The majority of enterprises are now piloting and deploying AI PCs as business leaders look to reap future AI rewards, according to a new research paper from IDC, sponsored by AMD.

With businesses investing in AI at the hardware layer as well in software, IDC found 60% of enterprises are already actively piloting AI PCs or have already deployed them. A further 21% of respondents are planning to deploy AI PCs within the next 12 months.

This adoption marks a shift in enterprise strategy, as leaders attempt to future-proof device fleets for incoming technologies such as agentic AI and to improve productivity with built-in AI features.

Respondents cite productivity improvement as the most common (59%) driver for investing in AI PCs, followed by innovation and competitive differentiation (39%) and security benefits (35%).

Other considerations include future-proofing business hardware (29%) and rising employee demand for AI tools (26%).

Among businesses that have already deployed AI PCs, 70% already report faster performance and lower latency, with 66% noting a marked increase in employee productivity.

Additionally, over two-thirds (67%) of business leaders surveyed by the consultancy indicated their organization is currently expanding AI initiatives across departments.

Similarly, knowledge of AI PCs is improving, with 46% of respondents now confidently claiming to know “a lot” about the devices.

"This shift reflects a broader architectural change," AMD said of the research findings. "As organizations seek more responsive and context-aware AI experiences, compute is moving closer to where work happens."

The survey took in responses from business managers involved in PC purchasing decisions, across the US, UK, France, Germany, and Japan.

AI PC adoption on an upward trajectory

Some 15% of respondents indicated that they have no timeline for AI PC deployment yet, but are evaluating options and just 4% of respondents said they have no plans to deploy AI PCs.

On overall AI readiness, 61% of respondents indicated they’re embedding AI into workflows, 38% are only deploying limited AI pilots, and 36% are reliant on third-party AI services. Just one in a hundred (1%) indicated they do not currently use AI in their work environment.

AI PCs have been on an adoption curve since late 2023, when former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said they would feature heavily in enterprise budgets throughout 2024.

While this prediction didn’t entirely pan out, NPU-enabled devices have gradually become more and more dominant in hardware configurations, with Gartner projecting a third of PCs sold by the end of 2025 fit the definition of ‘AI PC’.

AMD concurs with market expert opinions on the direction of travel. As reported by ITPro in March this year, the company said in a blog post that "AI on the PC has crossed an important line."

“For professionals, an Agent Computer means more output and more leverage,” the company added. “For creators, more time for original work and less time managing logistics. For developers, a local AI environment purpose-built for building, testing, and running agents.”

IDC has also predicted that AI PCs will be the ‘norm’ by 2029.

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Global server market sales hit record levels last year, according to new research from IDC, driven by skyrocketing demand for AI infrastructure.

New figures from the consultancy show organizations continue to ramp up infrastructure spending, particularly with top hyperscalers, while large service providers are racing to lead in the AI era.

As a result, the market saw a staggering 80.4% annual growth rate, recording $444.1 billion in revenue. In the last quarter of 2025 alone, revenue reached $125.3 billion – a 52.4% year-over-year increase.

There was a year-over-year increase of 52.4% in vendor revenue compared with the same quarter of 2024. Revenue generated from x86 servers increased 16.9% in the last quarter to $69.8 billion, while non-x86 servers rose by 146.4% to $55.5 billion.

Elsewhere, revenue for servers with an embedded GPU grew 59.1% year-over-year, representing more than half of the total server market revenue.

Memory price surges are a worry

The rising price of certain components, such as GPUs, DRAM, and SSDs, is causing worry. IDC noted that some enterprises have been trying to deal with the problem by securing prices in advance.

However, the impact could be set to hit harder during 2026 as demand keeps outpacing offering capacity in the near term.

“The race for AI adoption is settling the market pace with companies starving for infrastructure looking not only GPUs but also consuming more CPUs, among other components, in order to feed their needs,” said Juan Seminara, research director of Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers.

"We are going to see more price pressures, and that may impact on market dynamics with less units but higher average selling prices going forward."

Dell among the big server market winners

Regionally, the US saw the fastest server market growth, up 72.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024, fueled by 80.1% growth in the accelerated server segment.

Canada grew by 70.7%, for the same reason. EMEA and APeJC, meanwhile, showed double digit growth with 43.6% and 27.9% respectively. PRC and Latin America showed lower growth of 17.7% and 12.8% each, while Japan declined by 4.7%.

Dell Technologies was the clear leader in the OEM market with a 10.0% revenue share, thanks to significant growth on accelerated servers. Supermicro was in second place with 9.5% revenue share for the same reason.

IEIT Systems and Lenovo pretty much tied for third, with 4.1% and 4.0% share respectively, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise finished in fifth place, with a 3.1% share.

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Global server market growth skyrocketed in the third quarter of 2025, new research shows, fueled by continued enterprise cloud and AI spending.

Figures from IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker show the market hit a record-breaking $112.4 billion in revenue across Q3.

This, the consultancy noted, marked yet another double-digit growth rate, with the industry recording 61% growth compared to the same period last year.

Revenue generated from x86 servers increased by 32.8% to $76.3 billion, according to IDC. However, the biggest growth rate came in Non-x86 servers, hitting $36.2 billion and marking a huge 192.7% YoY increase.

Notably, revenue for servers with an embedded GPU now accounts for more than half of broader server market revenue, with growth in this domain surging 49.4% YoY.

IDC said a key factor here lies in sharpened hyperscaler focus on AI infrastructure projects, with major providers ramping up hardware spending to accommodate rapid enterprise adoption rates.

All told, spending on this front has helped fuel broader server market growth over the last 18 months, with IDC noting that the market has doubled in size compared to 2024, reaching revenues of $314.2 billion in the first three quarters.

“IDC expects AI adoption to keep growing at an outstanding pace as major vendors continue reporting record orders and showing strong backlogs,” said Juan Seminara, research director, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers.

“Hyperscalers and cloud providers are still ahead with new, large deployments that require much higher compute density. Additionally, we started to see major AI based Research and Education projects that will help fuel further growth.”

US market surge continues

IDC’s tracker shows continued growth across a host of markets, with the US in particular the fastest-growing region due to heightened hyperscaler infrastructure spending.

Indeed, the US recorded a 79.1% increase compared to the third quarter of 2024. IDC added that a key contributing factor here was a 105.% growth in accelerated server spending.

Market growth in China also surged by 37.6% YoY, with the region accounting for nearly one-fifth of global quarterly revenue.

“APeJC, EMEA and Japan also showed very healthy double digit growth with 37,4%, 31.0% and 28,1% respectively,” IDC added. “While Latin America showed a low single digit growth with 4.1% increase in the quarter.”

The big boom time winners

Major vendor positions in the server market have fluctuated over the last year, IDC found. Dell Technologies holds a solid lead, boasting an 8.3% revenue share which the consultancy attributed to "outstanding growth on accelerated servers”.

Supermicro, meanwhile, holds second place with a 4% share. However, IDC noted that its position here compared to last year has slipped by 13.2%.

Elsewhere, Lenovo and IEIT Systems remain tied in third position, commanding a 3.6% and 3.7% share respectively.

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Rising cyber crime and a surge in AI-powered threats is fueling a rise in security spending around the world, according to analysis from IDC.

The consultancy’s Worldwide Security Spending Guide shows global security spending is expected to grow by 12.2% this year, and to hit $377 billion by 2028.

The bulk of this spending (70%) will be in the US and Europe. But increases are expected in every geographical region, in particular Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa.

"Growing digital transformation and hiking emerging technology adoption across the Middle East & Africa (MEA) region — especially countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — have pushed the demand significantly for security solutions to face the evolving threat landscapes," said Eman Elshewy, senior research manager with IDC Data and Analytics.

"MEA is witnessing substantial investments from both government and enterprises to fight rising cyber threats, with strong awareness of the importance of cybersecurity education and training programs to fortify organizations against possible attacks."

Banking, federal and central government, telecommunications, capital markets, and healthcare providers will be the biggest spenders this year.

Meanwhile, the fastest-growing sectors will be capital markets, media and entertainment, and life sciences with an expected year-on-year growth rate of 19.4%, 17.1% and 16.9% respectively.

"The protection from cyber threats — now enhanced by AI and GenAI — is becoming an increasingly strategic issue for organizations in all industries," said Stefano.

Stefano specifically highlighted spending increases among organizations managing critical infrastructure along with those developing critical assets such as aerospace and defense.

“Although national and international regulations still play an important role in guiding organizations' security strategies — especially in regulated industries — more of them are realizing that having a proactive approach to security is crucial, not only as a short-term operational protection measure but also as a competitive advantage in the long term," he said.

However, IDC found that while large businesses account for most security spending across all regions, small and medium-sized businesses will continue to increase their investments in security throughout the forecast period.

More than half the cash will go on security software, with a 14.4% year-on-year growth rate. There's particular growth expected in cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP), identity and access management software, and security analytics software.

Security services will be the second fastest growing technology group in 2025, driven by the continuing expansion of managed security services, followed by security hardware, which IDC said will achieve single-digit but steady growth in 2025.

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The rise in AI has helped push server sales to the second highest growth rate since 2019, nearly doubling since last year.

The AI boom has driven a massive rollout in infrastructure, with research suggesting data centres will continue to grow in size and number.

That surge is reflected in IDC's worldwide quarterly server tracker, which showed the overall market topped a record $77.3 billion in revenue in the final quarter of last year, up by 91% year-over-year.

"IDC expects AI adoption to continue growing at a remarkable pace as hyperscalers, CSPs, private companies, and governments around the world are increasingly prioritizing those investments,” said Lidice Fernandez , group vice president, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers

Revenue was up across all types of servers. Traditional x86 servers were up 59.9% to $54.8 billion, while non-x86 servers climbed a whopping 262.1% to $22.5 billion.

GPU growth reflects AI boom

Servers with an embedded GPU were up 192.6% for the fourth quarter year-over-year, and for the full year, that key segment for AI made up more than half of the server market. Nvidia continues to dominate that space with 90% of shipments in the final quarter of 2024.

"The fast pace at which hyperscalers and cloud service providers have been adopting servers with embedded GPUs has fueled the server market growth which has more than doubled in size since 2020 with revenue of $235.7 billion dollars for the full year 2024,” IDC said.

All that growth raises challenges, in particular surrounding the high energy use of data centers amid predictions the AI boom will lead data centre power demands to triple in the US.

Gartner also predicts 40% of data center operators will face power constraints — sending some tech companies to invest in alternative power sources such as nuclear.

"Growing concerns around energy consumption for server infrastructure will become a factor in data centers looking for alternatives to optimize their architectures and minimize energy use," Fernandez predicted.

Winners and losers

Dell and Supermicro remain atop IDC's tracker, but their dominance is increasingly being challenged. Dell held a 7.2% market share in the fourth quarter of 2024, while Supermicro held 6.5%.

Yet despite overall revenue growth, both had lost market share from the previous quarter, from 11.3% and 8.0% respectively.

HPE, IEIT Systems, and Lenovo all shared the next spot on the tracker, each with shares around the 5% mark. The original design manufacturer segment — which can reflect hyperscaler demand — made up almost half of the total revenue (47.3%), while the "rest of market" section nearly a quarter (23.7%), highlighting a significant shift in the market.

Indeed, that marks a big change from the fourth quarter of 2019. In that quarter, the global server market revenue grew just 7.5% year-over-year to $25.4 billion — versus last quarter's $77.3 billion in growth just five years on.

In 2019, ODMs had just a quarter of server revenue and "rest of market" just 16%.

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Global PC and tablet sales could face a major hurdle in 2025, according to new research from IDC, with the looming prospect of US tariffs stunting growth.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker shows global PC volume is now expected to reach 273 million in 2025 - slightly less than the previous forecast and only 3.7% up on last year.

The consultancy added it expects growth of less than 1% each year until 2029 for the traditional PC market, partly thanks to volume stabilization following Windows 11 migration.

And tablets aren't expected to fare much better, with shipments set to shrink 0.8% in 2025 to 143.3 million. IDC then expects a slight gradual decline, reaching 141.6 million units by the end of 2029, mostly due to consumer saturation.

IDC specifically highlighted the potential introduction of US tariffs on Chinese goods as a key hurdle moving forward. The tariffs were originally touted to stand at 10%, however, President Trump has since said the figure could reach 20%.

"Price hikes stemming from tariffs in the US combined with subdued demand are leading to a negative impact within the largest market for PCs," said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC's worldwide mobile device trackers.

"However, the weakness amongst consumer demand is universal as macro issues persist. There are still some silver linings though: workstation volume should remain healthy, along with near-term tablet demand in China boosted by consumer subsidies."

