IDC Insight

A Big Data view of the Internet of Things

IDC analysts — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:21:56 GMT

The Internet of Things turns out to be as much a big data challenge as it is a sensor and network (M2M) challenge. Data and analytics architectural choices will be important for government CIOs that want to realise the value...

Experience Efficiency 2013 - Schneider Electric positions itself a tech company

IDC analysts — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:51:10 GMT

I attended the recent annual Schneider Electric Analyst event co-located with the DC Xperience Efficiency 2013 customer conference. The message was clear: Schneider wants to be defined as a tech company with a cohesive vision for sustainability and innovation...

Hurry up Symantec

IDC analysts — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:35:37 GMT

At the Symantec 2013 WWIAC (World-wide Industry Analyst Conference for those who are guessing) there was a feeling of freshness in the air - a feeling of "we can do this right this time". I believe as Symantec 4.0 takes...

OpenStack Summit: Day one round up

IDC analysts — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:20:15 GMT

IDC Storage has been following and tracking the OpenStack movement for some time now. OpenStack has received significant press lately and it seems every major IT company is circling the preverbal wagon around OpenStack. What's reality vs. hype? Let's dive-in...

How to become a smarter buyer of cloud services

IDC analysts — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:55:09 GMT

Cloud seems to promise transparency in cost, service effectiveness, and support, but after years of interviewing buyers - from both IT and line of business roles - of software and services, I've seen firsthand how complicated and confusing it can...

Is the Semantic Web and linked data ready for primetime?

IDC analysts — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:54:09 GMT

We have just published a report about a new tool that semi-automatically generates taxonomies by using text analytics and linked data from the Semantic Web. Pingar, a company headquartered in New Zealand, has developed a technology that allows the creation...

Impact of the SQL-Hadoop marriage on infrastructure

IDC analysts — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 06:17:29 GMT

With Hadapt, Cloudera, Greenplum and others offering SQL overlays for Hadoop, the unification of SQL and Hadoop is here and is here to stay. Regardless of what the naysayers say, the benefits of this marriage are clear - it enables...

The Salesforce.com platform is powering ISV growth

IDC analysts — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:20:18 GMT

Salesforce.com's Force.com PaaS solution is being used by ISVs to very quickly build out products and grow their business. Also the switch from flat rate pricing to a revenue share model enables ISVs to build enterprise offerings that they...

NetApp announces all flash storage strategy

IDC analysts — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:25:27 GMT

NetApp has had a long history with flash starting with Flash Cache (formerly PAM cards) to Flash Pools and even including flash on the host with Flash Accel. It's an exciting day for NetApp to complete the flash portfolio with...

Compustorage clusters: A new model for converged infrastructure

IDC analysts — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:48:38 GMT

IDC has been studying the converged infrastructure market for a while now and expects it to grow as businesses steadily demand simplification of their IT environments as a key focus area when making newer infrastructure acquisitions. A new breed of...

Will FIDO find friends?

IDC analysts — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:08:33 GMT

The newly created FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance is promoting a standardised, global protocol and the necessary interfaces to allow organisations to support authentication solutions appropriate to the level of risk involved. The FIDO protocol will allow the interaction of...

Sync-n-share services: The next big play for storage suppliers?

IDC analysts — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:28:50 GMT

Businesses everywhere are panicking. Their users have gone roughshod with public sync-n-share services like Dropbox, Sugarsync etc. They do not have an alternative to give to their users. Storage suppliers are coming to the rescue. The question is - has...

Partners will use cloud as a loss leader

IDC analysts — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:36:00 GMT

This is the first of our 2013 predictions, and comes on the back of a large number of partner conversations where we are seeing the maturing of cloud as a delivery option for technology, and also the maturation of partners...

A new way to approach storage - data organisation and data interfaces

IDC analysts — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:14:01 GMT

We just wrapped up the taxonomy guide for File and Object based solutions. I believe the time has come to redo how we approach classification of such solutions (at least for now File and Object based solutions - block will...

Why is Facebook Graph Search important?

IDC analysts — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:37:00 GMT

Last week Facebook announced a new feature called Graph Search to help people navigate through the wealth of information available to them in Facebook. Facebook calls Graph Search the third "pillar" around how they expect people to interact with Facebook....

Knox! Knox! Who's there? Open Vault

IDC analysts — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:41:00 GMT

IDC has been tracking the Open Compute movement very closely since it's inception 18 months ago due to the involvement of very large IT consumers such as:FacebookRackSpaceFidelityGoldman SachsLeading up to the Open Compute Summit there was lots of speculation regarding...

The new dialogue with risk and the CIO office - 2013 Issue of the Year

IDC analysts — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 17:08:00 GMT

Last week I held what I think was the first webinar of its kind for IDC and the Insights Team - a Predictions webinar, or maybe it was more of a dialogue with the research team here, on the topic...

Rival implementation paths - yet BYOD still hits a wall

IDC analysts — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:05:53 GMT

At many government agencies, mobile computing advocates are strongly pushing "bring your own device" (BYOD) solutions. This can work, but only if the BYOD approach offers just basic functionality, such as allowing guest access to an office Wi-Fi network. But...

The economics of copy data

IDC analysts — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:21:00 GMT

The storage industry has seen it's fair share of storage startups. Every now and then a startup comes along with a simple value proposition and yet one that is very powerful in the pain points it solves - pain points...

Rethinking advanced technology for maintenance

IDC analysts — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:30:00 GMT

Technologies for data acquisition, data communication and analytics have become increasingly viable, affordable, and scalable providing organisations with the opportunity to reexamine their asset maintenance strategies to not only deliver customers better service, but also to enable more predictable and...

Scale-out meets virtualisation

IDC analysts — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:42:00 GMT

For the longest time (and even now) most virtualisation deployments occur on scale-up storage platforms. However in the past few months several vendors have announced support for virtualisation platforms such as vSphere/ESX (as a starting point) and RHEV on their scale-out file...

OmniChannel retail IT M&A predictions for 2013

IDC analysts — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:47:56 GMT

In January 2012 we introduced the O3 Retail IT Model - which is more than simply modernising the application and commerce portfolio, but rather represents a complete re-platforming of the IT landscape to enable business results for the next decade....

The not-so-dark side of Social Engineering

IDC analysts — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:29:51 GMT

Anecdotal evidence from IDC research suggests that governments could perpetrate more cyber-attacks, for instance through social engineering, and not only be the victim of those actions. All governments in Western Europe and beyond are concerned about cybersecurity. The majority of...

SAP moves upstream

IDC analysts — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:26:00 GMT

The Oil and Gas (O&G) applications market traditionally was big and small at the same time. Big in the sense of the magnitude of spending on applications, but small compared to the manufacturing industry which has a large number of...

Wide area storage solutions.... A redux of Wide Area File Services?

IDC analysts — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 16:49:00 GMT

Data Direct Networks (DDN) has similar solutions (and aspirations) using its Web Object Scaler Platform. This made me wonder if newer technologies such as object storage and newer interfaces such as HTTP/REST are allowing vendors to come up with a...