Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

This animated sequence is a talk by Dan Pink (Wikipedia Google Twitter) discussing human drives and motivations at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (Wikipedia RSA Website). It’s a great all around introduction to some newly minted economic research from the top tier of the profession (MIT, U of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon — sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank), and should be interesting for anyone, not just business folks. I’ll let Dan explain:

Business Continuity/Disaster Data Recovery Market to Reach $39 Billion by 2015

Today we’d like to point you in the direction of tech intelligence firm ABIresearch. Currently the BC/DR market is sustaining $25 billion in economic activity, and is set to experience a CAGR of 10% as we move forward into 2015. Points to keep in mind: federal mandates require financial services and health-care industries to have business continuity and disaster recovery programs; vendors need to minimize complexity, provide broadest possible response. Have a look:

ABIresearch – Business Continuity/Disaster Data Recovery Market

… To compensate for the unexpected and account for the unpreventable, prudent organizations utilize business continuity products and services plans to keep their enterprises up and running in emergencies, and implement disaster recovery plans and programs against the possibility that a computer, server, office or entire building becomes unusable as a result of a catastrophe.

ABI Research forecasts that the global market for business continuity and disaster data recovery solutions will grow from $24.3 billion in 2009 to exceed $39 billion in 2015.

“As a result of their growing reliance on electronic data and the need for backup, storage and security, industries such as financial services and healthcare now operate under federal mandates requiring them to have disaster recovery and business continuity programs in place,” says ABI Research director Larry Fisher, “In many other industries, such programs are not legally required, but savvy companies always prepare for the worst.”

… Continue Reading

The South African IT Race Is On

The managed services industry is growing rapidly across the globe, everywhere we are finding phenomenal numbers. If you look at revenue breakdowns for public companies in this space, you can clearly see why there’s lots of excitement.

We’d like to bring your attention to South African technology firm EOH, a company with no debt and 212M in cash reserves, who in the last year experienced 20% gains in their Managed Services business. You can find the details in the presentation below, note the segmental reporting on page 7. Over half of EOH’s business is managed services, and the numbers they’re reporting match the trending we found in India last week.
EOH_Bk_T2IB02469~2

MidMarket IT Leaders See Growing Data Management Challenge

It’s the weekend, but no time to let up. Factoring a strategy for SMB isn’t easy; you need numbers, research, optimization, messaging, models, analysis, contingency plans, pivots, anything to find the market edge. One of the most important data sets you can find is Executive Sentiment; that’s why we are excited to bring you an excellent presentation from IT Pro Mike Vizard, over at CTOEdge.com. The name of the slide is Mid-Market CIO Priorities for 2010, take a look and see what you can find.

MidMarket CIO Forum Presentation – MidMarket IT Leaders See Growing Data Management Challenge

Global Tech Recovery Will Drive US IT Market Growth Of 6.6% And 8.2% Globally (In Dollars) In 2010

With 713M in Market cap, Forrester Research has a decent reputation for accurate market analysis. Today we have a blog post from one of their Vendor Strategy Professionals, Andre Bartels, about the recovery story for the IT Market in the United States, and globally. There are 3 main points to keep in mind, first, we will see a modest recovery in the developed nations; second, a cheap dollar aiding global growth; and third, a new innovation cycle for the tech market.

Global Tech Recovery Will Drive US IT Market Growth Of 6.6% And 8.2% Globally (In Dollars) In 2010

Posted by Andrew Bartels

2009 was a miserable year for tech vendors, especially for sellers of capital equipment like PCs, servers, routers, and licensed software, and for systems integrators who helped implement that software.   2010 will be a much better year, especially for these very same vendors.   We’re not talking boom yet, so we are not predicting double-digit growth rates across the tech market (though some categories will see those kinds of growth).  But, as our latest tech market report shows (http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/us_and_global_it_market_outlook_q4/q/id/53384/t/2), we do think there will be a solid tech recovery in 2010, with growth rates in the high single digits.

… Continue Reading

Intel: The World is Running Out of Storage

There’s no denying the reality that companies across the globe are experiencing exponential storage growth — 60% a year according to Intel. Looking at our own internals we believe the Online Backup market could be as high as 200%, depending on your vertical strategy. We are fully committed to our partner program here at XZ Backup, and believe this surge in growth is not a fleeting phenomenon, but actually a shift in storage computing, in large part due to mobile expansion and corporate accountability. Apparently Intel agrees.

World is running out of storage, warns Intel

Intel has warned that the world is generating more data than it has the storage capacity to hold.

Speaking at the company’s European Research conference here in Brussels, Intel fellow Jim Held claimed that data storage was growing at a rate of 60% per year.

“Vast amounts of data are being created at an increasing rate, already more than we can handle,” Held warned. “In 2007, we estimated that we didn’t have the storage to keep all of it.”

… Continue Reading

Enabling Disaster Recovery for Enterprise and SMB

A lot of companies out there, especially in the Small and Medium Business space, have absolutely no disaster recovery program in place (up to 40% of Enterprise customers have no validation procedures in place, according to Info Tech Research). So an essential part of any DR go-to-market strategy for the SMB segment (including Enterprise) must include a comprehensive plan for addressing all of the business, communication, and technical processes required for successful deployment of DR Managed Services. Here is some information that we think is useful moving forward:

Essentials Storyboard Enabling Disaster Recovery

The Economist: Big Data On Its Way

We mentioned “Big Data” in a blog post a few days ago, so we would like to point you in the direction of an Economist piece entitled Data, data everywhere. It’s a great run through of the trend, and you walk away with a few solid numbers. What’s the takeaway? Data is a new economic input, on par with labor and capital. New forms of businesses will rise up in the next decade, and their models will rely on information generated by not just desktop computers, but cloud computing platforms, mobile phones, gps sensors, and enumerable other devices that will come to market. We appear to be in the beginning stages, so stay on the lookout.

Special report

A special report on managing information

Data, data everywhere

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

… Continue Reading

IT managed services market in India to hit US$3.8 billion in 2013

We try to follow leads in the global market, and today we have a story from India, where their IT managed services sector is growing at a respectable rate. These are points to keep in mind.

MIS Asia

NEW DELHI, INDIA, 30 APRIL 2010 – The IT managed services market in India is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8 per cent, according to IT market research specialist Springboard Research’s newly released report ‘Indian Managed IT Services Market’.

The market is expected to reach US$3.8 billion in 2013 from US$1.6 billion in 2009, and this growth is higher than the growth rate of the overall IT services market. The report says Wipro Infotech has the highest market share, and HCL Infosystems leads in user satisfaction.

… Continue Reading

It’s All About Scalability

One thing we know about here at XZ Backup, and that is scaling. You need ways of managing your infrastructure so you can optimize your work accordingly. Bottlenecks must be addressed, code breaks, hardware dies, new storage is brought online; when building to support SMB and Enterprise customers, you need to work on a global time-frame, which means 24/7/365.

In the process of building systems, you always have a set of options and technologies available to you, and the question is what mix of these solutions will help bring your product or service to the next level.

Here’s a video with Steve Huffman, founder of reddit, at Future of Web Apps Miami 2010, giving insights into lessons learned.

Lessons Learned while at Reddit from Carsonified on Vimeo.