The main driver for this year's gains will be the commercial sector, IDC noted, with commercial PC volume, including education PCs, growing 2% in 2024. This growth was driven by some large deals and modest Windows 11 migration volume.

Commercial and school renewal projects are expected to be the biggest driver for 2025, IDC noted, with firms largely continuing Windows 11 PC purchases - although budgets and other constraints will leave some instead going for in-place upgrades or paying for extended Windows 10 support.

AI PC gains will be the big talking point in 2025

While AI PC purchases have faced hurdles since their launch, IDC expects a rather stronger market to emerge by the end of this year, with most new PCs expected to be AI-capable by 2026.

Japan, IDC noted, is one of the few regions around the world to show strong growth.

"In light of so many challenges around the world, Japan is a much-needed source of double-digit growth this year. Enterprises there as well as SMBs have been quickly replacing PCs in advance of the Windows 10 End Of Service in October," said Bryan Ma, vice president of devices research at IDC.

"Growth rates naturally come down next year, but at least there is still a large education project to absorb some of the landing."

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The banking industry is ramping up cloud spending more than any other sector, according to new research, but other major sectors appear to be easing off the pedal.

Analysis from IDC shows public cloud spending in Europe will hit a total of $221 billion this year and is expected to reach $373 billion by 2028 - marking a five-year compound annual growth rate of 20%.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) will remain the fastest-growing area for cloud spending, IDC said, thanks to the increasing demand for AI applications, integration of cloud ecosystems, and the need for scalable platforms that can support firms' digital transformation.

Banking, software and information services, and insurance will be the industries with the fastest year-on-year spending increases in 2025, IDC noted.

In the case of banking, this is thanks to threat intelligence requirements that are pushing companies to build AI tools that can rapidly categorize and summarize data and identify potential threats.

Meanwhile, last year’s strong investments in data centers across Europe will mean more cloud spending on generative AI and other technologies for risk assessment, customer service, and back-office process optimization.

Cloud spending gains face significant barriers

However, IDC said potential new US tariffs and trade tensions with the European Union, persistent economic weakness in Germany, and growing competition from China may create challenges for some European industries.

With Europe's economic growth in 2025 likely to remain shaky, consumer and business confidence could suffer, impacting budgets dedicated to cloud-based transformation projects.

"Manufacturing industries, especially chemicals and automotive, are paying the effects of prolonged supply chain disruptions, lower demand, skill shortage, and tough global competition," said Andrea Minonne, research manager at IDC UK.

"Deteriorating business confidence will slow down cloud spending, which will still grow, but at a slower place compared with verticals like banking or software and information systems."

Looking ahead, IDC said software and information services are set to have the highest value compound annual growth rate in Europe between 2023 and 2028, standing at 24%.

This spending growth will be fueled by rising demand for AI and generative AI solutions, increased investments in cybersecurity research and development, and the adoption of scalable SaaS solutions.

Insurance and life science will also grow their public spending more rapidly than other verticals, said IDC. Insurance firms will be investing in public cloud to modernize their core systems, automate operations, and integrate AI-driven risk management to improve compliance, efficiency, and customer experience.

Meanwhile, despite near-term supply constraints and manufacturing limitations, life sciences companies are investing in AI-driven drug discovery, expanding production capacity and strengthening digital supply chain resilience.

"Cloud is a growing market and investments will be driven to support automation and tech such as AI and generative AI," said Minonne.

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Generative AI offers a return on investment (ROI) of $3.70 for every dollar invested, according to a report commissioned by Microsoft from IDC.

The tech giant says that 85% of the Fortune 500 are using its own AI tools amid a wider boom in the technology.

But high costs for access to software and tools has raised concerns that this industry trend might pay for those developing the technology, rather than those using it, with previous research from Gartner suggesting it has become a "tax" on companies.

IDC surveyed 4,000 employees of enterprise organizations from around the world to unpick how people are using AI, how much it's paying, and what's next.

"IDC predicts that business spending to adopt AI, use AI in existing business operations, and to deliver better products/services to business and consumer customers will have a cumulative global economic impact of $19.9 trillion through 2030 and drive 3.5% of global GDP in 2030," the company said.

Use of generative AI increased from 55% of those surveyed in 2023 to 75% this year, IDC says, marking a steep rise in adoption rates.

"Enterprises worldwide are expected to invest $44 billion in GenAI solutions in 2024, significantly more than the $19 billion spent in 2023," the report says.

And AI is finally starting to pay, the study noted. AI deployments take less than eight months to roll out, with a return on investment within 13 months.

The average return on investment for every dollar is $3.70, though it varies — the top tier users of AI are seeing a ROI of $10. The biggest ROI is productivity use cases for 43% of respondents.

The results echo those from Google Cloud earlier this year, which suggested generative AI should offer a return on investment within a year — however, other research from Logicalis has suggested many companies haven't seen ROI at all as yet.

Indeed, the boost to the bottom line depends greatly on how AI is used and the company itself, and ROI can be difficult to track, especially when it comes to employee productivity.

What's next?

While boosting productivity is the main way generative AI is being used to boost bottom lines at the moment, though IDC predicts it will shift to functional purposes and industry use cases such as product development and manufacturing in the next two years.

"Organizations are transitioning to a more strategic AI approach, aligning investments across applications, platforms, data, and infrastructure," IDC says in the report.

"The aim is to enhance the value of AI initiatives through advanced automation, greater model and data reuse, and efficient, cost-effective inference delivery from network to edge to the individual device."

IDC also found that while pre-build AI solutions dominate at the moment, with 43% of respondents saying it was their primary approach for taking advantage of AI, that looks to shift towards custom-built AI solutions within the next two years.

Given the gains, why are companies still concerned about generative AI? The report said data security, data governance, privacy issues and regulatory compliance remained top concerns for organizations.

But another challenge holding back generative AI uptake is a lack of skilled workers, though that concern fell from 52% of respondents in 2023 to 45% this year.

IDC has warned that the growing trend of cloud repatriation is driven by missed expectations, largely around the growing costs of running workloads in the cloud.

The report comes a week after 37 Signals — the SaaS company behind Basecamp — has revealed it will save $10 million over five years by ditching the cloud in favor of investing in its own hardware.

And we can expect more companies to follow that lead, though IDC said repatriation is a growing trend, but not "a wholesale migration." Indeed, the analyst firm's own research suggests only 8-9% of companies plan a full workload repatriation, with most moving only specific workloads back in house.

"Cloud computing has been heralded as the panacea for modern IT challenges, promising scalability, flexibility, and cost savings," IDC said. "However, as the cloud landscape matures, many organizations are finding that the reality of cloud adoption does not always align with their expectations."

Cost is one aspect driving repatriation, with IDC research showing half of organizations spent more on cloud than expected last year, with 59% expecting similar cost overruns this year.

"The complexities of cloud environments, coupled with unforeseen external influences, make it challenging to forecast costs accurately," IDC said. "Factors such as the increasing cost of third-party services, energy costs, and the financial implications of new technologies like GenAI are contributing to these budget blowouts.

It’s not just costs driving cloud repatriation efforts

IDC said the cloud repatriation trend wasn't just about fluctuating costs, but performance and security concerns, too. The cloud isn't necessarily suitable for all workloads, IDC said, causing concerns with performance and latency.

"For instance, technical and AI-related workloads often experience performance bottlenecks in public cloud environments, prompting organizations to consider repatriation," IDC said.

Another challenge is security and compliance, with IDC saying cloud companies do offer advanced security measures, but that hasn't been enough to assuage concerns by organizations operating in sensitive industries, such as finance and healthcare.

"As a result, production data and backup/disaster recovery processes are among the most repatriated elements of workloads."

Beyond technical complaints, IDC said managing multi-cloud or hybrid cloud setups has become "incredibly complex". That can lead some companies to reconsider their cloud strategies, as it makes it costly to manage and difficult to secure data across multiple platforms.

IDC added that larger companies are more likely to repatriate than smaller businesses. "This is due to their greater resources, larger workloads, and more complex IT environments," IDC added. "Economic factors and comprehensive workload strategies also play a role in driving repatriation activities among large enterprises."

Millions for 37 Signals

Back in 2023, 37 Signals' CTO David Heinemeier Hansson said the company had looked at its setup and decided it made more sense to ditch the cloud because of the "grotesque" costs. Instead of shelling millions on its cloud bill, the company would invest in its own hardware.

The repatriation project has taken years, largely because of the length of cloud contracts — some stretch for up to four years, meaning 37 Signals won't be able to move all of its setup in-house for some time yet.

But in the meantime, the company has reported significant savings. Hansson has said the company will save $10 million over five years, which is three million dollars more than 37 Signals predicted when it set out on the project.

Of course, there are significant hardware investments to be made, but Hansson said that was recouped in the first year — and that's for hardware the firm expects to use for several years. The company has stressed that the repatriation project isn't just about cost savings, but the flexibility to try experiments and innovate.

Hansson suggested all companies should consider repatriation, but warned it may not make sense for everyone.

"Now, as with all things cloud vs on-prem, it's never fully apples-to-apples. If you're entirely in the cloud, and have no existing data center racks, you'll pay to rent those as well — but you'll probably be shocked at how cheap it is compared to the cloud," he wrote at the time.

Public cloud spending is rocketing, according to IDC, as enterprises continue to invest in infrastructure expansion and ramp up AI adoption.

Figures from the consultancy’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker show total global revenue in the public cloud services market hit $669.2 billion in 2023, marking a 19.9% increase on the year previous.

The biggest single contributor was Software as a Service (SaaS) spending IDC noted, which accounted for nearly 45% of the total.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was the second largest category, with 19.9% of the total, while Platform as a Service (PaaS) spending accounted for 18.4% of overall revenue.

PaaS spending experienced some of the fastest year-over-year revenue growth across 2023, which was partly fueled by heightened investment in AI, according to IDC's Adam Reeves.

"In large part due to end-user investment in AI, PaaS revenue growth continues to outpace the overall cloud market,” he said.

"Both market share-leading vendors and smaller providers continue to release PaaS-delivered AI offerings. Vendors are focused on being strategic partners to their customers by delivering highly performant, developer-friendly, trustworthy, and secure offerings that help users deliver intelligent applications more efficiently."

All the same names dominate the public cloud market

As in previous years, the market last year was dominated by the top five public cloud service providers – Microsoft, AWS, Salesforce, Google, and Oracle – which between them accounted for 40.5% of the worldwide total.

With offerings in all four public cloud categories, Microsoft held the top spot, with a 16.8% share in 2023, followed by AWS with a 12.4% market share.

IDC said the market is likely to continue to expand moving forward. Worldwide public cloud services revenue will top $800 billion this year, it predicts, up 20.5% over 2023, and with a similar increase expected in 2025.

Overall, the consultancy said there's likely to be a five-year compound annual growth rate of 19.5% with worldwide revenues reaching $1.6 trillion in 2028.

The main driver for all this growth is the shift of AI into the mainstream, which is pushing organizations to rethink their infrastructure strategy, according to Dave McCarthy, IDC's research vice president, cloud and edge infrastructure services.

"Public cloud IaaS will be an attractive source for AI-ready infrastructure as cloud service providers are heavily investing in the high-performance compute, storage, and networking services needed for AI workloads," he commented.

"The on-demand and pay-as-you-go tenets of cloud infrastructure facilitate access to the latest AI technology without large upfront investments or supply chain delays."

Revenue in the global semiconductor industry is set to plummet by more than 11% over the next year as waning business demand for hardware impacts manufacturers. 

An analysis from Gartner this week projected an 11.2% decline in revenue to around $532 billion, marking a significant decrease from a market total of $599.6 billion in the year prior.

A key factor in the predicted revenue contraction is the consistent decrease in demand witnessed across the PC, tablet, and smartphone semiconductor markets, which Gartner warned is ‘stagnating’. 

Tightened budgets at businesses worldwide mean that semiconductor manufacturers will be faced with an increasingly competitive and strained marketplace. 

These combined markets will account for around 31% of all semiconductor revenue in 2023, totalling $167.6 billion. 

“As economic headwinds persist, weak end-market electronics demand is spreading from consumers to businesses, creating an uncertain investment environment,” said Richard Gordon, practice VP at Gartner. 

Gordon added that a rampant oversupply of semiconductors will also have a significant impact on the market. 

This saturation of chips is “elevating inventories and reducing chip prices” across the board, which in turn will accelerate the decline of the market across 2023. 

Tough conditions for hardware demand

Demand for IT hardware has been consistently decreasing in recent months due to deteriorating economic conditions. 

