Small and medium-sized business (SMB) spending on cloud solutions will grow almost 20 percent annually through 2018, IDC predicts. If your business doesn’t use hosted communications and IT services, here are five reasons why it should:

Est-ce vraiment une surprise ? En ces temps moroses, le marché français des tablettes conserve la forme. Selon le cabinet d’études GfK, il devrait s’écouler dans l’Hexagone en 2013 6 millions d’ardoises tactiles, soit une forte progression de 65% par rapport à l’année dernière (3,6 millions).

Pourquoi ce fort attrait cette année ? Les prix pratiqués semblent être le principal argument.

Nvidia is banking on new computing devices to replace "cheap" PCs and Android to drive that disruption, according to comments from the chipmaker's chief executive on Thursday.

"A great tablet is clearly better than a cheap PC," said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during the company's fiscal first quarter conference call.

Salesforce.com and European venture capital firms have announced a 5 million € Innovation Challenge, a competition for European start-ups building enterprise cloud apps on the Salesforce platform.

Eligible start-ups will be invited to present their ideas to professional investors at a series of Innovation Challenge pitch events throughout Europe, hosted by Salesforce.com from September to November 2013.

Mobile PC shipments are expected to hit 762 million by 2017, thanks to demand for tablets and touchscreen-enabled notebooks, according to NPD DisplaySearch. Tablets and touchscreens will provide a huge helping hand to the PC industry in the coming years, says NPD DisplaySearch.

While Amazon is still king in the cloud computing world, it appears that Microsoft's Azure software is on the up and up. Not only have Azure subscriptions risen 48 percent over the past six months, but Azure and related Microsoft cloud service software earned $1 billion in revenue over the past year for the first time ever, according to Bloomberg.

Making the "billion-dollar club" is pretty significant -- considering the slumping PC market. Microsoft revealed these new performance details to Bloomberg in an interview.

IBM today unveiled MessageSight, a 2U appliance that would serve as a cornerstone to Big Blue's "Internet of things" vision: The hardware is a big data orchestrator, and according to IBM, it's capable of handling up to 13 million incoming messages per second flowing in from up to 1 million different sensors installed in anything -- automobiles, medical equipment, home appliances, mobile devices -- such that the data can be transformed into useful information.

Global CRM (customer relationship management) revenue grew 12.5 percent in 2012 to $18 billion, a rate three times that of all enterprise software segments on average, as companies look to acquire more business and serve existing customers better, according to a new Gartner report.

Chat apps now more popular than SMS worldwide. A handful of popular chat applications have already found a way to outpace SMS, according to new data.

Research firm Informa announced today that six of the most popular mobile chat applications, including WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple's iMessage, and KakaoTalk, averaged nearly 19 billion messages sent and received worldwide each day in 2012. The company estimates that 17.6 billion SMS messages were sent each day, as well.

The debate about the bring-your-own-device movement (BYOD) has quieted down, mostly because, it seems, while IT has been over in the corner arguing the pros and cons, employees have been streaming into office with their shiny new toys and using them to get work done.

China remains the largest culprit, with 41 percent of fourth-quarter observed attack traffic originating in the country, up from 33 percent in the third quarter.

Cyber warfare incidences jumped sharply in 2012, Akamai said, with the number of distributed denial of service attacks more than tripling from the previous year.

New numbers show the cloud reducing IT costs, with traditional software and hardware vendors paying the price.

Revenue for the Microsoft Business Division (MBD) in the first quarter was $6.1 billion, 5 percent above 2012's first quarter when adjustments for a free Office upgrade program were excluded. Office 365, Microsoft's expanded subscription program that it's promoted for both businesses and consumers -- and on which the company is pinning plans to drive future income -- will account for about 4 percent of the division's revenue for the fiscal year, Microsoft said.

Americans are so fixated on social networks that they spend an average of 16 minutes out of every hour on them, according to a study by Experian Marketing Services.

In the U.S., 27% of users' time online is spent on forums and social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Experian said. Experian included both desktop and mobile users in its study.

More than six out of 10 companies allow or mandate the use of employee-owned mobile devices for work in order to increase productivity, according to a survey.

While the BYOD (bring your own device) push has been at the forefront of press coverage, the majority of companies still provide at least a subset of devices to employees.

A l’issue d’une année 2012 marquée par un recul généralisé du chiffre d’affaires des opérateurs nationaux, Completel rend une copie autrement plus convaincante et revendique le statut d’exception dans le paysage français des télécoms.

