“Business users are often frustrated by the deployment cycles, costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructures demanded by on-premises BI solutions,” said James Richardson, research director at Gartner. “SaaS- and cloud-based BI is perceived as offering a quicker, potentially lower-cost and easier-to-deploy alternative, though this has yet to be proven. It’s evident that, despite growing interest, the market is confused about what cloud/SaaS BI and analytics are and what they can deliver.”

The use of SaaS BI may lead to faster deployment, insight and value, particularly where IT is constrained by existing work and/or limited budget so that it cannot respond to demands for information and analysis as quickly as the business requires, Gartner says. The cost dynamic differs between on-premises and SaaS models. Software purchased as a service can usually be expensed, rather than capitalized, on the balance sheet. Buyers often think that SaaS is cheaper, but the reality is that this is unproven. Gartner's cost models show SaaS can be cheaper over the first five years, but not thereafter. The long-term benefits lie elsewhere - in terms of cash flow, reduced IT support costs, etc. SaaS analytic applications offer prebuilt intellectual property that can help firms work around a lack of the skills needed to build their own analytic solutions.

Instead of disrupting the enterprise BI platform and corporate performance management suite market, a more likely scenario is that SaaS and cloud-based offerings will tap into new opportunities - e.g., with midmarket companies that have yet to invest in BI, or by offering domain-specific analytics.

“If their operational business applications are in the cloud, organizations should consider pursuing cloud BI/analytics for those domains,” said Richardson. “However, they must assess risks on an ongoing basis and ensure their chosen cloud provider has appropriate business skills to provide a viable outcome. They must also ensure their BI strategy outlines how to ensure that data flows to and from these solutions in order not to become yet more silos of analysis.”

Almost one third (27 percent) of the 1,364 IT managers surveyed already use or plan to use cloud/SaaS options to augment their BI capabilities for specific lines of business or subject areas in the next 12 months. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

“This is the biggest annual growth we’ve seen for this market since 2008,” said Colleen Graham, research director at Gartner. “Pressures to optimize costs and efficiencies in a heterogeneous IT environment are driving organizations to turn to MDM as a more efficient way to manage and maintain data across multiple sources. In addition, the increasing governance, risk and compliance regulations are forcing organizations to focus on MDM to support these initiatives.”

From a regional perspective, North America and Europe will drive the demand for MDM, and both regions will grow at a steady pace to reach the billion-dollar mark, in 2013 for North America and in 2015 for Europe. In 2013, MDM software revenue will see faster growth in Asia/Pacific, where revenue will increase by 30 percent from 2012 to reach $209 million. “MDM has become a critical discipline required for dealing with the challenges of social data, ‘big data’ and data in the cloud,” Graham said.

Within the overall MDM market, more than half the revenue is driven by products from small and best-of-breed vendors, as the market continues to favor specialized solutions over "generic" offerings. However, the overall MDM market is dominated by three major players - IBM, Oracle and SAP.  “In the next four years we expect larger vendors will continue to acquire for this specialization while smaller vendors will acquire each other to build market share and increase the functionality within their portfolios,” said Chad Eschinger, research director at Gartner.

However, the variety of technologies that can be applied to an MDM initiative leaves the door open for the entrance of data integration and data quality providers, in particular. As more midsize organizations adopt MDM in the course of the next four years, they are demanding lower prices and more flexibility from vendors. As a result, many new MDM vendors and offerings capturing this market will be focused on areas such as open source, as well as cloud computing/software as a service.

The largest domains are MDM of customer data and MDM of product data, each of which is predicted to more than double in size over the next four years. MDM of customer data helps an organization cross-sell and cross-market, as well as retain customers and provide a consistent high-quality customer experience. The market for MDM of customer data is expected to reach $644 million in 2012 and to exceed $1 billion in 2015. The market for MDM of product data, which helps an organization store product-related master data, metadata, or both, is projected to reach $688 million in 2012 and to surpass $1.1 billion in 2015.

“The increased demand for more effective decision-making and a focus on improving the timeliness and accuracy of business decisions makes MDM paramount for organizations,” said Graham. “MDM supports these goals by ensuring the high quality of key data needed at the point of decision, removing uncertainty and increasing confidence.”