Research from Gartner in January revealed that global PC shipments declined to record levels in the final quarter of 2022, dipping to 65.3 million and representing an overall decline of 28.5%. 

Budgetary constraints among global businesses, combined with a growing trend of firms delaying purchases and extending lifecycles were all highlighted as key contributing factors, Gartner said at the time. 

This trend has continued into early 2023, analysis shows. Earlier this month, IDC revealed that global PC shipments dipped by nearly one-third in the first quarter of 2023, highlighting this continued decline. 

The research from IDC showed that total shipments of PCs declined 29% in Q1 to 56.9 million units. IDC said that weak demand, excess inventory, and a “worsening macroeconomic climate” were responsible for the drop in shipments.

Today, International Data Corporation (IDC) announced its predictions for the worldwide IT industry. Shaped by the ongoing economic disruption caused by the global pandemic, the predictions reveal what IDC expects to happen in the next 12-24 months and beyond as enterprises and the IT Industry strive to succeed.

The next five years are crucial for CIOs and digitally driven C-suites, IDC says. To accelerate digitalization, CIOs must remedy shortcomings in IT environments established during the initial emergency response, identify the organization's IT transformation trends and use new technologies to capitalize on competitive and industry disruptions.

IDC also stated in its report that despite COVID-19’s widespread impact on businesses, the global economy will sustain its “digital destiny” course: the digitization of 65% of global GDP by 2022. This will drive $6.8 trillion in IT spending from 2020 through 2023.

"The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to unplanned/foreseen business disruptions will be a clearer determiner of success in our increasingly digitalized economy," said IDC group vice president for worldwide research, Rick Villars. "A large percentage of a future enterprise's revenue depends upon the responsiveness, scalability, and resiliency of its infrastructure, applications, and data resources."

More key forecasts from the report include the following:

1. The shift to cloud-centric infrastructure will accelerate twice as fast as it did before the pandemic.

2. Edge will become a top priority, spurring adoption of new, cloud-centric edge and network solutions that’ll enable faster responses to current business needs while promoting long-term digital resilience.

3. Seventy-five percent of G2000 companies will commit to providing technical parity to a workforce that is hybrid workforce by design rather than by circumstance, enabling them to work together separately and in real-time.

4. Smart CIOs will look for opportunities to design next-generation digital platforms that modernize and rationalize infrastructure and applications while delivering flexible capabilities to create and deliver new products, services and experiences to workers and customers.

5. Leading enterprises must rapidly adapt to business disruptions, leverage digital capabilities to maintain continuous business operations and quickly adjust to take advantage of changed conditions for competitive advantage.

6. By 2023, an emerging cloud ecosystem for extending resource control and real-time analytics will be the underlying platform for all IT and business automation initiatives anywhere and everywhere.

7. By 2023, driven by the goal to embed intelligence in products and services, one-quarter of G2000 companies will acquire at least one AI software startup to ensure ownership of differentiated skills and IP.

8. By 2024, 80% of enterprises will overhaul relationships with suppliers, providers and partners to better execute digital strategies for ubiquitous deployment of resources and autonomous IT operations.

9. By 2025, 90% of G2000 companies will mandate reusable materials into IT hardware supply chains, carbon neutrality targets for providers' facilities and lower energy use as prerequisites for doing business.

10. Through 2023, half of the enterprises' hybrid workforce and business automation efforts will be delayed or will fail outright due to underinvestment in providing IT, security and DevOps teams with the right tools or skills.

You can find the report and an on-demand replay of IDC's Worldwide IT Industry Predictions webinar at: https://www.idc.com/events/futurescape.

SSD shipments will continue to rise as the IT industry continues its adoption of 3D NAND Flash.

In the coming 12 months, research firm IDC expects the cost of SSDs to reduce considerably as NAND flash supply constraints diminish. This will lead to more manufacturers integrating SSDs into their devices - particularly PCs.

IDC thinks the worldwide SSD unit shipments to increase at a CAGR of 15% over the next five years, with adoption in the PC and consumer electronics devices market increase by a slightly higher 15.8% CAGR. In terms of what this means in monetary terms, IDC expects SSD-related revenues to reach $33.6 billion (£25.13 billion) in 2021, growing at a CAGR of 14.8%.

"SSDs continue on a path to become a more broadly used, ubiquitous storage technology across IT markets," said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president, Solid State Drives and Enabling Technologies.

"SSDs play an important role in making the digital transformation possible, a dynamic that IDC expects will continue to propel the adoption of SSDs and underpins the secular growth of the SSD market for both the client and enterprise segments."

IDC also thinks higher-capacity SSDs will become available at more competitive price points, meaning we'll start to see manufacturers upping the storage of notebook and desktop PCs as well as in detachable tablets or 2-in-1 tablets such as the Microsoft Surface.

The enterprise market will also benefit, with lower SSD prices on a per-gigabit basis for servers, network storage arrays (all-flash arrays and hybrid flash arrays), and hyperscale cloud service provider datacenters.

Worldwide spending on virtual and augmented reality technology could reach $13.9 billion (11.2 billion) in 2017, jumping almost 131% over last year's figures, according to recent research by the IDC.

In an update to its Worldwide Semiannual Augmented and Virtual Reality Spending Guide, the IDC expects the technology to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 198% during the 2015-2020 period, raking in over $143 billion.

As a comparison, spending on VR and AR in 2016 reached just $6.1 billion.

The largest portion of this growth will come from the consumer market, with spending on hardware and software set to reach $6.2 billion this year. Although VR started as a crowd-funded project with the Oculus Rift, consumers are now able to take advantage of a vast array of different products from leading technology and entertainment companies.

Unsurprisingly, industry will lag behind in spending as businesses continue to explore new applications of the technology. The biggest uptake is expected within the manufacturing and retail sectors, the only industries set to exceed $1 billion on VR and AR this year. Online retail outlets alone may sink almost $462 million into the technology, providing a way for users to experience select products using AR through a website.

By the end of the forecast period, transportation is expected to be the fastest growing sector at 233.7% CAGR, closely followed by healthcare at 231.8%.

"At this stage, to make the transition to a robust technology spending environment, third-party custom application development and systems integration will fill a vital role in bringing projects to life," said Marcus Torchia, research director at IDC's Customer Insights and Analysis.

"We expect initial AR spending to lean on mobile workforce-based use cases, where AR headsets are a natural enhancement to existing mobility investments. And we will see education, research and design applications form a foundation of adoption in professional environments," added Torchia.

Gaming and entertainment will see spending on VR headsets outpace that of AR during 2017 and 2018. But after this period, the research expects AR spending to surge ahead as the technology finds a firm place within industry, particularly within healthcare.

Although VR has found limited success outside the commercial space, in areas such as education and architecture, AR is proving massively more popular within industry. Following our hands-on demo of Microsoft's Hololens, we can safely say the technology provides a promising tool for improving business productivity.

Worldwide sales of tablet devices fell by almost 15% in the third-quarter of 2016, with Apple, Samsung and Lenovo all seeing market losses.

Vendors shipped 43 million units in the third quarter, an increase of 9.8% over the previous quarter but significantly down from the 51 million sold this time last year.

The report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) has attributed poor growth the increasing popularity of cheap devices, and has warned that the tablet industry could suffer from a 'race to the bottom'.

"Unfortunately, many low-cost detachables also deliver a low-cost experience," said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst at IDC.

"The race to the bottom is something we have already experienced with slates and it may prove detrimental to the market in the long run as detachables could easily be seen as disposable devices, rather than potential PC replacements," added Ubrani.

The largest loss came from Samsung tablet sales, which surprisingly avoided fallout from negative press surrounding the Note 7. Instead, Samsung's overreliance on slate tablets has resulted in a 19.3% drop in growth for the company, shipping only 6.5 million devices, down from 8.1 million.

Apple saw a year-over-year growth decline of 6.2%, but has managed to retain flat revenue for the quarter thanks to sales of the iPad Pro.

The IDC shows Apple still retains the largest market share at 19.6%, followed by Samsung at 16%.

iCharts

The growth comes as Amazon continues a "strategy of selling low-cost tablets as a gateway and companion to its ecosystem," according to the IDC report.

"Beyond the different end-user experience delivered by low and high-end tablets, we're witnessing real tectonic movements in the market," said Jean Philippe Bouchard, research director at IDC.

"Slate companion devices sold at the low end are serving a broader platform strategy, like Amazon is doing with Alexa on its Fire Tablets, while more expensive productivity tools closer to true computing and legitimate notebook replacement devices should help to keep average prices up," added Bouchard.

A report by IDC has revealed PC sales are declining rapidly, with the number shipped expected to fall 7.3 per cent by the end of the year.

The sector is being threatened in part by sales of detachable tablets, the research firm explained, which often offer comparable specifications at lower prices than standalone laptops. If the projected sales figures are combined with detachable PCs, IDC predicts the market will only contract by two per cent over this year.

Another reason for the decline in shipments is that consumers are delaying the purchase of new computers, instead opting to update machines to Windows 10, rather than buying a new computer, while enterprises are still evaluating whether to make the jump to Windows 10 and kit their employees out with new computers.

"The latest update reflects continuing pressure on PC shipments, but does not significantly change the factors driving the market," saidLoren Loverde, vice president of worldwide tracker forecasting and PC research at IDC.

"In addition, we have now had four consecutive quarters of double-digit volume declines. This type of prolonged slump is unprecedented, and lowers the bar for some improvement going forward. Unfortunately, the PC market still faces some persistent challenges, and for now, improvement continues to mean slower declines."

However, growth rates for smartphones and tablets are also falling, which should relieve some pressure for standalone PCs, although it may not be enough to help boost results next year.

"Although inventory has improved in some markets, channels remain extremely conservative," saidJay Chou, research manager at IDC's worldwide PC tracker unit.

"The economic and competitive pressures are particularly affecting the consumer segment, which is projected to see another year of double-digit declines in 2016, and decline throughout the forecast. In contrast, commercial shipments are projected to decline just 4.4 per cent in 2016 and see slightly positive growth for the next few years."

IDC has predicted the worldwide smartphone market will start to slow in 2016 as consumers start shying away from two-year contracts in favour of monthly installment plans that do not lock them in.

The research firm also predicts that, for the first time ever, iPhone shipments will decrease compared to 2015,dropping from 232 million units shipped in 2015 to 227 million in 2016. However, the company thinks Apple can bounce back in 2017 thanks to the lower-cost iPhone SE and offers an attractive early trade-in programme.

Android shipments, however, are set to increase year-on-year, rising from a predicted 1.24 billion shipments in 2016 to 1.57 billion in 2020, thanks to OEMs offering a wider variety of devices at different price points and integrating unique UIs to attract a bigger audience.

"Vendors continue to push larger screened devices at a variety of price points that feature big bold displays as well as powerful multimedia capabilities in both mature and developed markets,"Anthony Scarsella, research manager with IDC's Mobile Phones team said.

"We are witnessing a plethora of vendors shifting their flagship devices towards the Phablet category as the average selling price for a Phablet will remain significantly higher than a regular smartphone ($383 vs. $260 in 2016) through the forecast period."

The way people buy their devices is also changing. For example, some markets are moving away from two-year subsidised contracts towards handsets payable by monthly installments or selling and buying them via online marketplaces.

"Consumers everywhere are getting savvy about how and where they buy their smartphones, and this is opening up new doors for OEMs and causing some traditional channels to lose some control of the hardware flow," said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

"Smartphones sold into eTailer channels grew 65 per cent in 2015 and are expected to account for roughly 12 per cent of smartphone shipments in 2016, up from just 4 per cent in 2013. Consumers are having more say over which brands they want and at the same time able to bargain shop."

Apple may be the darling of the tech world, but Google is once again nipping at its heels.

Google's Chromebooks have overtaken sales of Apple's Macs for the first time since the cheap and cheerful cloud-based laptops were announced five years ago.

That's according to research firm IDC, which reported 1.76 million Macs shipped in the latest quarter.

"Chrome OS overtook Mac OS in the US in terms of shipments for the first time in 1Q16," IDC analyst Linn Huang confirmed to The Verge, which pinned Chromebook sales at about two million for the first quarter of the year.

Chromebooks are much cheaper devices than Apple's Mac lineup, with the former ranging from 179 to 299 excluding Google's own top-end Pixel laptop, while Apple's MacBook Air starts from 799.

So while Google's partners are shipping more units than Apple, the latter will likely still be pulling in more revenue, though shipments were down by two percentage points in the first quarter from the same period in 2015.

Indeed, the company that may be more nervous about the success of Chromebooks is Microsoft, as standard PCs running Windows saw double-digit declines.

