Photo: Axel Bührmann / Flickr

Gartner Research reports that the server market bounced back all through 2010, with Q4 sales punctuating the year long recovery. The research firm reports, however, that the market will see growth slow in 2011.

Growth and more growth

Revenue from overall server sales was up 16.4 percent compared to the year prior, while the volume of servers shipped was up 6.5 percent. The reason for this growth, says Gartner [via PC world], is the adoption of the newer Opteron chip servers from AMD and the Nehalem processor-based servers from Intel. Furthermore, companies replacing their x86 servers after businesses resumed usual operations post the economic crash is a big contributor tot his growth in server sales.

Gartner, however, predicts that post recessionary spending is mostly over, suggesting that growth will slow this year.

How the pie was served

In terms of revenue for the big players in the space in Q4 server sales, IBM dominated. The venerable tech firm saw revenue of $5.2 billion, giving it 35.5 percent market share.

Close behind was HP, whose revenue allowed the company to grab 30.4 percent marketshare. HP, however, sold the highest volume of servers than IBM did, with 767,026 units, taking a healthy 32.2 percent of total shipments for the quarter.

Dell – who was the third biggest company in terms of revenue – sold the second most servers in the quarter, with 515,274 units for 21.6 percent of total industry shipments.

Oracle took a pummeling in the quarter, seeing its server shipments crater 40.8 percent. This meant revenue dropped by 16.2 percent for Q4. Making up the rear was Cisco, with sales in the low single digits after its first full year of operation in the server game.

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In the usual end of year deluge of research reports, surveys, and market predictions, few if any have the level of influence Gartner’s reports have. The research firm has proven itself to be extremely insightful over the years – if slightly off the mark on some occasions – and so the information technology industry took note when Gartner revealed its top predictions for IT organisations and users for 2011 and beyond. You can click through on that link to read the whole press release, or just scroll below to see what we thought the key takeaways were.

Prediction: hackers are going to really mess things up for some

Easily the gloomiest prediction of the lot, research firm Gartner says that ‘By 2015, a G20 nation’s critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage.’ In plain speak hackers are going to fundamentally disrupt how a key nation functions, in a manner similar to the lasting effects of a national event like the September 11 attacks.

The firm says that: ‘If a national stock market was rendered unavailable for several weeks, there would be lasting effects even if there was no change in government,’ which is as true as it is frightening. Cyber criminals everywhere are already launching assaults on companies like Google and the US government, so while we do not want to spread this kind of gloom, it’s hard to reject this prediction off-hand.

Prediction: enterprises to start supporting personal devices

Gartner predicts that ‘by 2014, 90 per cent of organisations will support corporate applications on personal devices,’ which the group says will happen out of necessity due to the growing number of ‘individuals who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices.’

And this is true. While corporations are dreadfully slow about changing the hardware provisions their employees have, employees who will insist on using the latest and greatest smartphones and tablets will need to be catered to. One look at the number of successful business applications on Apple’s App Store alone should be indicative of this trend.

Prediction: wide tablet support

Gartner predicts that ‘by 2013, 80 per cent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets’. While that figure may seem on the high end, the number of companies building tablet PCs targeted specifically at enterprise users suggests that this market could be massive. The research firm says that these devices ‘will be focused largely on content consumption, and to some extent communications, rather than content creation.’ Simple video conference calling, anybody?

Oh, by the way, this is the same Gartner who previously said tablets wouldn’t impact the enterprise at all. Hmm.

The summary

So research firm Gartner wants you to know that cyber criminals can – and will – fundamentally alter your life in ways you cannot begin to understand, your notoriously security conscious company will start supporting your cool smartphones and tablets, and four out of five of you will be given a tablet by your company. Clearly there are fun times ahead over the next five years.

Or, you know, as analysts are prone to being, they could be spectacularly wrong. Who knows?

Photo: Stock.Xchng

The incessant back-and-forth about whether tablets will erode PC sales has reached crescendo, with highly respected research firm Gartner saying that tablets, will, in fact, eat into PC sales. The firm has since cut its forecast for the global shipments of computers for 2010 and 2011 due to this.

Weak demand

Citing weak demand due to many customers choosing to buy a tablet computer instead of a PC, Gartner forecast that this year’s PC sales would rise 14.3 per cent year-on-year, to total 352 million units sold. The research firm predicted that 2011’s PC shipments would rise 15.9 per cent. Both these growth estimates are less than the 17.9 per cent and 18.1 per cent Gartner had predicted for 2010 and 2011, respectively.

Media tablets, you statistic altering creatures

In a statement, Ranjit Atwal, who is a research director at Gartner, said that ‘These results reflected market reduction in expected near-term unit growth based on expectations of weaker consumer demand, due in no small part to growing user interest in media tablets such as the iPad.’ Continuing, he offered that ‘media tablets are expected to displace around 10 per cent of PC units by 2014’.

Conservative?

Looking at that 2014 estimate of tablet PC sales, one cannot help but wonder if research firm Gartner has its estimates somewhat on the low side. While tablets, utility-wise, are not as functional as computers presently are – especially for content creation – they do present an opportunity for software previously impossible (and yet to be conceived) to emerge. If this happens, than we could see media tablet sales grow at a rate even the most bullish analyst would struggle to predict.

Analogous to smartphones and feature phones

In a sense, while it isn’t a like for like comparison, this does seem analogous to what is happening with smartphones and feature phones. While, in the beginning, smartphones had a hard time justifying their high sticker price, meaning the rate at which they ate into feature phones sales was negligible. Now, with the ubiquity of device enhancing apps, and integrated features like GPS, smartphones are ploughing into feature phones sales at an alarming rate.

