gartner

Spoofing Gartner's Magic Quadrants

What with all the talk about companies buying their way into Gartner's Magic Quadrants (viz, the more cash you offer, the better the magic), most recently with accusations flying about Wipro buying its way onto a Magic Quadrant, I was pleased to see a comic take on the infamous (but powerful) Magic Quadrants posted by Valley of the Geeks publisher and Sun Microsystems executive Zack Urlocker:

Gartner, of course, provides an explanation of how it builds its Magic Quadrants, which it says helps provide "visual snapshots of a market's direction, maturity, and participants." The hitch? You … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 891: Jazz hands and a testosterone venti

Leo Laporte joins the cast today to discuss, of course, Steve Jobs' medical leave of absence, the problem with filters (yes, it's the problem you think it is), the future of bendy gadgets, and how to dance like Bollywood. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 891

Apple: Jobs to Take Medical Leave of Absence http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/01/14/apple-jobs-to-take-medical-leave-of-absence/

Analysts: he probably won’t come back http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/01/why-jobs-isnt-c.html

In the interim, who’s leading Apple? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10143030-37.html

PC shipments up just 1.1 … Read more

CFOs start to see the benefits of open source

CFO Magazine is running a great story about the cost savings available from open-source software. This is a topic that you'll hear open-source vendors crow about, but it's somewhat rare to actually get a CFO on the record about her benefits from open source, so it's notable.

Recent Gartner research suggests that over 27 percent of enterprises will deploy open-source software in 2009. (Note: the remaining 63 percent will, too, but Gartner must have asked the CIO, and the CIO is the last to know.) That's up from 25 percent in 2008, while the share of … Read more

Gartner says 2009 chip sales decline to set record

Can the chip industry doldrums get any worse? Yes, Gartner says. In fact, semiconductor sales may set a record for consecutive yearly declines.

The market research firm on Tuesday predicted that in 2009, the chip industry will see back-to-back yearly declines for the first time in its history, with global chip revenue expected to decline 16.3 percent, to $219.2 billion.

Sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 will post a historic decline too, sinking to a record quarter-over-quarter decline of 24.4 percent, surpassing the 20 percent decline record set in the second quarter of 2001, the firm … Read more

Daily Tidbits: Delicious goes on the road

Social-bookmarking site Delicious announced Tuesday that it has launched a mobile site to allow users to view saved pages while on the go. Delicious Mobile allows users to browse saved bookmarks, view their in-box, and browse recent bookmarks and tags from the Delicious community. The company says it will integrate its social search engine into the mobile site next.

Analysts from market research firm Gartner said Wednesday that organizations need to understand how social networks are "altering the recruitment landscape and adapt recruiting strategies and systems accordingly." Gartner analysts went on to say that by 2011, organizations that … Read more

Gartner: 85 percent of enterprises using open source

Admit it. When you read that headline - "Gartner: 85 percent of enterprises using open source" - you assumed that was a good thing, right? Who's afraid of enterprises saving a lot of money and getting much more flexible IT for their IT budgets?

Gartner, apparently. According to Gartner, that widespread adoption is cause for alarm, as Glyn Moody rightly notes (and pillories). Somehow, Gartner assumes that if 85 percent are using open source and 69 percent don't have a formal open-source management team, the world is going to end.

As Moody notes, however, IT organizations have virtually nothing to worry about when adopting open source:

"About a dozen times a year," [Software Freedom Law Center general counsel Eben] Moglen says, "somebody does something [that] violates the GPL. Most of the time, they're doing so inadvertently, they haven't thought through what the requirements are. And I call them up and I say, 'Look, you're violating the GPL. What you need to do is this. Would you help us?'" The answer is invariably yes, he says.

So the reality of the situation is that the worst you are likely to get is quick phone call from Moglen....Here's the truth, then: there are no "huge potential liabilities" involved with free software. It's very hard to infringe, and very easy to sort things out.

I think it's more likely that Gartner's biggest concern is that open-source software firms (and communities) pay it little money for its research. The biggest danger from open source may actually be to Gartner's P&L statement, not to the enterprises that adopt open-source software.

After all, as IT Pro reports, the Gartner study also indicates that open-source software "is being used for mission critical processes as often as it is for less business-necessary functions." In other words, more of the world relies on software that brings Gartner roughly $0.00 in analyst fees.… Read more

Gartner: Internal clouds are coming

Gartner analyst Tom Bittman is predicting "that the future of corporate IT is in private clouds, essentially flexible computing networks modeled after public providers such as Google and Amazon, yet built and managed internally for each business's users."

While it's true that most enterprises can't replicate the economies of scale that Google and Microsoft have, most companies do have spare computing capacity that can be used as part of an internal cloud.

I've written many times about the need for a virtualized layer--one that separates the platforms and the applications. Gartner agrees and … Read more

Ballmer: It's OK to wait for Windows 7

Some companies are planning to skip Windows Vista, and that's OK, according to Steve Ballmer. But Microsoft's CEO hopes that those companies come back for Windows 7.

Ballmer said that "if people want to wait they really can," ZDNet's Larry Dignan reports. "But I'd definitely deploy Vista," he said.

Speaking on Thursday at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando, Ballmer defended Vista and noted that "The adoption rate of Vista is faster than the adoption rate was of XP at two years in."

Ballmer did note that Vista has … Read more

If Intel's worried about suppliers, so should the rest of IT

It's reached the point where I don't trust any of the big research houses to get it right when it comes to IT spending.

Last month Forrester reduced its 2009 IT spending forecast while at the same time upping its projections for the remainder of this year. (I should add that Forrester issued its declaration just before the big financial meltdown got going in earnest.)

Meanwhile, tech CEOs gathering this week at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo conclave in Orlando are moping around as they regale each other with ever more depressing tales from the trenches. The Gartner graphic … Read more