That said, the IDC Chromebook figuressales are only in the US and largely made up of shipments to schools, where Google has had particular success with its Chromebook platform."Chromebooks are still largely a US K-12 story," Huang said.

Chromebooks could be set for more mainstream success after Google confirmed Android apps would be supported on the Chrome OS from this autumn.

Security intelligence vendor Exabeam has chosen Exclusive Networks as its sole UK distributor, with a view to expanding this into further EMEA territories later in 2016.

The agreement is part of the Silicon Valley vendor’s plans to recruit specialist partners, VARs and international/global SIs to exceed what it describes as “ambitious revenue targets.”

Exabeam produces user and entity behavioural analytics (UEBA) for tracking down elusive threats within the corporate network. The company claims its Stateful User Tracking automatically creates a complete timeline of every event and anomaly tied to an attack, across devices, IP addresses, and credentials, and uses that timeline to assess risk and automate many incident response tasks.

“Sooner or later, every enterprise is affected by threats that penetrate outer defences and secretly work their way across to the most sensitive or valuable data assets. Clues to these dangerous attacks are typically undetectable or hidden in masses of logs and other security big data. This is what Exabeam was designed for; putting security operations teams straight on the scent and in for the kill,” comments Graham Jones, country manager at Exclusive Networks UK, who adds that the technology “is highly pertinent to Exclusive’s CARM [Cyber Attack Remediation & Migration] solution framework.”

The distie says that as well as its integration within the CARM framework, its role includes educating the channel about the opportunities surrounding UEBA and the Exabeam platform, and accrediting resellers to the Exabeam partner programme.

“Exclusive Networks is well respected and we’re excited to be building out our channel with them as a true extension of our team,” says Brett Candon, EMEA channel director at Exabeam. “They understand Exabeam’s position in the market and the opportunities that lie ahead for our partners. They have the right pedigree to help Exabeam fully execute on its growth plan. The VCs of Exabeam involved in the likes of Palo Alto, Fire Eye and Imperva have witnessed this previously and we look forward to a longstanding, successful relationship.”

Worldwide tablet sales have declined for the fifth successive quarter, with losses of 13.7 per cent year-on-year, according to IDC's latest figures.

Sales decreased by 10.1 per cent over the entirety of 2015, from 230.1 million in 2014 to 206.8 million last year. Market leaders Apple and Samsung saw the biggest losses, with shipments reducing by 24.8 per cent and 18.1 per cent respectively.

The winners were third place Amazon and fifth place Huawei, whose sales increased by 175 per cent and 124 per cent over the quarter, although Amazon's success was limited to the fourth quarter of 2015 rather than the whole year, where it failed to rank as highly.

However, it's not all doom and gloom for the mobile sector. Detachables, such as the iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface showed a substantial uplift, demonstrating the trend of businesses scrapping their laptops in exchange for more flexible options.

"Despite lukewarm reviews, the iPad Pro was the clear winner this season as it was the top selling detachable, surpassing notable entries from Microsoft and other PC vendors," said Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Device Trackers.

"It's also important to note that the transition towards detachable tablets has presented positive opportunities for both Apple and Microsoft. However, Google's recent foray into this space has been rather lacklustre as the Android platform will require a lot more refinement to achieve any measurable success."

Jean Philippe Bouchard, research director of the tablets division at IDC, added that end users are viewing detachables as PC replacements as they offer the power of a computer without the wires.

"We believe Apple sold just over two million iPad Pros while Microsoft sold around 1.6 million Surface devices, a majority of which were Surface Pro and not the more affordable Surface 3," he said. "With these results, it's clear that price is not the most important feature considered when acquiring a detachable performance is."

The Apple Watch has come up trumps in IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker report, shipping 3.6 million smart watches in the second quarter of 2015.

Although FitBit topped the manufacturer charts with 24.3 per cent of the market share, Apple was hot on the company's tail with 19.9 per cent of the share. Xiaomi also freshly entered the charts with 17.1 per cent of the wearables market, just behind Apple, while the fourth place contender was Garmin, with less than a four per cent share.

IDC said this demonstrates the power that Apple has in the technology market, whatever new innovations it launches.

"Anytime Apple enters a new market, not only does it draw attention to itself, but to the market as a whole," noted Ramon Llamas, research manager for IDC's Wearables team. "Its participation benefits multiple players and platforms within the wearables ecosystem, and ultimately drives total volumes higher."

He explained how Apple forces other technology vendors to re-think about their products and innovate in order to stay competitive.

"Fairly or not, Apple will become the stick against which other wearables are measured, and competing vendors need to stay current or ahead of Apple. Now that Apple is officially a part of the wearables market, everyone will be watching to see what other wearable devices it decides to launch, such as smart glasses or hearables," he continued.

The report also revealed a very definite divide between smart wearables such as the Apple Watch and Samsung's range of wearables that can run third-party apps and those that only work with one application, such as fitness bands.

Those producing basic wearables will need to compete with the smart wearables, while keeping their price points low to be attractive to consumers.

Samsung led worldwide smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2015, thanks to great demand for lower-cost smartphones, according to the latest figures from analyst firm IDC.

The firm's Galaxy S6 and S6 edge shipped late in Q1 2015, meaning the Korean manufacturer was able to push ahead at the end of the quarter. The iPhone shipped in Q4 2014, meaning sales had slowed considerably by the first quarter.

iPhone 6 shipments shouldn't be underestimated though. iPhone sales grew 40 per cent year-on-year and researchers at IDC noted a remarkable 63 per cent growth in emerging markets, despite the device's comparable high cost.

Anthony Scarsella, research manager with IDC's mobile phone team, explained that despite soaring demand for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Samsung managed to edge ahead. "Samsung's shipments, given that the S6 was not launched into the market for the full quarter, were driven by large volumes into emerging markets and steady demand for its midrange and lower-priced smartphones," he said.

Melissa Chau, senior research manager with IDC's mobile device tracker team, added: "Through the rest of this year, we expect all vendors to be squeezed on falling ASPs, while at the high end it will be a battle between the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge from Samsung versus continued demand for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus."

Other notable insights from the study include Lenovo's stabilisation as third in the mobile shipment charts thanks to its acquisition of Motorola. Huawei also managed to sustain its position at number four, with its mid-range and high-end models accounting for a third of its shipments.

LG returned to number five with successes in the US for its L and F series devices.

Overall sales were up year-on-year in the quarter, but were down compared to Q4 2014. In total, 336.5 million smartphones were shipped worldwide in the first quarter of 2015, up 16.7 per cent from the 288.5 million units in Q1 2014. In Q4 2014, 377.5 million units were shipped.

Data volumes created by the Internet of Things (IoT) means businesses must invest in datacentres as a priority, analyst firm IDC has warned.

The research firm thinks workloads will increase by 750 per cent in the next four years and this will put immense strain on existing infrastructure.

Rick Villars, vice president, datacentre and cloud at IDC, said: "Equal, or even greater, investments in the IoT platform services residing in the datacenter will be instrumental in delivering the IoT promise of anytime, anywhere, anyhow connectivity and context.

"Given the number of devices connected and the amount of data generated, businesses must focus on their IoT service platform requirements at the level of the datacenter itself, not just the individual servers or storage devices."

Additionally, IDC said in its Impact of Internet of Things on Datacentre Demand and Operations study that all this extra data will need to be analysed, placing analytics at the heart of hyperscale datacentres.

As the IoT emerges as the leading driver of new compute/storage deployments, enterprises and service providers are most are likely to feel the burden of establishing new ways of managing devices and the data the IoT will generate.

However, IDC thinks service providers will adopt IoT technologies and services to better monitor and manage their own datacentre assets, providing a great opportunity for the sector.

In January, Ofcom and the government announced they would develop guidelines to regulate the IoT. The two think the number of devices classed as IoT will carry out more than a billion transactions every day by 2022.

Working together, they are attempting to address other concerns caused by this influx of new devices, including freeing up spectrum on which they can operate.

After a turbulent 2014, Juniper Networks’ (NYSE:JNPR) CEO Rami Rahim has promised “no more transformations” at the networking vendor, and will instead focus on innovation and driving top line growth.

Last year the networking vendor was forced to exit the application delivery controller business, cut six percent of its workforce and offload its mobile security division, Junos Pulse, to a private equity firm in June, enabling it to hone its cloud and ‘High IQ’ networks concept.

CEO Shaygan Kheradpir also parted ways with the vendor after less than a year in the role, to be replaced by 18-year Juniper veteran Rahim in November 2014.

Now, Rahim (pictured) maintains that the upheaval has been replaced with pursuing a goal of being “a worldwide leader in network innovation”.

Speaking at Juniper’s Innovation Showcase at the vendor’s Sunnyvale HQ, he explained: “Last year was a year of very significant change for the company, and it wasn’t easy. It was a year of aligning our strategy, of restructuring, of extracting inefficiencies that existed in the company. But we’ve merged from that and...I feel extremely good about our position right now.”

He continued: “Because I was part of the leadership team, I was very much involved in the massive transformations this company underwent last year. I don’t want to go through another set of massive transformations; we’ve already restructured, we’ve realigned our strategy, I’m very happy with all of that.

“Last year was around cost efficiencies and streamlining the company...Now it’s about executing on that strategy and achieving top line growth.”

Rahim also admitted the firm has struggled to tell its story around emerging technologies. However, the firm used the event this week to lift the curtain on a number of new high performance switches, routers and security products that it claims deliver “unprecedented levels of network performance, automation and scale”.

“We want to stay simplified in how we build products and also we enable the channel can address a broad a market as possible with a common and consistent portfolio,” said Juniper’s head of development and innovation, Jonathan Davidson.

Rahim too, sees the channel as instrumental in delivering the solutions. “We have a highly-focused strategy, we must rely on our partners to complete our solutions and help us deliver those solutions to a wider set of customers around the world. They are an integral part of what we do here at Juniper.”

The CEO said he is excited about the direction of the company, telling attendees at the event this week: “After 18 years here, Juniper isn’t start-up anymore, but it certainly feels like that right now. It feels like we are as innovative as a start-up.”

Juniper Networks: “Hell-bent on channel strategy”

The commercial market for tablets is expected to reach more than 11m units by 2019 in Western Europe.

According to figures published by analyst firm IDC, the market would see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 130 percent over the next four years, making the area a “significant opportunity for device makers”. This is despite the analysts registering the first year-on-year decline for tablets in the last quarter of 2014.

While sales volumes stagnated last year, the enterprise market is expected to thrive this year with lower prices and more innovative features introduced into tablets.

According to the firm’s latest survey of tablets in enterprises, their adoption rate is expected to double between 2014 and 2015 and to grow significantly until the end of the forecast period.

“Tablets are used in companies of all sizes,” says Chrystelle Labesque, research manager, IDC EMEA Personal Computing. “While the first perception might have been that tablets were entering enterprises mostly as employees were bringing in their own devices, the reality is that more than two-thirds of the enterprises surveyed in France, Germany, and UK have already deployed tablets.”

IDC said that tablets that doubled up as laptops were meeting productivity needs as well as improving battery life was helping to increase penetration of the devices into corporate and SMB areas.

It also said the launch of Windows 10 will help “facilitate the integration of the device as a notebook replacement, additional mobile device, or computing device in the new era of digital processing”. The analyst firm noted that Apple’s partnership with IBM and Google’s Android for Work were indications of the growing relevance of tablets in enterprises.

“Increasing employees' productivity is the main driver behind tablet adoption in enterprises,” says Marta Fiorentini, senior research analyst, IDC EMEA Personal Computing.

“As more companies embrace digital transformation and their workforce become increasingly mobile, tablets have clearly emerged as a winning form factor to provide computing power for new users and processes in enterprises. The commercial segment is therefore expected to grow significantly in the coming quarters. This will support overall market stabilisation in 2015 and will drive tablet penetration further and beyond the forecast period.”

A discrepancy has emerged between Gartner and IDC's views on the Q4 performance of the PC sector, although both crowned a Chinese manufacturer the market leader.

Gartner's figures suggest 83.7 million PCs were sold during the final quarter of 2014, which is one per cent higher than the number shipped in Q4 2014.

IDC, meanwhile, claims PC sales were actually down 2.4 per cent during the last three months of 2014 compared to the previous year, and that a little over 80 million units were sold.

As a result, Gartner said the PC market's Q4 performance showed a "slow, but consistent improvement following more than two years of decline".

IDC's summary is markedly starker and stated: "The final quarter... marked the end of yet another difficult year the third consecutive year with overall volumes declining."

The difference in figures can be attributed to the subtle variations in what devices both analyst houses include in their PC market trackers.