Le groupe d’utilisateurs Java Paris JUG a publié les résultats d’une enquête en ligne sur l’utilisation du cloud en entreprise par des développeurs et architectes informatiques.

Sans surprise, 68% des 429 professionnels interrogés entre février et mars jugent le cloud « utile pour certaines utilisations », mais ils ne sont pas plus de 22% à considérer « indispensable » l’informatique en nuage.

More than 75 percent of corporations have policies that prohibit the use of consumer OFS (online file sharing) and collaboration tools, yet employee use of the services is still rampant, according to an Enterprise Strategy Group survey.

"The thing is, IT had control of the data in the past. Now, it has only been three years since this [OFS] market has taken off and now data is everywhere," said Terri McClure, who spoke at SNW here Tuesday.

Three years from now, tablet computers will outsell traditional Windows PCs, and do so by a whopping 72 percent, according to the latest projections from Gartner. In between, PC shipments drop at ever faster rates.

Some of that decline will be made up by the faster growth in "ultramobiles," the new breed of Windows 8 devices such as Microsoft Surface Pro. But the PC decline is permanent, reflecting a "long-term change in user behavior," according to the Gartner statement.

The percentage of North American companies using SIP or Session Initiation Protocol trunking and traditional T-1s will just about equalize in two years, marking a dramatic shift in technology used for external corporate communications.

Of the 278 companies responding to an Infonetics Research survey, 58% say they will use at least some SIP trunks in 2015 while 55% say they will use will use at least some T-1s.

Avaya unified communications products can get along with Microsoft's Lync Server, and many customers will probably choose to deploy both rather than just one, says Avaya's CEO.

Despite what he sees as shortcomings of Microsoft's real-time communications platform, businesses will see value to some of its features, and supplement those with products from Avaya, says Avaya chief Kevin Kennedy.

"Enlightened coexistence" between Web and native device application platforms will be a key trend in 2013, according to an IDC assessment of how the application development realm will take shape this year.

Mobile-based browsing has tripled in the last two years, and is making significant inroads on traditional Internet access from personal computers, according to statistics from a Web metrics company.

Atos CEO Thierry Breton caught a lot of flak last year when he announced he wanted his employees to give up email, but he may have been on to something.

Kids these days don't use email -- digital market research company comScore found that use of Web-based email dropped 31 percent among 12- to 17-year-olds and 34 percent among 18- to 24-year-olds in the period between December 2010 and December 2011.

There are three technologies that will fundamentally change the nature of video over the next few years, and these are having a significant impact on the collaboration market, according to Cisco.

OVH, spécialiste de l’hébergement au niveau international (Europe et Amérique du Nord en particulier), annonce qu’il a bouclé un financement de 140 millions d’euros. En fait, il ne s’agit pas d’une levée de fonds avec augmentation de capital.

For devices that hit the market just three years ago, tablets are doing pretty well, generating 8 percent of all Internet traffic.

 (Credit: Adobe Digital Index)

CRM (customer relationship management) software will be the top priority for additional spending on enterprise applications around the world in 2013 and 2014, according to newly released data from analyst firm Gartner.

The category edged out ERP (enterprise resource planning), which took up the second-highest spot, with office suites coming in third, according to Gartner.

The global public cloud computing market will grow 18.5 percent in 2013 to $131 billion, up from $111 billion last year, research firm Gartner predicts. Through the next three years, cloud spending is predicted to total $677 billion, with almost half of that spending made up of cloud advertising.

Academic research suggests that working more than one day a week away from the office, for jobs that require a lot of collaboration with colleagues, can cut into performance.
When Yahoo told workers last week that they could no longer work from home, there was no shortage of punditry opining on the merits of the decision.

Microsoft's call app increased its traffic in 2012 by twice the amount of all international phone carriers combined -- it's calls are now equal to one third of all global phone traffic.

 (Credit: TeleGeography)

Gartner predicted in December 2011 that cloud computing would be getting real in 2012. They said cloud computing "is becoming a reality." But did that happen?

A quarter of all enterprises will create their own app store in the next five years, according to a report from analysts at Gartner, as IT staff seek to manage the threat posed by the growing bring your own app (BYOA) trend.

