First wave of ‘ultrabooks’ expected soon

The first set of ultra-low voltage, ultra-thin notebooks based on the very latest Intel Core i7 series

processors are due to hit the market any time now and Computer 2000 will be the first to offer you stock from all the leading vendors. We’re expecting announcements from Acer, Asus, HP, Samsung, Toshiba and other top names imminently and these thinner and lighter mobiles are expected to be hot-sellers in the run-in to the year-end.

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Global Internet population will be 2.7 billion by 2015

In its latest Worldwide New Media Market Model, IDC predicts that the total number of Internet users will grow from two billion in 2010 to 2.7 billion in 2015, when 40 percent of the world’s population will have access to the web. Global B2C ecommerce spending will grow from $708 billion last year to $1,285 billion in 2015, at a CAGR of 12.7 percent.

BT turns up broadband speeds

BT intends to roll out fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband service that will deliver download speeds of up to 300Mbps to as much as one quarter of the UK next spring. Other parts of the UK should be able to access fibre-to-the cabinet services at speeds of up to 80Mbps. BT is investing £2.5 billion to make  fibre broadband available to two thirds of UK premises by the end of 2015, only around a quarter of these will benefit from FTTP.

Tablets to take a sixth of the market

IDC expects tablet sales to make up more than a sixth of the PC market in 2011. The analyst says that 62.5 million units will be shipped this year while overall PC shipments will be up just 3 percent to 357 million, which would give tablets a 17.5 percent slice. Around 18 million tablets were shipped in 2010. In Q2 this year, IDC says that Apple took a 68.3 percent share of the market. In EMEA Europe, tablet shipments were almost 4.4 million units in 2Q11 – an increase of 394 percent compared with the same quarter last year and up 82 percent compared with 1Q11.

Hot technologies and markets for the channel in 2012 Part 4

Value Added Cloud

Where would any self-respecting prediction list be without reference to the cloud! Every vendor seems to have jumped in feet first with cloud happily tacked onto just about every possible permutation of product. You would assume that the market is saturated and a done deal. Well the reality is that customers – remember, the ones who pay for things – have, by and large, not yet boarded the good ship cloud for various reasons. There is an opportunity for a new breed of channel partner that understands not just the cloud but legacy systems to help then make that switch. One of the biggest areas is office productivity, of which, Microsoft is still the dominant player. Another area is unified communications, and the last area ripe for moving to  the cloud is backup and recovery.

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Tablets take PC sales up 17 percent

Channel research specialist Canalys measured global PC market growth at 17 percent in the second quarter of the year, driven by widespread upgrades to Windows 7 and strong tablet sales. Gartner’s preliminary figures for Q2 – which do not include tablet PC sales – tell a different story with global sales up by only 2.3 percent on last year. It says that the market is now shifting to a pattern of modest, but steady growth.

New 20nm NAND process will lead to higher capacity tablets and SSDs

Intel and Micron has announced a finer 20-nanometer (nm) process technology for manufacturing NAND flash memory, which is likely to lead to higher capacity plug-in flash drives, solid state devices and tablets early next year. The new 20nm process produces an 8-gigabyte (GB) multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash device. The result will be higher capacity in a smaller space and for around the same price as today’s technology.

Acer puts more emphasis on commercial channel business

Acer is putting more focus and investment into driving commercial business in the SME market. The company has re-focused its activity and now has a new commercial team, headed by Division Manager Nathan Knight, with Alicia Shepherd heading the Sales Team dealing with all SME resellers, whilst Jennifer Watts will run the Professional Computing product set. These resources have been put in place to make sure that resellers have access to the right products, at the right price, and the right margin. There will also be new incentives and mechanics to assist resellers addressing the business market, including a commitment to same-day response on bids and tenders.

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Apple iPad 2 expected to help tablet sales reach 58 million by 2014

Ahead of the launch of the Apple iPad 2, InStat predicted that sales of tablet devices will hit 58 million units by 2014. Newspaper and magazine content and a rise in table-specific apps are expected to fuel growth in sales. Emailing and browsing are currently the top two main uses for tablets, according to InStat with more than half of users spending nine hours or more each week using their devices. Adobe recently announced a version of its Digital Publishing Suite that enables creation of interactive publications on tablets which will give developers greater flexibility in development and will only enhance the content available on tablets.

Do you own a tablet or are you thinking of getting one for business or home?  Let us know how you think the market will develop.

What kind of Christmas will it be for resellers?

Andy Dow, Retail Director, talks about what kind of Christmas will it be for resellers and what products to look out for. 

What kind of Christmas will it be for you? What products are you focusing on this year? – leave a comment to let us know.

Click the title to view the video.