For example, IDC excludes handheld PCs or tablets (including Windows or Android models sporting detachable keyboards). Conversely, Gartner does include sales of Windows-based tablets in its market data, but not Chromebooks.

Despite this, there were a couple of areas in the results that both analysts agreed on, including the ongoing strength of the US PC market and that Lenovo is the manufacturer to beat across the globe.

Rajani Singh, senior research analyst for personal computing at IDC, said: "The US PC market continued to grow in the fourth quarter, outperforming the global market for the tenth consecutive quarter."

This is a trend IDC predicts will continue, thanks in no small part to the 2015 release of the Windows 10 operating system.

"The US consumer PC market will finally move to positive growth in 2015, strengthened by the slowdown in the tablet market, vendor and OEM efforts to rejuvenate the PC market, the launch of Windows 10, and replacement of older PCS," Singh added.

One area flagged by Gartner where PC sales seem to be flagging was emerging markets, which the analyst attributes to the popularity of smartphones and tablets.

Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said: "Mature regions show an ongoing trend of positive growth, but emerging markets remain weak.

"We attribute this weakness to a strong affinity for smartphones and tablets in those markets, while PCs are a low priority."

"Even low-priced notebooks struggle to succeed, because of the different mobile device usage patterns," Kitagawa added.

Despite holding on to its market-leading position, Apple tablet shipments have started to slow down and overall Android is the dominant OS, according to IDC.

Apple shipped 16.4 million iPads, down 16.1 per cent year-on-year, when the firm shipped 19.5 million units.

Shipments were also down by 10 million over the previous quarter, when Apple sold 26 million units, but this was the busy Christmas period.

Samsung remains a strong challenger, having shipped 11.2 million tablets in Q1. This was up 32 per cent on Q1 2013, when the South Korean vendor managed to sell 8.5 million units.

However, Chinese hardware vendor Lenovo experienced the biggest shipment growth (224.3 per cent) between Q1 2013 and this year, having shipped 2.1 million tablets.

Overall, Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst for IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, said despite Apple being in pole position with its iOS devices Android remains the dominant OS.

"With roughly two-thirds share, Android continues to dominate the market," he said.

"Although its share of the market remains small, Windows devices continue to gain traction thanks to sleeper hits like the Asus T100, whose low cost and 2-in-1 form factor appeal to those looking for something that's good enough'."

The tablet market is in for a tough year, with IDC data confirming that first quarter shipments were way down across the globe.

According to the latest version of the analyst house's Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, Q1 saw a marked slowdown in shipments for devices regardless of the operating system used and their screen size.

As a result, IDC said the signs suggest 2014 could turn out to be "an even more challenging year ahead" for the tablet market.

The number of devices shipped was up 3.9 per cent on last year, with 50.4 million tablets shifted during the first three months of 2014.

Tom Mainelli, IDC programme vice president of devices and displays, said lengthy tablet refresh cycles were partly to blame for the slowdown.

"The rise of large-screen phones and consumers who are holding on to their existing tablets for ever longer periods of time were both contributing factors to a weaker-than-anticipated quarter for tablets and 2-in-1s," he said.

"In addition, commercial growth has not been robust enough to offset the slowing of consumer shipments."

Global smartphone shipments topped the one billion unit mark for the first time ever in 2013, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

The market watcher's figures revealed that 1,004.2 million smartphones shipped in 2013, which is 38.4 per cent higher than in 2012 when 725.3 million units shipped.

During the fourth quarter of 2013, the number of smartphones shipped was up 24.2 per cent on the previous year and reached 284.4 million units.

Samsung continued to lead the smartphone market in 2013, and has maintained a double-digit lead over its nearest competitor Apple, thanks to the continued demand for its S3 and S4 devices.

Apple, meanwhile, notched up a record number of shipments during Q4, as the launch-day momentum of its iPhone 5S and 5C models continued on in to the next quarter.

Huawei, Lenovo and LG made up the rest of IDC's top five smartphone vendors.

Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC's mobile phone team, said the figures are a testament to the continued popularity of smartphones.

"Total smartphone shipments reached 494.4 million units worldwide in 2011, and doubling that volume in just two years demonstrates strong end-user demand and vendor strategies to highlight smartphones," said Llamas.

In the mobile phone market (inclusive of smartphones), a grand total of 1,821 million units shipped in 2013. This was up 4.8 per cent from 1,738 million units in 2012.

Smartphones accounted for 55.1 per cent of all mobile phone shipments in 2013, up from 41.7 per cent the previous year.

Ryan Reith, programme director for IDC's worldwide quarterly mobile phone tracker, much of the growth in the smartphone sector has been driven by large screens and low cost.

"Of the two, I have to say that low cost is the key difference maker. Cheap devices are not the attractive segment that normally grabs headlines, but IDC data shows this is the portion of the market that is driving volume," said Reith.

"Markets like China and India are quickly moving toward a point where sub-$150 smartphones are the majority of shipments, bringing a solid computing experience to the hands of many."

The market for 3D printers will grow tenfold over the next four years, according to predictions from research firm IDC.

The analysts said that the technology will move out of its niche markets and become mainstream as firms begin to recognise and embrace the manufacturing and cost benefits of it.

IDC said that the worldwide 3D printer market will experience tremendous unit and revenue growth from 2012 to 2017, with compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) of 59 per cent and 29 per cent, respectively.

"While traditional print technologies are facing maturity, 3D printers will see worldwide unit shipments grow by 10 times over the forecast period, and worldwide hardware value will more than double in the short term," said Keith Kmetz, IDC vice president of imaging, printing and document solutions.

The firm said that 3D printing was an "incredible opportunity" that has gone beyond hobbyists to being regularly used by a number of industries. In addition to general manufacturing and R&D applications, 3D print is also finding use in aerospace, automotive, education, dental, jewellry, medical, and recreation vertical industries.

The report said that traditional vendors are "increasingly seeing 3D printing as an opportunity". It said that HP is preparing to enter the market in the middle of next year, and Konica Minolta is about to sign a US agreement to distribute a leading manufacturer's 3D printers. It said that a number of other vendors were eyeing up opportunities to get into the 3D market.

As reported by IT Pro, scientists have developed a low-cost open source 3D metal printer that could make metal tools and components far more cheaply than current methods. The printer was developed by a team at the Michigan Technological University with parts costing less than $1,500.

Worldwide tablet shipments grew to 47.6 million units in the third quarter of 2013 according to preliminary data from IDC.

While slightly below the firm's forecast, the number still represents 7.0 per cent growth over the previous quarter, and 36.7 per cent growth compared to the third quarter of 2012.

Android products once again drove much of the growth in the market as iOS growth stalled and Windows tablets continued to struggle to win over consumers.

With no new iPad product launches in the second or third quarter to drive volume, Apple experienced a quarter-over-quarter decline in shipments from 14.6 million in 2Q13 to 14.1 million in 3Q13. Year over year, iPad shipments grew less than one percent. Apple's slowing growthcaused in part by its decision in late 2012 to move its product launches from earlier in the year to the fourth quarterhas caused the company's tablet market share to slip to 29.6 per cent, its lowest share to date.

However, with the new iPad Air shipping November 1 and the refreshed iPad mini with Retina scheduled to roll out later in November, IDC expects Apple to enjoy robust shipment growth during the fourth quarter.

"With two 7.9-inch models starting at $299 and $399, and two 9.7-inch models starting at $399 and $499, Apple is taking steps to appeal to multiple segments," comments Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst with IDC's Tablet Tracker.

"While some undoubtedly hoped for more aggressive pricing from Apple, the current prices clearly reflect Apple's ongoing strategy to maintain its premium status. It's worth noting that Apple wasn't the only one to increase the price of its small-sized tablet during this product cycle: Both Google and Amazon increased the price of their newest 7-inch tablets from $199 to $229 to cover the higher costs associated with high resolution screens and better processors."

Samsung once again secured the second position with shipments of about 9.7 million units. The company, which owes a measure of its tablet success to its ability to bundle them with other successful Samsung products, such as smartphones and televisions, grabbed 20.4 per cent of the worldwide market.

ASUS, which makes the Nexus 7 for Google, shipped about 3.5 million total units during the quarter for a third place finish and 7.4 per cent market share. PC powerhouse Lenovo moved into the number four tablet spot with shipments of 2.3 million units and a 4.8 per cent share. Finally, Acer rounded out the top five with 1.2 million units shipped and a 2.5 per cent share.

Notably, vendors from outside the top five were responsible for more than a third of the shipments in 3Q13. IDC tracks dozens of tablet vendors, and this quarter "Others" represents a combination of major vendors (such as Amazon, Microsoft, HP, and Dell) and lesser-known, so-called white box vendors that typically sell ultra-low cost Android devices at often unsustainably low margins.

"White box tablet shipments continue to constitute a fairly large percentage of the Android devices shipped into the market," says Tom Mainelli, research director, Tablets at IDC. "These low cost Android-based products make tablets available to a wider market of consumers, which is good.

"However, many use cheap parts and non Google-approved versions of Android that can result in an unsatisfactory customer experience, limited usage, and very little engagement with the ecosystem. Android's growth in tablets has been stunning to watch, but shipments alone won't guarantee long-term success. For that you need a sustainable hardware business model, a healthy ecosystem for developers, and happy end users."

In his keynote at last month's Canalys Channels Forum, CEO Steve Brazier said predicted that Google Android would become the operating system of choice within the enterprise.

"It's mainly consumer today but with such dramatic numbers shipping, it's just a matter of time," he commented.

Nearly two million cloud-related jobs went unfilled last year, because IT pros lacked the experience and skills needed to do them.

That's according to a recent study by IDC and Microsoft into the impact cloud computing is having on the global employment market, which featured responses from 600 HR managers from across the globe.

The report's findings suggest cloud is going to be responsible for driving "almost all" of the growth within the IT jobs market over the next three years, as adoption of the technology continues to take-off.

However, it is feared increasing numbers of these jobs could go unfilled, unless IT pros make more of an effort to get trained up and gain experience in cloud technologies.

Speaking at the Microsoft TechEd conference in New Orleans, the software giant's director of learning, Ken Rosen, explained: "In that study we asked how many of [the HR manager's] open roles [in the cloud] remained unfilled...and IDC concluded there are 1.7m jobs that have been posted and gone unfilled over the past year."

When asked what skills were in shortest supply, the study's respondents said they were struggling to find people who could assess the risk associated with moving to the cloud, and the impact this would have on IT service management.

They also cited difficulties in finding candidates that could create cloud migration plans.

"What's the common theme among all these? They are not low-level implementation skills," said Rosen.

"They are not installation, configuration-type things. These are sophisticated skills that are very difficult to tease out during an interview process."

HR managers may need to rethink the recruitment criteria they use when it comes to hiring cloud professionals, suggested Rosen, to ensure more of these vacancies get filled in future.

"There are not a lot of people out there today that have experience and proof of experience [in cloud technologies]," he said.

"So what we're seeing now is a resurgence of interest in training and certification in the IT field, particularly around cloud-related skills."

More bad news for the PC market; tablet shipments will outstrip those of portable PCs this year – and are set to outpace the entire PC market (portables and desktops) by 2015.

According to IDC, tablet shipments are expected to grow 58.7 percent year over year in 2013 reaching 229.3m units, up from 144.5m units last year.

“What started as a sign of tough economic times has quickly shifted to a change in the global computing paradigm with mobile being the primary benefactor,” explains Ryan Reith, program manager for IDC's Mobility Trackers.

“Tablets surpassing portables in 2013, and total PCs in 2015, marks a significant change in consumer attitudes about compute devices and the applications and ecosystems that power them. IDC continues to believe that PCs will have an important role in this new era of computing, especially among business users. But for many consumers, a tablet is a simple and elegant solution for core use cases that were previously addressed by the PC.”

While Apple has been at the forefront of the tablet revolution, the current market expansion has been increasingly fuelled by low-cost Android devices.

In 2013, the worldwide average selling price (ASP) for tablets is expected to decline -10.8 percent to $381. In comparison, the ASP of a PC in 2013 is nearly double that at $635. IDC expects tablet prices to decline further, which will allow vendors to deliver a viable computing experience into the hands of many more people at price points the PC industry has strived to meet for years.

“Apple’s success in the education market has proven that tablets can be used as more than just a content consumption or gaming device," says Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst for the Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. “These devices are learning companions, and as tablet prices continue to drop, the dream of having a PC for every child gets replaced with the reality that we can actually provide a tablet for every child.”

In addition to lower prices, another major shift in the tablet market has occurred around screen sizes. Apple’s first generation iPad, which included a 9.7-inch display, was perceived by many as the sweet spot for tablets. That is, until 7-inch Android-based tablets began to gain traction in the market. Apple responded with the iPad mini in the fourth quarter of 2012, and in the space of two quarters the sub-8-inch category exploded to overtake the larger-sized segment in terms of total shipments.

