Tech Market Snapshot: Wearable owners unimpressed with apps, UK firms shifting to hybrid IT

Tech Market Snapshot: Wearable owners unimpressed with apps, UK firms shifting to hybrid ITTech Market Snapshot: Wearable owners unimpressed with apps, UK firms shifting to hybrid IT
We roundup the latest news from IT analysts and firms to see which tech categories have been doing well, which haven’t, and what’s forecast to be big in the near future.

Wearable tech owners unimpressed with corresponding apps
A new report from Argus Insights shows that consumers are much happier with their wearable devices than the apps they use to interpret the data they collect.

Based on an analysis of over 136,000 consumer reviews of wearable devices and applications from November 2015-February 2016, Argus Insights found that users report higher delight for devices than brands’ associated apps.

“Clearly the app experience is affecting the long term efficacy of the wearables market,” said John Feland, CEO, Argus Insights. “Without interpretation of the data to inspire action and promote change, devices become dispensable and land in the sock drawer.”

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UK businesses are shifting to hybrid IT
SolarWinds has released the findings of its IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution. The study features insights from UK IT practitioners, managers and directors proving that the vast majority of businesses have shifted away from on-premises-only infrastructure to hybrid IT environments, creating new pressures and concerns, such as resource and skillset requirements, for IT professionals.

“The findings of this year’s study paints a clear picture: cloud adoption is nearly ubiquitous, but it’s not now and will not in the foreseeable future be suitable for all workloads, and even if it were, very few if any companies would convert all of their existing applications to run in the cloud,” said Joel Dolisy, CIO, SolarWinds.

“The resulting dynamic – one set of critical on-premises services connected with another set of services in the cloud – is hybrid IT. And at the center of this evolution is the IT professional who needs to ensure always-on performance of applications, devices, networks and systems – regardless of location.

“They need to be empowered with the support to gain the skills and tools required to properly manage hybrid IT environments, which in turn will allow businesses to truly unlock the potential of the cloud.”

Large-size LCD panels fall 1.3% in Q1
According to a new report from WitsView, a division of TrendForce, large-size LCD panels fell by 1.3 per cent in Q1 2016 compared with the previous quarter.

This is a 3.5 per cent difference from the earlier projected quarterly increase of 2.2 per cent. Samsung Display (SDC) was responsible for 2.1 per cent of the 3.5 per cent downward correction because the panel maker has issues with 0.4mm glass production, and in turn caused delays to the certification of new panel products.

The remaining 1.4 per cent difference was attributed to the early February earthquake that damaged Innolux’s fabs in Taiwan. While the industry has no plan to significantly cut back the production of large-size panels, the problems encountered by Innolux and SDC actually reduced some of the oversupply pressure over the entire year.

Software-Defined WAN technology and services market poised to reach $6bn by 2020
Software-defined networking has already arrived in the datacenter, providing the agility and responsiveness that datacenter networks need to meet the demands of cloud computing. Now the focus is shifting toward wide area networks (WANs), which can also be optimised to meet the requirements of cloud applications and services.

In its first forecast of the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) market, IDC estimates that worldwide SD-WAN revenues will exceed $6 billion in 2020 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 90 per cent over the 2015-2020 forecast period.

“As public and private cloud use continues to grow, WAN performance becomes critical to latency-sensitive and mission-critical workloads and inter-datacenter business continuity,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC.

“Accordingly, as enterprises plan and implement comprehensive cloud strategies, WAN architectures need to be considered alongside, and in conjunction with, datacenter infrastructure. Moreover, as enterprises move business processes to the cloud, there is a greater need to fully integrate cloud-sourced services into WAN environments to ensure workload/application performance, availability, and security.”

[“source-Techradar”]