There are different consumer services that don't use the term "UC," but offer many of the same capabilities. They include Skype, Facebook, Foursquare and Google+, which is the most business-oriented. These services offer functions such as presence, chat and email tied to what in most cases is essentially a social networking platform.

Alcatel-Lucent reported a fourth-quarter net loss of €1.37 billion (US$1.81 billion), and at the same time announced it is hunting for a new CEO.

Current CEO Ben Verwaayen will step down as soon as a replacement is found, and will not seek re-election as a director, the company announced Thursday.

Forrester predicts that 200 million workers will be lining up for a Windows tablet. Apple may want to take a bite out of that market with an iPad "Pro."

Microsoft's Surface Pro is apparently just what businesses want in what was formerly known as the desktop computer. If that's the case, Apple's brain trust may want to revisit the space where the Mac and the iPad intersect.

BroadSoft has just released survey results that substantiate users' increasing demand for mobile unified communications. The results also highlight an opportunity for mobile network operators to more quickly monetize their LTE network investments by delivering mobile UC to workers. The survey was conducted in late 2012 with responses from more than 700 business people from the United States, Spain and Sweden.

« L’arrivée du BYOD (« Bring Your Own Device ») pousse les entreprises à réfléchir à la manière de travailler et à l’utilisation des périphériques mobiles », rappelle Yves Tapia, architecte solutions chez Avanade France, Belgique et Luxembourg.

A recent FCC study on local telephone competition highlights how successful Voice over IP (VoIP) has been in displacing traditional telecom services.

Many large companies are embracing internal social networks, but for the most part, they're not getting much good from them, according to analyst firm Gartner.

By 2016, some 50 percent of enterprises "will have internal Facebook-like social networks," and 30 percent of these will be considered to be as crucial as email and telephones, a Gartner study announced on Tuesday states.

The BYOD (bring your own device) movement hit a full sprint in 2012 and the following infographic puts BYOD data in colorful perspective. But is a BYOD reality check coming in 2013?

The bring-your-own-device, or BYOD, trend was all the rage as employees brought their personal tech gadgets, such as iPads and smartphones, to work and pressured IT to support them. TrackVia put together an infographic (see below) using data from multiple sources that document BYOD's meteoric rise.

Dans le sillage du grand public, les PME françaises ont placé les téléphones mobiles au coeur de leur réflexion et les ont massivement adoptés. Cet appétit se confirme au baromètre de Futur Telecom*, qui a enregistré, entre 2011 et 2012, une progression significative de ses ventes en volume (+23%).

En tête de palmarès, 46% des terminaux écoulés sur l’année sont estampillés Samsung.

Cloud service providers will seek out partnerships to offer a wider breadth of services that customers are increasingly demanding, a new report from research firm Current Analysis predicts.

The market has already seen some partnerships, but researcher Amy Larsen DeCarlo, principal analyst covering security and data center services for Current, expects to see even more alliances as customer use case requests outpace the ability of individual providers.

Gartner.

A survey of chief information officers by Piper Jaffray points to greater adoption of the iPad and tablets in general over the coming year. The iPad will land in the hands of more business users in 2013, according to a poll conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Troy Jensen.

The research firm spots some easing of pessimism, saying now that it expects spending on IT products and services to rise by 4.2 percent in 2013, up from the prior forecast of 3.8 percent.

IT spending around the world is likely to hit $3.7 trillion for the coming year, according to a report out today from Gartner.

The latest projection calls for an increase in spending of 4.2 percent in 2013, an improvement over Gartner's 3.8 percent estimate from last year's third quarter.

Topics that are discussed here:

Unified communications (UC) was born to serve the enterprise market, with voice over IP (VoIP) as the prerequisite service needed to create the remaining UC portfolio. As with many services that users learned to value in the workplace, the portfolio of UC services is also gaining popularity among consumers. We have seen UC features offered to consumers by wireline providers, by over the top (OTT) providers, and (to a lesser extent) by wireless providers.

Windows Phone is poised to be the fastest-growing mobile OS over the next five years, but when all is said and done, Microsoft will boast just 9 percent of the world's smartphone shipments, according to a newly released report from research company Analysys Mason.

Dans sa dernière étude « Le cloud computing dans les PME françaises : réalités, besoins et perspectives 2014 », le cabinet Markess International estime que seulement une petite ou moyenne entreprise sur cinq utilise actuellement au moins une solution basée sur le cloud (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS). Cette estimation grimpe à une sur trois en 2014.