While we “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many numbers each week. Below are some:
Navel Gazing
Number of weeks doing numbers: 32 (I think). Numbers of Numbers posts now: 31. I think we missed a week in there somewhere (I know: last week).
Virtual Potential
According to Gartner, 18 percent of server workloads this year run on virtualized servers; that share will grow to 28 percent next year and reach almost half by 2012…. There are about 5.8 million virtual machines (VM) believed to be in use today, said Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman.
But growth is anticipated among the small-to-midsize businesses (SMB), and it’s in this segment that Microsoft has a good chance to build a customer base. By 2012, VMware’s share is expected to shrink to 65 percent but the base of VMs will have grown to 58 million, a 10-fold leap. By that time, Gartner believes, Microsoft will hold 27 percent share, Citrix 6 percent, Red Hat 2 percent and others about 1 percent.
In related news:
VMware says that it has processed over 500,000 downloads of its vSphere 4.0 virtualization tools, which started shipping on May 21 and which are anchored by the ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor. According to a spokesperson at VMware, those downloads are only for sales by VMware itself through its own Website and does not include any vSphere distribution through VMware’s partner channel, which includes just about every server maker on the planet.
While you were waiting…
Sun Microsystems will lay off up to 3,000 workers over the next 12 months as Oracle awaits approval from European regulators for its acquisition of the company.
Sun is losing US$100 million a month while it awaits approval for the deal, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said last month, so news of the layoffs came as no great surprise.
Meanwhile, Dell’s manufacturing shifting is shedding jobs as well.
BYOC: Bring Your Own Computer
Citrix, a software maker, has been running trials of a program in which its employees receive a stipend for computers and buy their own machines. The company recently surveyed 133 of the trial participants and found that 42 percent of them spent more than their $2,100 budget and 11 percent spent more than $3,000 on their new PCs.
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About 90 percent said they felt more productive, and almost all of them said they would participate in the program again.
I’ve liked this concept since I heard Citrix talking about it last year. I’ve been thinking that this might be the real, lasting thing that The Kids (the “digital natives”) bring to the IT landscape: bringing their own laptops, phones, and IT. I don’t think The Kids are any “better” than previous generations, I just think they expect less from IT and can do much of it on their own. And if our The Kids aren’t smart enough to do even that “simple” task, plenty of The Kids from the rest of The Flat World are ready to take their place, I’m sure.
That’s the thing about the cycle of fretting about The Kids entering the work-force: if they’re so damn revolutionary and brilliant, make ’em use that to work for their pudding. Supposedly, they’ll be happy to. At least according to one of the 500 different The Kids prognostications ;>
(As a side note, the BYOC trend totally favors the thing computing and desktop virtualization products Citrix has to sell, don’t think it’s just virtuous experimenting on their part.)
The New “Dumb Pipes”
Free Skype-to-Skype minutes grew 74 percent to 27.7 billion minutes, whereas SkypeOut minutes (which is what members pay for) grew 44 percent to 3.1 billion minutes.
All of those SkypeOut calls translated to a healthy $185 million in revenues, up 29 percent from a year ago. If it keeps up at this pace, it should easily be able to exceed its $1 billion annual revenue goal by 2011.
Recension Recovery Reality
Overall, IT pay and perks continues to shrink in 2009. A Janco Associates survey released in June found that total compensation for IT professionals fell an average of 19 percent between January 2008 and June 2009.
Obama IT
One obvious follow-up question to the U.S. government’s announcement this month that the federal stimulus has created or saved 30,000 jobs so far is this: How many were IT and engineering jobs?
Unfortunately, there isn’t an answer.
There is no information at Recovery.gov concerning the types of jobs either saved or created from the $16 billion in contracts awarded so far, representing 2% of the $787 billion stimulus.
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Mark Loughbridge, IBM’s chief financial officer, said this month that public sector was again the fastest growing sector with 2% growth, led by health care and education.
Fact: you can never get enough iPhone Numbers p0rn
iPhone activations were 3.2 million, the largest quarterly activation total to date. Of those activations, 40 percent of them were new to AT&T.
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Wireless data revenue was $3.6 billion, up 33.6 percent from a year ago.
iPhotoshop
Adobe today announced that its Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone application has been downloaded over 1 million times from Apple’s App Store, a milestone reached in less than one week of availability. Additionally, the application has held the No. 1 position for all “Top Free” applications as well as the “Top Free” application in the Photography category for 10 consecutive days.
From PR email from Adobe. See more about the app. I just like these stories because Photoshop was long the example of an application that couldn’t be extended beyond its original desktop confines. Which is still true for all of Photoshop, but even the limited photo editing functionality in the iPhone app is fun.
Disclosure: Adobe is a client. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant clients.
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