In the UK media tablets have continued to display double-digit growth in both volume and value terms. In April 2013, the product category grew 24 percent in value in comparison to the same time last year and now accounts for 35 percent of all the IT spending through retail, according to research from GfK.

Market watcher IDC has slashed its 2013 IT spending growth forecast, driven in part by the continued decline in PC shipments.

The analyst house said IT spending during the second half of 2012 and first quarter of 2013 fell below market expectations, with many IT vendors reporting problems closing deals.

This it blamed on a mix of global economic problems, including the ongoing European debt crisis, which had left many firms unwilling to invest as much as previously forecast on IT.

As a result, IDC has revised down its worldwide IT spending growth forecast from 5.5 per cent to 4.9 per cent for 2013.

As well as the uncertain global economic landscape, IDC said the decision to downgrade its spending forecast had been "largely driven" by the rapid decline in PC shipments since the second half of 2012.

This is a trend IDC expects to continue, with PC spending expected to fall by three per cent this year, which would make 2013 the third successive year of declining PC revenues.

As stated in previous reports from IDC and fellow market watcher Gartner, the ongoing decline in PC shipments has been largely attributed to the increasing popularity of tablets and smartphones.

"The shift to mobile devices remains a key driver for overall tech spending growth," said IDC in a statement.

"Excluding mobile phones and tablets, worldwide IT spending increased by only 2.8 per cent in 2012 and is forecast to grow by just 2.6 per cent this year,

"Worldwide spending on smartphones will increase by 17 per cent in 2013 while tablet spending will grow by 32 per cent," it continued.

It's not just the PC sales that are being affected by the emergence of newer technologies, as the rise of cloud is also taking its toll on commercial software and IT services sales, said IDC.

"Just as tablets are cannibalising PC spending, so the growth of cloud services continues to cannibalise commercial software and IT services.

"IT services demand remains stable, but the pass-through from capital spending and software deployment remains tepid by historical standards."

Stephen Minton, vice president of IDC's Global Technology and Industry Research Organisation, said the cannibalisation trend has accelerated over the past two quarters.

"The trickle of substitution is becoming a flood, as many organisations look for ways to do more with less in the context of an uncertain economy in which CFOs are attempting to protect profitability by limiting the size of budget increases," said Minton.

"Just as outsourcing got its boost from the 2001 recession, and virtualisation from the financial crisis of 2009, low-cost mobile devices and the cloud are being partly driven by the willingness of businesses to look for new ways of getting things done in return for improvements in efficiency," he added.

Minton also flagged Western Europe as one of the worst areas for IT spending, while emerging markets were hailed as the "engines for growth" when it comes to driving up investments in IT.

"Our surveys confirm that underlying demand for IT products and services remains strong, but that businesses [are] being forced to delay new projects or investments in the face of longer decision-making cycles and a lack of short-term visibility," he said.

"This storm could pass quickly, if governments in the US, Europe, China and Japan succeed in steering their ships towards calm waters in the second half of the year."

Storage giant EMC has hailed the emergence of an object storage-based platform that will underpin the rollout of a new generation of cloud-based applications.

This "third platform" theme was touched on by several speakers on the first day of EMC World in Las Vegas, the storage vendor's annual worldwide partner and customer event.

The phrase was originally coined by market watcher IDC, who used it to describe the "convergence of disruptive IT trends" such as mobile, cloud services, mobile broadband networks, big data analytics and social technologies.

This will result in the creation of new cloud-hosted applications, accessed primarily through mobile devices that will be used by millions of people, it was claimed at the event.

According to figures quoted by EMC, there were around six million of these types of applications in 2012, a figure that is expected to rise to around 48 million by 2016.

David Goulden, chief operating officer and president of EMC, briefly discussed the trend during the opening keynote of EMC World 2013.

He said most of the applications we use today, from the likes of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, are built on the so-called "second platform", and based on older programming languages.

"How organisations tap into that [third platform] opportunity, [will need to be done] in a way that allows them to leverage their existing technology investments. That is going to be key," he added.

Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations and marketing at EMC, keenly stressed during a separate media presentation that these second generation apps will still be with us for a long time to come.

In fact, according to the same set of figures trotted out by EMC, the number of second platform applications is expected to grow from 83 million in 2012 to 141 million in 2016.

"Most people in IT these days, their businesses have been built on this second platform," he said.

"Now, we don't see the second platform going away any time soon, but over the next couple of years we [will see a] new platform and ecosystem emerging called the third platform.

"The opportunity and challenge [for businesses] is to be relevant in the world of the third platform," he added.

Former VMware CEO Paul Maritz, who was recently installed as the chief executive of EMC-backed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) player Pivotal, also flagged the notion of the third platform during the opening keynote.

"Everything we do is in support of applications [because] they're what deliver the experience to customers, enable new business models," said Maritz.

"We're about to see a golden age of new generation of applications that will allow amazing things to be done," he concluded.

The growing popularity of tablet devices is continuing to take its toll on the rest of the PC market, with shipments across EMEA down 20.2 per cent on last year.

IDC's EMEA-wide quarterly PC market tracker revealed that 21.8 million PC units were shifted in the first quarter of 2013.

Portable PCs accounted for 13.6 million of the devices shipped in Q1, while the remainder (8.3 million) were desktop PCs. Both product types chalked up double digit declines compared to last year.

The market watcher attributed much of this slump on the continued popularity of tablet devices, as well as the introduction of austerity measures across several vertical markets.

"Tablets and phones continued to capture customer attention and spending in the corporate space decelerated renewals and the lack or delay in IT investment directly impacted commercial results," said IDC in a statement.

"The public and education sectors across most countries also remained under pressure, announcing further cuts and austerity measures, adversely impacting PC demand."

However, Chrystelle Labesque, research manager for personal computing in EMEA at IDC, said there were some positives to be taken from the results.

"While the PC market continues to suffer from a shift to other devices, the current market expansion to a larger product portfolio and higher number of devices per person continues to support an increase in overall spending on total client devices, which grew by 15 per cent in 2012 and will remain at double-digits in 1Q13," she said.

The release of Windows 8 also failed to jumpstart PC sales during Q1, with IDC pinpointing to the high cost of the touch-based devices needed to get the most out of the new OS.

"The PC market is in a transition phase with a larger than ever choice in devices, form factors, and various operating system options," said Labesque.

"New notebook technologies such as touch or ultrabook generate a lot of interest and traction, but high price points prompt many consumers or businesses to hold onto their current system longer."

From a vendor perspective, Lenovo faired the best, emerging as the only PC manufacturer to report growth during Q1.

The vendor's shipments were up 11 per cent, helping the Chinese firm accrue market share across all sub-regions and cement its position as EMEA's number two PC maker.

HP held on to its market leading position, despite seeing a drop in share from 21.7 per cent in Q1 2012 to 18.5 per cent in Q1 2013.

Microsoft needs to take urgent action to bolster Windows 8's appeal to PC buyers and end industry speculation about the latest version of its flagship operating system being a flop.

Since the product's release in October 2012, speculation about how users would take to the operating system's revamped interface has been rife.

Especially as the release saw Microsoft replace the Start Menu with a new touch- and tile-centric Start Screen, known as Modern UI, and introduce a gesture-based navigation style.

To date there have been numerous reports about how the product has fared in the market, with analyst Context recently reporting a lack of interest in Windows 8 from business users, while Microsoft claims its sales are on a par with Windows 7.

IDC's latest market tracker data tells a different story, with the analyst claiming Windows 8 has actually deterred would-be buyers from purchasing new PCs during the first quarter of 2013.

The operating system was also cited by the market watcher as major contributor to the massive year-on-year drop in worldwide PC sales recorded during Q1, which has been described by the analyst as the steepest it has ever seen.

Part of the problem with Windows 8 is that users fear they need a touchscreen PC to make the most of the operating system's features, but the high price of devices puts them off, IDC said.

"People think they have to have touch, and they go look at the price points for these touch machines, and they are above where they want to be and they say, I guess I'll wait', " said IDC analyst Bob O'Donnell in a Reuters report.

The new-look interface is also off-putting for users, added Jay Chou, senior research analyst at IDC.

"Users are finding Windows 8 to offer a compromised experience that doesn't excel either as a new mobile interface or in a classic desktop interface," he said.

"As a result, many users find a decline in the traditional PC experience without gaining much from new features like touch."

Window of opportunityThe release of a new Windows operating system has traditionally given the PC market a boost, so Windows 8's affect on the market is bound to fuel opinions the product is on course to become a flop.

A little intervention on Microsoft's part could put paid to that, said Clive Longbottom, service director at market watcher Quocirca, but the software giant will need to move fast.

"Unlike [the era of] Windows Vista, where Microsoft still had a stranglehold on a growing PC market and so could afford to have another go, Windows 8 is now fighting in a multi-fronted war on tablets and smartphones," Longbottom told IT Pro.

"Microsoft will retain its stranglehold on the PC market, but the PC market is shrinking and it has to rethink its strategy and quick."

To regain some of this lost ground, Microsoft needs to make Windows 8 a more appealing proposition for business users as a matter of priority, suggested Longbottom.

"Getting businesses to deploy Windows 8 as a direct functional replacement for Windows 7 would be a great start...but this would mean providing the means for businesses to go straight through to the traditional desktop [and bypass the Modern UI], but Microsoft seems to be against this on principle," he said.

"The problem is Windows 8 Modern UI is not a business front end, and with the vast majority of apps that businesses want to run still operating in the traditional desktop, Microsoft really has messed up by not allowing users to bypass it," he said.

Meanwhile, Richard Holway, chairman of UK analyst house TechMarketView, said Microsoft should have followed Apple's lead and offered users a choice of operating system styles depending on the type of device they are using.

"This is where Microsoft has made a big mistake by insisting you have the same interface on both [a tablet and a traditional PC]," he told IT Pro.

"I think you should have horses for courses and the standard Windows interface is fine for everything I want to do of a serious [corporate nature on a laptop] and then I'll have a different interface for everything else...which is precisely what Apple has done."

Therefore, he thinks Microsoft should consider introducing a feature that gives Windows 8 users a choice of interfaces when they start their machines.

"They should have done that from the start... and I understand that you can reconfigure the laptop to look like a Windows 7 machine, but you need a bit of knowledge to do that and not many people can be bothered," he said.

However, he warned people against seizing on comments made by the likes of IDC to "forecast the demise" of Microsoft, but said he doubts Windows 8 will be enough to regain the ground it's already lost to its rivals.

"Windows 8 will do, but it's not going to be the rocket that fires Microsoft up there overtaking the Androids and the Apples of this world," he said

"I honestly believe, and I'm not forecasting their demise, but there is nothing I see in Microsoft at the moment that suggests they're going to be reborn and regain their past glories," Holway concluded.

IT Pro contacted Microsoft for comment on this story, but had not received a response by the time of publication.

IDC has warned that the slowdown in Chinese PC sales during February will have an adverse effect on the first quarter performance of the worldwide PC market.

The market watcher claims China experienced slower than expected PC market growth last month, which means the Q1 worldwide shipment figures are likely to be two per cent lower than forecasted.

Global PC shipments were expected to decline by 7.7 per cent during Q1, but a double digit-sized slump is more likely now, IDC revealed.

China's influence on the global PC market can be attributed to the fact it is now the world's largest PC market, accounting for more than 21 per cent of global shipments during 2012.

The timing of this year's Chinese New Year, which fell in early February, as well as government budget cuts and the introduction of new anti-corruption measures have been blamed by IDC for the slow growth.

The analyst house also disclosed that market performance in other regions during the early months of 2013 has been "close-to-forecast", although "supply chain data indicates room for a slightly larger downward adjustment," the company added.

Loren Loverde, programme vice president for worldwide PC trackers at IDC, said a modest Q1 decline had been expected, as vendors continue to get to grips with the launch of Windows 8.

"However, our February monthly data suggest that we could see a drop touching double-digits in the first quarter and a mid-single-digit decline in the second quarter before we see any recovery in the second half of the year," Loverde warned.

"Even getting to positive growth in the second half of 2013 will take some attractive new PC designs and more competitive pricing relative to tablets and other products," he added.

Android tablet shipments will overtake the iPad this year for the first time, as Apple loses mobile market share to its rivals, claims research house IDC.

