IBM System z – zEC12 Drives Big Q4 Growth

System z Highlights

• Massive growth in MIPS and revenues following the introduction of the zEnterprise EC12
• Linux is strong, but z/OS is also used by 40% of totally new customers signed in 2012
• Many offerings announced on February 5^th
• Revenue success is tied to IBM investment and new product introductions
• Stronger increases in ‘growth’ than ‘major’ countries

PC Markets Fall By 5% In 2012

PC Market Highlights

• 225 million shipments, $187 billion – both down 5% in 2012
• HP led in revenue, Lenovo in units
• Lenovo, Samsung, NEC, Asus and Fujitsu grew
• HP, Dell, Apple, Acer, Toshiba, Sony, NEC, LG and Hitachi all declined
• Laptops did better than desktops
• Windows 8 did not kick start the Xmas market
• 57 million units and $47 billion revenue in Q4 – both down 10%
• The installed base grew 4% to 811 million

The World Goes Mobile – 906 Million Devices, 27% Growth In 2012

Mobile Device Highlights

• 906 million devices shipped in 2012
• 27% growth, following the 15% in 2011
• Smart phones are half the market
• Apple is the overall leader
• Lenovo leads the laptop PC market
• Kindle leads the eReader area
• Apart from they year of the Credit Crunch mobile device shipments have increased by between 20% and 35% each quarter for 10 years
• We identify 6 broad changes effecting the mobile device market

Server Market Devlopment

 The rise of x86 chips is significant in the server market – see how the proportions and values of chip types has evolved over the last 40 quarters. See our latest market share post.

x86 includes machines based on AMD or Intel chips, System z are IBM Mainframe servers and RISC/Other includes IBM Power, Intel Itanium and Oracle Sparc systems.

Server Markets Jump Up 7.5% In Q4 2012

Server 2012 Highlights

• The market dropped by 3% in 2012 to $58.8 billion
• In Q4 the market grew by 7.5%, driven by a huge growth in IBM System z revenues
• HP led the market in 2012 with a 23.0% share
• IBM is closing fast
• Dell grew its market share significantly
• x86 servers now account for 73.6% of overall revenues
• We forecast a decline of 1% in 2013 followed by 4 years of growth
• Servers form the heart of integrated systems
• We expect a rise in ARM-based microservers for hyperscale workloads
• Specific workloads and software platforms such as SAP HANA, Hadoop, VDI and server virtualisation will become more important in 2013

Sony Playstation 4 – Social Sharing And AMD Chips

Playstation 4 Highlights

• Will use AMD 8-core x86 rather than IBM PowerPC derivative
• Will use Gaikai technology to bridge between home and mobile usage
• Embraces social sharing and information
• Has new controller and camera peripheral
• Will depend on new games unlocking new functions
• Backward compatibility may be compromised by the change in chip
• Will be more dependent on the Playstation Network – hopefully Sony has learnt from the massive hacker attack of 2011
• Will help reinvigorate the gaming console market

Sony Launches Playstation 4 – Vive the Playstation 3!

Sony announced its Playstation 4 today, so we think it’s a great opportunity to look at the market development of its predecessor.

The PS3 was launched in 2006 and has achieved some notable success over the years. For instance:

• At the end of 2012 Sony had an installed base of 49 million PS3s
• It has shipped 76 million cumulatively since the launch in 2006
• It held a 40% share of the home Internet gaming console market
• Has generated $20 billion in revenues for hardware alone

The PS3 will live on for many years – in fact Sony only stopped showing shipment figures for the PS2 in 2012! So enjoy your gaming, Internet TV and BluRay movies.

If you want to know more about the gaming console market read our latest sizing and forecast and watch our infobomb on Slideshare by clicking on the figure above. To see more infobombs click here.

Hadoop And Big Data Enterprise Challenges

Hadoop Highlights

• Apache HTTP server is used on 65% of all active websites
• Hadoop is a software library allowing for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers
• Public Cloud suppliers have the widest expertise and largest production systems today
• Cloudera, IBM, Red Hat and Microsoft are among a number of suppliers addressing the commercial market
• We predict a rise in the number of large users using Hadoop for OLAP and other workloads
• Big Data isn’t about scary numbers

Mobile Phone 2012 Market Shares And Forecasts – Join The Smart Phone Revolution

Phone Handset 2012 Highlights

• Mobile – and especially Smart – phones continue to grow while most other ITC offerings decline
• 1.28 billion phones shipped worth $271 billion
• Units declined 1.6%, revenues grew 15.2%
• Smart overtook basic phone revenues in 2011
• More Android (184 million) than iOS (136 million) smart phones were sold
• Apple led in value, Samsung in volume in the Smart Phone market
• Asia Pacific was the only major region for growth in shipments of all phones
• Android and iOS will continue to dominate to 2013, with Windows Mobile becoming a strong number 3
• There is plenty of scope for hardware vendors to transform their businesses and for software and services companies to take advantage

VMware Buys Virsto – Becomes ‘The VMware Of Storage’

Virsto Acquisition Highlights

• Becomes VMware’s 14^th acquisition
• Is a small software company focusing on providing storage hypervising in virtualised environments
• Its vDisk virtual storage object has significant advantages over the use of native VMware VMDK or Microsoft VHD
• This is as important as the acquisition of Nicira last year in VMware’s development of the SDDC
• Reduces users spending on storage hardware –threatening EMC’s array business
• Is an inflection point for the adoption of storage hypervising