Archive

November 2018

Browsing

It’s my favorite time of the year – the moment when our Global IoT Decision Maker results come back from the field. We’ve been fielding this primary research study for 6 consecutive years, and this year we captured feedback from our biggest sample yet. This year we have inputs from almost 5,000 IoT decision makers in more than 25 countries. The dataset is rich with perspective on deployments, including the challenges and successes these organizations are experiencing. But this year, we are diving deeper into the key metrics they are using to measure success as well as their perspectives on how to truly monetize the IoT.

More than 3 years ago, I wrote a IDC Community post, “Using Robots to Curb Labor Shortage in Chinese Manufacturing” highlighting a factory in China that replaced 90% of the people in the factory with automation and robots. In that case the workforce was reduced from 650 employees down to only 60 people, those remaining were doing drastically different work than those jobs that were replaced. The jobs shifted from manual labor to oversight, maintenance, and support of the automation and robotics systems.

With Halloween now firmly in the rear view mirror, I – along with numerous retailers – am turning my attention to holiday shopping. Naturally, the tech fan in me expects all number of smart compute devices to make it on many consumers’ lists from tablets to smartphones, from PC’s to smart speakers, and even some of the emerging products like AR/VR and drones.

While Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is more than 10 years old, the technology has not captured a level of market success commensurate with its mindshare – and has indeed lagged either SaaS or IaaS in terms of market presence. Yet in spite of its slow market growth, PaaS technology has continued to diversify and evolve to support the intensifying developer need for agility and productivity, especially as developers have assumed a front seat at the enterprise digital transformation table.

IDC has published the 4th in a series of IDC MarketScapes on POS (point of sale) software solutions. This most recent IDC MarketScape, the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Point-of-Sale Software in Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Retail 2018 Vendor Assessment, reviews Aptos, Diebold Nixdorf, Fujitsu, GK Software, NCR, NEC, OneView Commerce, Oracle, PCMS, TCPOS, Toshiba, and Veras Retail. Other IDC MarketScapes in this series also review Cegid, Celerant Technology, Infor Retail, Jesta I.S., Mi9 Retail, KWI, Multidev Technologies, Oracle NetSuite, and Springboard Retail.