A growing variety of smaller and cheaper Android tablets from Google to Amazon will catch on this year with more consumers and chip away at Apple's dominance since the first iPad launched in 2010, the analyst said.

iPad and iPhone shipments are expected to keep growing at enviable rates, but arch-rival Samsung Electronics and others have hurt Apple with a combination of savvy marketing, greater variety and rapid technology adoption.

On Thursday, Samsung takes the wraps off the fourth generation of its flagship Galaxy, the smartphone that helped the South Korean giant knock the iPhone off its top ranking for part of last year.

A growing perception that the company co-founded by Steve Jobs may be losing its competitive edge has weighed on its shares, which have lost more than a third of their value since hitting a high in September.

In the latest criticism from Wall Street, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek on Tuesday compared Apple to Blackberry saying the iPhone is now on the defensive against Samsung's devices.

"Historically when handset makers fall out of favour they fall faster/further than expected," Misek said.

Now, IDC claims Apple may begin losing some its lead on tablets as well, though it remains the top seller among manufacturers.

iPad shipments are expected to account for 46 per cent of the tablet market in 2013, down from 51 per cent last year, IDC said. Devices running Android are expected to grow their market share to 49 percent this year from 42 percent last year.

Google's Nexus 7 tablet and Amazon.com Inc's Kindle, which uses its own customization of Android, made major inroads with consumers last year. In November, Apple launched its own foray into smaller-sized tablets with the iPad mini.

"One in every two tablets shipped this quarter was below 8 inches in screen size. And in terms of shipments, we expect smaller tablets to continue growing in 2013 and beyond," said IDC.

Samsung has overtaken Apple to lead the connected devices market, after shipping more smartphones and portable PCs during 2012 than its arch-rival.

This is according to IDC's latest Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker report, which claims shipments were up 28.3 per cent on 2011 during the fourth quarter and totalled 367.7 million units.

The market watcher's connected device tracker logs shipments for desktop and portable PCs, as well as smartphones and tablets each quarter.

In keeping with the reports of other industry analysts, the firm recorded year-on-year declines in desktop and portable PC shipments (of 4.1 and 3.4 per cent, respectively), while tablet and smartphones sales continued to soar.

Tablets experienced the largest year-on-year growth of all the devices tracked by the IDC report, and were up 78.4 per cent on 2011, while smartphones accounted for just over 60 per cent of all the smart devices shipped in 2012.

Ryan Reith, programme manager of IDC's Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers, said PC sales are being affected by falling tablet prices and the relative disposability of smart devices.

"Smartphones and tablets are growing at a pace that PCs can't realistically keep up with because of device prices and to some extent disposability," said Reith.

"The average selling price for a tablet declined 15 per cent in 2012 to $461 and we expect that trend to continue in 2013."

From a vendor perspective, Samsung managed to usurp Apple as the leader of the connected device market and shipped 250 million PCs, tablets, and smartphones over the past 12 months.

This was 119.3 per cent higher than the number shipped during 2011, and was driven primarily by its success in the smartphone market.

The firm shifted more smartphones and portable PCs than its rival during 2012, but Apple shipped more tablets.

In terms of market share, Apple's has remained largely the same since Q4 2011 at around 20 per cent, while Samsung's has risen from 14.6 to 21.2 per cent over the same time period.

Trailing behind Samsung and Apple is Lenovo in third place with 6.5 per cent share.

The Chinese vendor shipped 30 million portable PCs in 2012, but has seen its smartphone shipments steadily increase by around 20 million units from 3.7 million in 2011.

Hardware giants HP and Dell both paid the price, in market share terms, for their deficiencies in the tablet and smartphone department, with both reporting slumps.

However, Bob O'Donnell, programme vice president for clients and displays at IDC, said Apple regained a lot of lost ground against Samsung during Q4.

"After falling well behind Samsung early in 2012, Apple came roaring back in final quarter of the year thanks to its latest hits the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini and reduced the market share gap to less than a single percentage point.

"The question moving forward will be whether or not Apple can maintain its hit parade against the juggernaut of Samsung," he added.

US backup and recovery firm Unitrends has outlined its plans for expansion in Europe.

With London set to serve as the company’s satellite headquarters, Unitrends CEO Mike Coney last week visited the capital to interview for the role of UK-based European general manager to oversee operations.

The firm’s first step has been to appoint distributor e92plus, which is currently orchestrating a channel recruitment campaign for the vendor. Coney says e92plus is “very motivated” to drive business for Unitrends – particularly after it parted ways with backup rival Barracuda last month.

“Partnering with Unitrends was an easy decision for us,” says Mukesh Gupta, MD at e92plus, citing the vendor’s “simple and affordable” backup and recovery technology that protects data across hybrid environments. “We knew this was a partnership that would benefit our resellers tenfold.”

Coney hopes to get European resellers on board with what he describes as “chunky margins, a good, robust deal registration, and a unique partner loyalty programme.”

In some cases partners can make up to 40 percent on the MSRP, which is protected with a deal registration programme and partners that don’t register a deal can expect to make 5 – 10 percent.

“[The channel programme] is not tired or based on volume; partners don’t need to jump through hoops. We want to make it really simple,” says the CEO. “We’re still not well known so we’re building the brand.”

Unitrends’ portfolio of backup and recovery products includes the Recovery Series of physical appliances that support up to 97 TB of raw capacity, and its software-only virtual appliance, Unitrends Enterprise Backup.

Coney is confident of customer uptake, referring to the rapidly growing market for purpose-built backup appliances (PBBAs), where IDC expects worldwide revenue to total nearly $5.9bn by the end of 2016.

2012 was the company’s best performing year to date, posting 88 percent growth in the US. Coney says he anticipates similar results this year, and expects Europe to be the firm’s fastest growing geography. He says the UK should also play a big part: “It should represent 15–20 percent of our overall revenues,” he maintains.

The firm is eyeing a “controlled” growth strategy for now, with the next round of hires to include a country manger, and a dedicated channel management team. Also looking ahead, the CEO says he wants to avoid over-distribution: “We need one, but don’t need five [distributors],” he says. “We’ll maybe add one more big name,” he said, adding he was a “fan” of Tech Data.

The firm is expected to release details of further partner benefits in the next few days.

The new Windows 8 system is off to a "solid" start and should get a boost in sales over the next few months as new touch-screen devices hit the market, Microsoft has claimed.

The flagship product of the world's largest software company, launched on 26 October, has not set the technology world on fire. By early January, it had sold more than 60 million units, on par with the release of Windows 7 three years before.

"We're only just getting started, there's a lot yet to come," said Tami Reller, chief financial officer of the Windows unit, in an interview at Microsoft's campus near Seattle.

This is a solid start and we have a lot of reasons to be optimistic.

"Touch laptops and convertibles, we're really just starting to see these and over the next couple of selling seasons we'll have them across all form factors and all price ranges."

Reller highlighted new tablets from Acer and lightweight laptops from HP as machines capable of grabbing a share in a mobile computing market dominated by Apple's iPad and Google's Android.

She thinks new devices will answer demand for Windows 8 that was thwarted over the Christmas period by the scarcity of the most popular machines, partly caused by constrained supply of touch-screen components.

"At holiday there were certain devices that were limited in their volume. We sold out of a lot of the most interesting things," said Reller.

Scratch the Surface

Microsoft has still not revealed the number of Surface tablets it sold since the device's launch alongside Windows 8, but research firm IDC last week put it at 900,000. That is much lower than analysts' initial estimates and a fraction of the 23 million iPads Apple sold last quarter.

The second of two Surface devices launches this weekend in the US, running on an Intel chip and capable of running all legacy Windows programs, which might appeal more to businesses.

"You launch Excel and you can just see things fly," said Reller, who has been using a Surface Pro for the last two weeks.

A Forrester Research survey published on Monday showed that only 2 percent of "information workers" around the world are using Windows tablets for work, but 32 per cent indicated they would like one for their next work tablet, which could translate into 200 million sales of Surface and other Windows tablets.

One selling point of the Surface Pro is a full suite of Office applications, which means Microsoft can market the tablet as a fully functional PC. Microsoft has not released Office for the iPad, although many expect it will eventually.

Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting Windows 8 and Surface last quarter, but some in the PC industry have complained privately that Microsoft has not done enough to train sales people or educate consumers on the new range of devices running Windows 8.

"I think we can do better and we'll work with them (retailers) to do better," said Reller. "That's not a criticism of our retailers. But we are definitely going to do more at retail to make that experience better."

Overall, Reller was happy with progress in the 90 days or so since Windows 8 launch.

"This is a solid start. But we are just getting started," she said. "We have a lot of reasons to be optimistic."

Market watcher IDC has urged Microsoft to lower the price of its Surface RT device, if it is serious about taking the tablet market by storm.

The software giant introduced the Surface RT in October 2012, and IDC claims Microsoft has shipped 900,000 of the devices worldwide since then.

The Surface RT was initially sold through Microsoft retail stores and online outlets, which has previously been blamed by industry watchers for "modest sales" of the device.

To put those figures into context, Apple sold three million first generation iPads in the US during its first 80 days on sale in 2010.

Ryan Reith, programme manager of mobile device trackers at IDC, said Windows 8 and RT tablets failed to gain much ground during the fourth quarter of 2012.

"The reaction to the company's Surface with Windows RT tablet was muted at best...[and] we believe that Microsoft and its partners need to quickly adjust to the market realities of smaller screens and lower prices," said Reith.

"In the long run, consumers may grow to believe that high-end computing tablets with desktop operating systems are worth a higher premium than other tablets, but until then ASPs (average selling prices) on Windows 8 and Windows RT devices need to come down to drive higher volumes," he added.

Meanwhile, the analyst's Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker revealed that while Microsoft may not be taking over the tablet market just yet - companies like Samsung and Amazon.com are doing some serious damage to Apple's market share.

The IDC figures showed that Apple's market shared dropped for the second quarter in a row during Q4, dropping to 43.6 per cent in 2012 from 46.4 per cent in Q4 2011.

Tom Mainelli, research director for Tablets at IDC, said the overall tablet market is growing as predicted.

"We expected a very strong fourth quarter, and the market didn't disappoint," Mainelli continued.

"New product launches from the category's top vendors, as well as new entrant Microsoft, led to a surge in consumer interest and very robust shipments totals during the holiday season."

The launch of Windows 8 did little to arrest the slump in worldwide PC sales during the fourth quarter of 2012, as the sector reported its first year-on-year holiday season sales decline in half a decade.

This was the view put forward in the latest edition of IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, which shows that Q4 PC sales were down 6.4 per cent on last year, and topped 89.8 million units.

The sales slump was worse than anticipated, as IDC previously forecasted a 4.4 per cent fall in PC sales during Q4. This is also the first year on-year holiday season decline to blight the market in five years.

The launch of Windows 8 did not change the sluggish PC demand.

IDC attributed the results to the lacklustre economy and the growing demand for mobile devices, which the launch of Windows 8 did little to counteract.

"The quarter marked the beginning of a new stage in the PC industry with the launch of Windows 8, [but] its impact did not quickly change the sluggish PC demand, and the PC market continued to take a back seat to competing devices and sustained economic woes," said IDC in a statement.

Jay Chou, senior research analyst at IDC, said Microsoft's new flagship operating system should make a bigger contribution to PC sales in time, before accusing vendors of pushing the touchscreen capabilities of their Windows 8 devices at the expense of other features.

"Lost in the shuffle to promote a touch-centric PC, vendors have not forcefully stressed other features that promote a more secure, reliable and efficient user experience.

"As Windows 8 matures, and other corresponding variables such as Ultrabook pricing continue to drop, hopefully the PC market can see a reset in both messaging and demand in 2013."

According to the firm's vendor-by-vendor break down, HP retained its position as the PC market leader, thanks to an aggressive push on Windows 8 by the hardware giant in Asia Pacific and the US.

This was despite some fierce competition from Chinese PC vendor Lenovo, who IDC claims outperformed the rest of the market during Q4 by achieving 8 per cent growth.

Meanwhile, Dell continued to lose share, with worldwide shipments down 20 per cent on last year.

The worldwide storage software market grew by less than one per cent, according to a new IDC report.

The analyst company said that worldwide revenues increased by only 0.9 per cent over the past year. The storage software market closed the second quarter 2012 higher than compared to the same quarter last year, but only just.

EMC, IBM, and Symantec remained the top ranking storage software suppliers with 26.4 per cent, 14.7 per cent, and 14.6 per cent market shares, respectively. CommVault and EMC showed the largest organic growth during the quarter with 21.5 per cent and 7.4 per cent year over year increases.

The report found that data protection and recovery and archiving software markets were once again the two fastest growing segments with 2.4 per cent and 2.2 per cent year over year growth rates, respectively, or $1.16 billion and $404 million in total revenues.