Perhaps that transitional phase where media tablets have to prove their worth relative to laptops and other PCs will be shorter, meaning the tablet PC’s growth rate could be absolutely explosive, and at the expense of the traditional computer. Sure, this is all conjecture, but it’s difficult to rule out a future where the tablet PC is extremely common. What do you make of these predictions by research firm Gartner?

Photo: Apple

Gartner, the famous research company, has predicted that 2011 will be a blow out year for tablets, with worldwide device shipments likely to top 54.8 million units. Even with that high volume, Gartner expects Apple’s iPad tablet PC to dominate sales, swallowing a huge portion of market share, and solidifying its position as the pre-eminent tablet. Other people believe Apple could sell 48 million iPads next year alone.

Apps and iPhone momentum are the big difference maker

Very similar to what many attribute much of the iPhone’s success, Gartner predicts that the Apple tablet PC will have a leg up on other competitors due to its robust app marketplace and the ubiquity of iOS devices. ‘Apple’s dramatic expansion of iOS with the iPad and the continuing success of the iPod touch are important sales achievements in their own right,’ is what research vice president at Gartner, Carolina Milanesi, had to say.

She added, saying that: ‘But more importantly they contribute to the strength of Apple’s ecosystem and the iPhone in a way that smartphone-only manufacturers cannot compete with.’ No doubt, if you take the flipside of that argument, the same applies for a Apple’s iPad tablet PC advantage over tablet-only manufacturers, too.

What happened to Samsung Galaxy Tab

While Samsung is bullish about its tablet sales projections, likely to cross the 1 million units sold this year still, reviewers aren’t so hot for the device. Influential tech sites Gizmodo and TechRadar have both slated the Samsung Galaxy Tab in their reviews. Gizmodo in particular went in hard on the first big deal Google Android tablet, subheading its review as a ‘pocketable trainwreck’, before dubbing it unfit for humans – certainly not a positive start for the Tab.

What this means is that the one challenger most everyone was backing to give Apple and their iPad tablet PC a run for its money has faltered where it matters most – in the quality stakes – likely reaffirming Gartner’s position that Apple will take some catching.

The iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab are available in stores today, with a slew of other big deal tablets scheduled to arrive in the coming months.

Photo: Gartner

Research giant Gartner has reduced its global IT spending forecast from a previous forecasted year-on-year growth of 5.3 per cent to a forecasted year-on-year growth of 3.9 per cent.

Gartner’s new forecast pegs worldwide spending on IT – across the entire industry – at $3.35 trillion for 2010, a 3.9 per cent increase over 2009.
Europe to blame

The current Euro debt crisis, coupled with the dollar strengthening against the Euro, has put depressive ‘pressure on U.S.-dollar-denominated IT spending growth’, Richard Gordon, Vice President of Research at Gartner, said in a statement.

However, as Gordon adds, Western Europe accounts for less than a quarter of global IT spending, meaning the more positive outlooks from other regions would mitigate the bearish approach in Western Europe. Gordon writes in a blog post that even in the face of massive cutbacks in Western Europe, this ‘would likely only result in a one to two percent reduction in global IT’ and that the impact this would have on growth across the board would be tiny. If you want to dig deeper into the thinking behind the Gartner IT spending revision, Gordon’s whole blog post is well worth a read.

Hardware still blazing ahead

Photo: Microsoft

The Gartner IT spending forecast accounts for the entire industry, from hardware to software and including service level. The one area in this triangle of concerns that’s blazing ahead unabated in growth is in the hardware space, with Gartner expecting that sector to grow 9.1 per cent year-on-year to reach $365 billion in 2010. This is attributed to strong growth in PC shipments as well as growing demand for mobile devices on the parts of consumers. The spillover success of Windows 7 is taking effect throughout the industry, with Gartner linking the strong hardware growth to enterprise-level migration to Microsoft’s new operating system.

Taking a crude snapshot of the industry by looking at our users, have you bought any additional computing hardware in this calendar year as opposed to last, or are you feeling the pinch, still?

Photo: Gartner

While technology publications are enamored with the Apple tablet and touch devices in general, research company Gartner predicts these devices will have traction with some, but not with others.

Cool with the kids

Gartner predicts that, come 2015, 50 per cent of all PCs bought for children under the age of 15 will have touchscreens. That prediction isn’t that hard to believe, considering how many touchscreen computer screens, laptops and tablet devices have been released lately and are currently in development.

Not so bullish on enterprise

Where this is not applicable, however, the research firm continues, is in big business. Gartner predicts less than 10 per cent of PCs sold to enterprises, for ‘mainstream knowledge workers’ will have touchscreen interfaces.

Essentially, the firm believes it will be the consumer market that forces the market to start adopting newer technology.

Analysis

Before analysing these predictions, it is worth being mindful that any predictions research companies make regarding new technology like the Apple tablet and other tablet devices are essentially shots in the dark.

Photo: Apple

Having said that, the fact that the consumer market will force enterprise to adopt change will always hold true since it is far more costly for enterprise system overhauls than for individual consumers. Rather let technology prove itself in the wild before making multi-billion pound mistakes.

The second thing worth being mindful of is that no killer app has been developed for enterprise on tablet computers. Just like it required killer apps like VisiCalc and productivity suites to help computers break into businesses, tablets and touchscreen devices may have software like that just waiting to be built. This may be for the Apple iPad, or for a multitude of other devices, but it takes just a group of applications to render Gartner’s prediction false.