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

Dell Goes Private – What Are The Chances Of Success?

Dell Privatisation Highlights

• The process will cost about $24.4 billion – making it one of the largest ever privatisations in the ITC industry
• Michael Dell’s MSD Capital will join Silver Lake and Microsoft as investors
• The process of transformation into an Enterprise supplier is taking longer than expected
• The ‘go shop’ period will be 45 days, but the process will be extended if the EU gets involved
• Scott McNealy considered taking Sun private before leaving and the company being taken over by Oracle
• Other successful privatised ITC companies include Avaya and ASG Software
• The move highlights the difficulty some leaders/originators have in letting go
• Dell’s transformation should be aided by the privatisation

Gaming Console Market And Forecast Q3 2012 – New Platforms Needed

Gaming Console Q3 2012 Highlights

• In the year to the end of September the overall market declined 10.6% to $42.2 billion
• 69.5 million consoles were sold in the year, worth $14.0 billion, down 27.1% in the year
• 45.1 million Internet enabled consoles were sold in the year, worth $10.7 billion – down 14.1% in the year from $19.3 billion
• Sony leads with a 35.6% share, up from 31.7% in the previous year
• Nintendo was in second position with a 34.8% share – down from 43.8
• Microsoft Xbox has a 29.6% share – up from 24.6%
• Software accounted for $28.1 billion –59.0% of the overall market

IBM Leads The $25.5 Billion Server Virtualisation Market

Server Virtualisation Highlights Q2 2012

• IBM leads the overall market with a 34.1% share of the $25.5 Billion market
• HP leads the x86 market with 28.9% of the $12.0 Billion market
• RISC/Other processor types supporting mainly mainframe and Unix operating systems account for 53% of all virtualised servers
• x86 now accounts for 47%

Dell Primes PartnerDirect Channels For Windows Server 2012 Upgrades

Dell, Microsoft Windows Server Highlights

• Readies its PartnerDirect channel for Microsoft’s new operating system
• The ending of support for Windows 2003 in July 2015 creates a call to action for customers
• Links its training and collateral to sales cycle phases
• Aims to help its channel move to higher-margin services
• Will include other software and hardware with the upgrade business
• Microsoft estimates that 80% of its servers run Windows 2003 today – 30 million by our estimates

The Future Of The Network Is Software Defined

We’re very pleased that Pim has agreed to let us republish this article on Software Defined Networking, previously published by the METISfiles.

Last week we attended the NetEvents EMEA Press and Analyst Summit. Part of the 2-day program was a debate session on Software Defined Networks (SDN) with panellists from Gartner, IDC, IBM, Dell, HP, Extreme Networks, Enterasys and yours truly. The debate centred on the question who is first to ride the SDN revolution, the Enterprise, the Cloud Data Centre, or the Service Provider (and where is it taking them)?

What is SDN?

SDN is about separating the network router and switch data plane (hardware that does packet forwarding) from the control plane (logic that controls packet forwarding). In SDN the control path decisions are taken out of the switch and managed by software on a centralised server. In other words, SDN is about providing a programmable interface into the infrastructure to modify the network infrastructure behaviour and delegate the capability of modifying that to other IT systems. The OpenFlow protocol, which the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is standardizing, is part of SDN and is used to communicate between an external OpenFlow controller and OpenFlow enabled switches (see Figure below).

Gaming Console Market Share And Forecast Q2 2012 – Better Internet Experiences Please

Gaming Console Q2 2012 Highlights

• 9.1 million consoles worth $1.8 billion shipped of which 5.4 million ($1.3 billion) were Internet enabled
• The installed base reached 339 million, of which 153 million are Internet enabled
• Within the Internet enabled console market 22% of units (1.2 million) and 13% of value ($163) were handsets
• Gaming software accounted for 71.8% ($4.7 billion) of the total $8.0 billion market
• Internet service only accounted for 3.1% of the total market value
• Microsoft (35.4%) is now the hardware market leader, followed by Sony (33.1%) and Nintendo (31.6%)
• Apple’s iPad is a strong competitor for dedicated gaming consoles and its vertical integrated architecture holds lessons for console suppliers

Microsoft Results – The Shapes Of Things To Come

Microsoft Q1 2012 Highlights

• Achieves record $18 billion and $74 billion revenues for its fourth quarter and financial year
• Posts its first ever loss of $474 million for the quarter, due to a goodwill impairment charge of $6.2 billion associated with aQuantive
• Achieves better than expected revenues in its Entertainment and Devices division due to the success of its Skype acquisition
• Has distinct revenue signatures which help predict the effects of the Windows 8 launch
• Will need to meet the challenge of customer preferences for integrated products

Microsoft previews Surface – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Microsoft Surface Highlights

• Announces 2 Surface platforms – based on ARM and Intel chips
• Includes a keyboard, making this a ‘convertible’
• Will challenge Apple’s 94% share of the smart tablet market
• Will compete directly with its PC OEMs in client devices for the first time and will need to balance its activities carefully
• Signifies the most important move today away from the horizontal PC market

Gaming Console Market Share And Forecast – Shipments Crash In Q1 2012

This article is co-authored by Lizzie Hingley, who continues to add strong ideas from her experience of working in the gaming retail area. For an update for Q2 2012 please click here. Please also see our related summaries of business for this quarter of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft xBox

Gaming Console Q1 2012 Highlights

• Unit console sales were 8.2 million – down 53% from 17.6 a year before
• Software sales were 3% up at $6.3 billion
• Nintendo and Sony tied as market shipment leader with 3.4 million each
• Sony led in revenues with $2.1 billion v $1.6 billion for xBox and $1.0 for Nintendo
• The current slump in shipments will result in a static installed base until 2014
• Profitability is weak for hardware players – unusual for the end of platform life cycles
• Internet handset consoles are picking up – will easily be the strongest growing sector