Large enterprises contributed to the arrest in the market. Companies with more than 1,000 employees made up the biggest component of the market with $1.5 billion (926 million) in storage software investments during the quarter, but this represented a fall of one per cent compared to the same quarter a year ago.

Storage software investments made by small and medium companies countered this fall, managing to grow 5.2 per cent year over year to $574 million (354 million). Spending on storage software by governments and education also fell 1.5 per cent to $472 million (291 million).

Eric Sheppard, research director, Storage Software at IDC said the results of the second quarter were "mixed when viewed by supplier or functional market."

"Indeed, five of the top eight suppliers experienced revenue growth, but this was offset by declines within a few of the market's larger suppliers," he said.

"Most functional markets showed increased investments, but the increases were far smaller than the market had been experiencing over the past two years."

Sheppard added that these generally lower results could be partially attributed to suppressed economic growth in Europe, reduced government and education investments as well as "transitions specific to a few large suppliers."

The popularity of Android tablets in the enterprise is set to soar, as sales outstrip those of the iPad, according to a new report.

In a worldwide survey involving 3,124 IT-business decision makers, it was found that 44 per cent of first time buyers would opt for an Android tablet, while 27 per cent would choose an Apple iPad.

The research is bad news for Microsoft, with only three per cent of those polled looking for a Window 8 tablet.

The poll, conducted by research organisation IDG Connect, found that 71 per cent of respondents already owned a tablet, with just over half (51 per cent) possessing an iPad.

Among prospective buyers, preference for Android is lowest in North America (30 per cent) and Australia/New Zealand (35 per cent), but highest in Africa (44 per cent).

The exception to this developed and developing world split occurs in Europe, where only 23 per cent of non-owners plan to purchase an iPad, compared with 49 per cent who will buy an Android tablet.

Kathryn Cave, one of the report's authors, said the rise in tablet usage is "set to have a fundamental impact on IT and business over the next few years.

"These findings signify changes in work mobile consumption and market leadership in the tablet arena. They also have implications for business in emerging regions, IT security and marketers worldwide," she added.

Meanwhile, in a separate report by IDG Connect's sister company IDC, it was reported that iPad sales are increasing.

IDC forecasts tablet shipments of 107.4 million units, up from its prior target of 106.1 million. It also upped its 2013 shipment estimates to 142.8 million units from 137.4 million.

It predicts that tablet shipments will hit 222.1 million units by 2016.

In addition to increasing the unit totals for 2012, IDC also updated its forecast to shift a larger percentage of future units toward iOS and away from Android.

IDC now expects iOS to grow its share of the market from 58.2 per cent in 2011 to 62.5 per cent this year.

Meanwhile Android's share is expected to slip from 38.7 per cent in 2011 to 36.5 per cent in 2012. IDC expects third-place Blackberry to slip from 1.7 per cent to 1 per cent.

"After a very strong launch of new products in March, Apple's iPad shows few signs of slowing down," said Tom Mainelli, research director of mobile connected devices at IDC.

"The addition of the Retina Display and 4G capabilities to the third-generation products clearly enticed many current owners to upgrade. And Apple's decision to keep [the] iPad 2 in the market seems to be paying off as well.

If Apple launches a sub-$300, 7-inch product into the market later this year as rumoured, we expect the company's grip on this market to become even stronger," he added.

Windows XP users lose nearly eight hours a year to downtime and spend five times more on PC support than people running the latest version of Microsoft's operating system.

This is one of several conclusions published in a Microsoft commissioned white paper called, Mitigating Risk:Why Sticking with Windows XP is a Bad Idea.

Most new PCs have features that were nonexistent or immature when service pack enhancements for Windows XP were discontinued.

The report was carried out by market watcher IDC, and features responses from nine companies with an average of 3,680 employees who use a mix of Windows XP and Windows 7 devices.

According to its findings, the annual per PC support cost of using Windows XP is $870 (554), but for Windows 7 users this figure stands at just $168 (107).

Five year old computers running Windows XP cost companies around $324 (206) in lost productivity and $766 (487) in IT labour costs each year, the study added.

"These higher costs were caused by a variety of problems, not all directly attributable to the operating system, but common in older solutions that required IT labour and help desk support activities," stated the report.

"User productivity costs were driven up by higher levels of downtime caused by security woes, waiting for helpdesk support and time spent rebooting systems."

The IDC report also highlights features, such as Bluetooth connectivity, faster USB ports and high-resolution monitors, that Windows XP users miss out on by sticking with the decade old operating system.

"Most new PCs have features that were nonexistent or immature when service pack enhancements for Windows XP were discontinued," it said.

"Many of these capabilities are either poorly or not supported by Windows XP Professional."

Support for Windows XP will end in April 2014 and, as of the end of 2011, the product was still the operating system of choice for 42 per cent of commercial Windows users.

The white paper states that, if the current rate of Windows 7 adoption continues, this figure should fall to 11 per cent by the time support for XP ends.

"The termination of extended support for Windows XP SP3 is a firm, impactful deadline that should be a real wake-up call for organisations of all sizes," the report concluded.

Speaking to IT Pro, Andy Trish, managing director of Microsoft partner NCI Technologies, said promises about cost savings and productivity gains are unlikely to make users ditch XP.

"Customers know End of Life doesn't mean the software will stop or that they will get any more problems than usual," said Trish.

"For many, there is no reason to upgrade. If it works, why change?"

Anti-piracy body the Business Software Alliance (BSA) wants the Government to introduce tougher penalties for businesses caught using unlicensed software.

Citing figures from the latest edition of the BSA's Global Software Piracy Study, the group claims the commercial value of pirated software in the UK topped 1.2 billion last year.

Software should be the thing businesses invest in, not scrimp and steal.

The report was jointly compiled by the BSA, IDC and Ipsos Public Affairs and featured responses from 15,000 computer users across 33 countries.

It also claimed that 27 per cent of UK computer users admitted to using pirated software, while 77 per cent said the risk of getting caught offered little deterrent.

The research also claims that, across Europe, business decision makers are more likely to pirate software and misuse licenses than other types of users.

As a result, the BSA wants firms caught using pirated software to face larger financial penalties to compensate the IT industry for the unlawful use of its intellectual property (IP).

Robert Holleyman, president and chief executive of the BSA, said: "Software piracy persists as a drain on the global economy, IT innovation and job creation.

"Governments must take steps to modernise their IP laws and expand enforcement efforts to ensure [people] who pirate software face real consequences."

Across the globe, the commercial value of pirated software rose from $58.8 billion in 2010 to $63.4 billion last year, the study revealed.

The emerging economies were pinpointed by the BSA as being the driving force behind much of this piracy, as these countries now account for 56 per cent of the world's new PC shipments.

China was reported to have the "most troubling" piracy problem, as the illegal software market was valued at nearly $9 billion, which is three times the value of the legal software market.

The cost to business of Chinese counterfeiters was the subject of a recent IT Pro report, which highlighted the sale of fake iPads and Windows 7 software in the country.

Julian Swan, director of compliance marketing for EMEA at the BSA, said the study suggests the need for a fundamental change in how people view and acquire software.

"Software should be the thing businesses invest in, not scrimp and steal. Anyone who uses software they haven't paid for should face hefty consequences," he said.

Hard drive disk (HDD) shipments are set to return to growth following a difficult 2011.

So claims research firm IDC, which believes the natural disasters in Thailand and Japan hit the HDD market hard but the future of 2012 was looking brighter.

HDDs will continue to be the primary storage technology used in PCs and enterprise systems for most of this decade.

The report claimed the first half of this year would continue to focus on repairing factories in the regions, but in the second half, HDD shipments will see a record year-on-year growth of 7.7 per cent following the 4.5 per cent decline in the previous year.

IDC also claimed the market would achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6 per cent between 2011 and 2016.

John Rydning, research vice president of HDDs at IDC and author of the report, said the troubles faced by the industry had given it the opportunity to start again with pricing structures, which had been falling at an excessive rate.

"In many respects, the hard disk drive industry has collectively hit the 'reset' button," he said.

"A reset of the HDD industry structure should allow for the remaining HDD industry participants to slowly reduce HDD prices from current levels at a rate that still delivers value to customers, while at the same time ensuring sufficient funding is available to develop new HDD technologies that are needed to improve HDD capacity, performance, reliability, power consumption, and security."

However, Rydning claimed HDD vendors couldn't return to just providing the basics to an

industry with changing devices and new ways of implementing storage.

"Long-term revenue growth will only be realised if the remaining participants transform into storage device and storage solution suppliers with a broad range of products for a wide variety of markets," he added.

The other issue with returning to growth for HDDs is also the growing threat of the solid state drive (SSD) market.

A report released at the beginning of March by DRAMeXchange, a subsidiary of larger analyst firm TrendForce, claimed SSDs are set to fall below $1 per GB for the first time in 2012, which would help remove the barrier of high prices and speed up adoption of the technology as a replacement for HDDs.

However, Claus Egge, analyst and partner at Rainmaker Files, claimed there was some way to go before HDDs were taken over by their faster, more expensive cousins.

"The [shipment] volume is much higher for HDDs than SSDs, 25 times or more," he told IT Pro. "My personal prediction is it will take more than five years before prices converge, and Flash has got its flaws [too]."

"So I don't see SSD usurping HDDs in the coming five years. Most capacity shipped only needs HDD performance [as it] is more than adequate, so SSD will post high growth, but from a lower base."

Rydning concurred that HDDs are here to stay for a while yet. "SSD adoption is growing, but SSD pricing is not dropping quickly enough to displace HDDs in the majority of new PCs," he told IT Pro.

"The percentage of new PCs shipping with an SSD continues to be a very small.HDDs will continue to be the primary storage technology used in PCs and enterprise systems for most of this decade."

Big data is driving cloud computing adoption in Western European utility firms, according to a new survey by research analysts IDC.

The study found nearly half of respondents - 46.2 per cent - were positive cloud would be able to solve big data problems.

According to the survey, private or hybrid cloud deployment options are the preferred choice by Western European utilities.

Security and regulatory compliance are still seen as barriers to public cloud adoption for utilities, with around 24 per cent believing regulation would slow down take-up across the region. However, the survey also found companies believe public cloud encourages more standards and quicker implementations.

The research highlights commoditised applications as the most likely candidates for going into the cloud. But utilities recognise the real potential would be for speciality applications, according to the study.

Budget allocation for cloud computing still is not top priority for Western European utility companies, with only 25 per cent allotting just one to three per cent of budgets to cloud computing in 2012. It also reveals short-term expectations for cloud computing budget shares are positive.

"Budget allocation for cloud is not yet a priority for utilities, so it is important to see through the hype and understand how cloud can best be applied to the industry and how to remove barriers to deployment," said IDC's head of energy insights in EMEA, Roberta Bigliani.

She added cloud computing, together with mobile, big data, and analytics, is transforming the utilities IT landscape.

Demand for videoconferencing technology is going from strength to strength thanks to a particularly strong quarter at the end of last year, according to research published this week by IDC.

Videoconferencing revenue for the entire year shot up by a fifth to $2.7 billion, fueled by a 24.6 per cent year-on-year growth in Q4 revenue and a 19 per cent quarter-on-quarter rise.

Advances in technology and the falling cost of network bandwidth means the opportunity to embrace video conferencing and develop innovative uses exists now more than ever before.

"Growth has been spurred on by more well-defined video use cases among organisations across a range of vertical market segments, including healthcare, higher education, financial services, legal, law enforcement, manufacturing, and retail," said Rich Costello, senior analyst at IDC's Enterprise Communications Infrastructure division.

"We also expect growth over the next several years to be bolstered by the impact of video integrated with vendors' unified communications and collaboration portfolios, and increasing video usage among small workgroups, desktop users, and mobile device users."

The growth rate has positive implications for future business opportunities as well, according to other industry experts.

"It is promising to see video conferencing revenues growing, as companies begin to recognise the business benefits that video conferencing can bring," said Chris Argent, financial services consultant at ICT consultancy Hudson & Yorke.

Argent explained the possibility for exploring videoconferencing for customer-facing services instead of just internal, employee-focused activities.

"As consumers are growing used to socialising, banking and shopping in a virtual way, many would be happy to discuss and buy financial products and other services from a video agent," Argent said.

"Advances in technology and the falling cost of network bandwidth means the opportunity to embrace video conferencing and develop innovative uses exists now more than ever before."

Cisco held the top spot during the fourth quarter of 2011 with 35.5 per cent year-on-year growth and holds 54.3 per cent of the market.

Polycom's revenue also increased 15.2 per cent year-on-year, with annual growth figures of just over 20 per cent.