Datacenter connectivity, disaster recovery/business continuity, and data storage replication are the three primary applications driving adoption of Ethernet. "Enterprises are increasingly utilizing Ethernet services for domestic and international WAN networking," said Nav Chander, research manager, Enterprise Telecom. "The ability to efficiently transport multiple types of traffic - including voice and video, as well as non-IP-based traffic and storage traffic - is a key differentiator for Ethernet services within the enterprise."

Growth of Ethernet access as an alternative to leased lines for access to other services, such as to the Internet or IP VPNs, is also contributing to demand. Additionally, Ethernet services are often significantly less expensive than private line or packet services, and lower equipment costs also contribute to overall cost effectiveness.

Other key findings include the following:

• E-Line services make up slightly more than half of the Ethernet services revenue at present;
• Ethernet access market will maintain growth rates above 20 percent during the forecast period;
• More medium-sized enterprises are also adopting Ethernet as they migrate to VoIP, employ storage networking, and access cloud-based services;
• Implementation of hybrid Ethernet and IP VPN networks are a growing trend among enterprises.

Ethernet seems to be wired for success: Adaption rates are soaring, and revenue in the U.S. is expected to increase from $3.4 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion in 2015. Photo: Public Domain

While rebuilding is under way, SMBs have been slow to resume business because of damages to buildings and facilities and the lack of resources with which to renovate them. These delays in the restoration of production facilities in the Tohoku region have severed supply chains, created power shortages in areas serviced by Tokyo Electric Power and Tohoku-Electric Power, and caused consumers to exercise self-restraint in their purchasing. The overall effect has been detrimental to SMBs and, as a trend, caused them to cut back on their IT spending. Therefore, significant negative growth is forecast for the Japan SMB IT market in 2011. However, we are also looking at a resumption of positive growth in this market in 2012 when supply chains are rebuilt and reconstruction demand keeps SMBs afloat.

In terms of the industry sectors, IDC forecasts that the impact brought about by the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake will result to negative growth for all sectors in 2011. Manufacturing and financial services are forecast to be particularly hard hit with double-digit negative growth of -11.4 percent and -10.7 percent respectively. The impact will be milder for information services (YoY growth rate: -5.9 percent). This sector has seen expansion in the demand for datacenters and the effect of consumers' self-restraint on Internet service providers has been relatively small. Many companies in the information services sector are improving their performance, which is mitigating the size of the contraction. IDC forecasts positive growth for all sectors except financial services in 2012.

In spite of the substantial decline in the 2011 Japan SMB IT market, the earthquake will also expand the demand for datacenters and cloud computing among SMBs seeking to address issues such as business continuity, disaster recovery, and power conservation. Nonetheless, the demand for these solutions may be transitory and could decline as electric power shortages are remedied. The study recommends that IT vendors move quickly to respond to needs for business continuity, disaster recovery, and power-savings solutions and also propose solutions that address fundamental management and operational issues.

The picture shows Japan, an island nation in East Asia, from space. Photo: NASA/Public Domain

“We have written the application from the ground up in HTML5, so that customers can also access their content offline directly from their browser,” said Dorothy Nicholls, Director, Amazon Kindle. “The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you're using - from Chrome to iOS. To make it easy and seamless to discover new books, we've added an integrated, touch optimized store directly into Cloud Reader, allowing customers one click access to a vast selection of books.”

The Kindle Cloud Reader can be seen as Amazon’s answer to Apple’s App Store policies. To comply with the latest rules, Amazon removed the buy-button from the Kindle app late last month. Through the new application, users can now access over 950,000 eBooks through the browser based app that applies updates automatically to.

According to a 2010 study from Goldman Sachs, Amazon did have a 58 percent market share of eBook sales in the U.S. at this time, followed by Barnes & Noble (27 percent) and Apple (9 percent.) The Kindle Cloud Reader will be available on additional web browsers, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the BlackBerry PlayBook browser in the coming months.
The Kindle Cloud Reader is available for download here.

A new app for Amazon’s Kindle allows users to access over 950,000 eBooks through the Safari and Chrome web browser. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com