500 million by 2011.

    Gerry Kaufhold, In-Stat analyst, said the US analog shut off has driven a surge of HD converter boxes in 2008 and 2009.

    "However, this bubble will wane, while the SD DTT market continues to grow across a broader set of geographic markets," he said.

    Other findings from In-Stat include:

    • The European DTT STB Market Value will peak in 2011 at $1.6 billion.
    • On a European country basis, UK leads the market, followed by Spain, France, Germany, and then Italy.
    • Total DTT STB unit shipments will peak at 44 million in 2009.
    • Key component categories include the Demux/CPU/AV decoder and the MPEG-2 MP@HL/Graphics IC

  • Mobile App Revenues To Reach $25bn By 2014


    Mobile app revenues are expected to climb to more than USD $25bn by 2014 – fuelled by the launch of a raft of new application stores.

    But while one-off downloads currently account for the majority of revenues, that will change with the increasing utilization of in-app billing, according to Juniper Research.

    Its Mobile Applications & Apps Stores report suggests that rising revenues from additional mobile content will see value-added services (VAS) providing the dominant revenue stream by 2011.

    It also notes that many Tier 1 operators will seek to deploy their own app stores in a bid to maintain content revenue share.

    However, the report’s author, Dr Windsor Holden, said that in the longer term, the greatest benefits to operators would be derived from data revenues associated with app usage rather than from the retail price of apps and content.

    She said this was providing that the operators rejected the walled garden approach.

    "Data revenue growth is dependent upon operators embracing policies which enable open access – a policy which also involves facilitating app stores which compete with their on-portal offerings," she said.

    The report also noted that, given the fact that app stores currently cater exclusively for smartphones, then operators, developers and content providers would be unwise to ignore opportunities from traditional app and content distribution and monetization channels.

    Other findings from the Juniper report include:

    • Games will remain the largest category in terms of overall app downloads and revenues, although Multimedia & Entertainment apps will attract the greatest share of VAS revenues from 2009 onwards
    • App stores present a significant challenge to traditional content aggregators who may be obliged both to expand the range of their content portfolios and to amend their business models to remain viable

  • Report Aims To Demystify "Hype and Rhetoric" Around Green Data Storage


    Storage vendors worldwide have jumped on the "green" bandwagon in their marketing campaigns, but it’s often hard to determine which technologies move beyond hype and rhetoric to have a real positive impact.

    A new report from Forrester Research suggests, however, that adopting an environmentally responsible approach to storage can help to make it more efficient, reducing capital and operating costs at the same time.

    Entitled Align Green Storage With Overall Efficiency it says that poor measurement capabilities, high switching costs, and overall buyer conservatism have limited green considerations from having significant influence on purchase decisions.

    Its author, Andrew Reichman, says the report is intended to highlight the approaches that make the most economic sense.

    "In a gloomy economy, initiatives that sound good but have little measurable influence on the bottom line are unlikely to receive funding, so sorting through the claims and identifying benefits that are achievable in the near term is key to a successful green strategy in storage."

    He goes on to say that given the current economic climate, there are green storage approaches that are likely to see higher adoption. Among them:

    • Dense drives, such as SATA and FATA, are the greenest storage technology going and can have a tremendous impact on the green and financial bottom line
    • Thin provisioning can reduce the overall footprint of usable data and dramatically increase storage utilization, which is often low because of large upfront allocations that often sit idle
    • Deduplication eliminates redundant copies of data. Forrester expects significant focus on these capabilities, which significantly reduce the amount of disk space required to save a given amount of data, from vendors in the near term.

    An abstract of the report is available here.

  • Sandisk Sees Growth In Mobile Devices


    Sandisk expects increased demand for its mobile storage products as a result of continued growth in the smartphone, MIDs and notebooks sectors.

    The flash memory provider said demand for its mobile solutions was actually increasing – as were prices.

    Eli Harari, Sandisk’s CEO, speaking in its first quarter earnings this week, said he expected demand for NAND to continue to grow particularly for mobile and portable computing platforms.

    He said this would help absorb the industry supply growth projected for second half of 2009 and ensure price stability.

    Pointing to the changes currently taking place in the mobile market, he compared them to those experienced by the Internet in its early days.

    He said these would also have important implications for Sandisk’s mobile storage business.

    Apple’s iPhone and its App Store, RIM’s Blackberry Market, the adoption of Android by smartphone makers, as well as Nokia and Microsoft’s plans were all mentioned as playing a role in fuelling the demand for flash memory.

    "The opportunity for us is these devices will have to be content with wireless bandwidth and coverage limitations, making off-line, local caching of increased amount of data, central to devices’ usability," he said.

    "Paradoxically, the promise of always-connected devices in cloud computing is resulting in the ever greater need for local storage on the devices themselves."

    Harai said Sandisk was seeing increasing demand from "major players" in the mobile ecosystem for its mobile storage solutions, including Mobile Card, embedded iNAND and solid state drives for notebook PC’s.