While we “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many interesting numbers each week. Here are some:
Plugging In SpiceHeads
Since launching Spiceworks 3.5 in December 2008, there are now more than 50 Spiceworks plugins and widgets in a variety of categories developed by Spiceworks employees and SpiceHeads.
More detail from email with Spiceworks:
[Since launching there’s been] over 16,000 downloads of 53 plugins.
Storage: The Low Hanging Fruit of the Cloud
Today, [Amazon S3] has grown to store over 52 billion objects and serve over 1 trillion requests per year from customers in over 90 countries.
How Much Does a Cloud Cost, Software Edition
A Hadoop-powered analysis also determines what 300 million people a month see. Yahoo tracks peoples’ behavior to gauge what types of stories and other content they like and tries to alter its homepage accordingly. Similar software tries to match ads with certain types of stories. And the better the ad, the more Yahoo can charge for it.
Yahoo is estimated to have spent tens of millions of dollars developing Hadoop, which remains open-source software that anyone can use or modify.
Punk IT Kills Again
[SGI] declared bankruptcy and sold itself to Rackable Systems for $25 million plus the assumption of “certain liabilities.” In its bankruptcy filing, SGI listed debt of $526 million…. A decade ago, SGI’s revenues peaked at about $4 billion a year. Now it will be lucky to make one tenth of that, with a revenue run-rate of less than $400 million, and its losses are piling up. Rackable’s stock is down nearly 7 percent on the news. SGI’s high-performance, highly-proprietary, computing systems fell victim to the spread of cheap Linux boxes hooked up together with massive redundancies.
I remember seeing those frosty blue SGI boxes in a university computer lab once and thinking they must be the coolest workstations ever.
Tech Jobs
The U.S. high-tech industry gained about 77,000 jobs in 2008, despite losses of 38,000 jobs in the fourth quarter of the year, according to a report from trade group TechAmerica…. While unemployment was up slightly in high-tech fields, it was still relatively low, the report said. Computer scientists had a 2.4 percent unemployment rate at the end of the year, and engineers had a 2.5 percent unemployment rate, the report said. The U.S. unemployment rate in February was 8.1 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Another summary from Denise Dubie:
Dice reports 50+K open tech jobs as of April 1; TechAmerica says 77K new IT jobs created in ’08; Challenger reports >50K IT jobs cut in ’09.
According to the report, Texas added 14,700 high tech jobs, with a total of 474,100 people employed by the industry. That makes Texas the second largest state by technology employment, behind California and ahead of New York.
Meanwhile, the big guys keep letting thousands go.
Spending Forecasts: Cloudy with a chance of meat-balls
US: “Forrester Research is now predicting that U.S. IT spending will drop by 3.1 percent this year, shattering its previous projection of a 1.6 percent increase.”
Globally: “Gartner reported that global IT spending will reach about $3.2 trillion in 2009, a 3.8 percent decline in growth from the $3.3 trillion spent in 2008 — which marked a 6.1 percent growth over 2007. The research firm adjusted its spending forecast downward across all segments, attributing the cutback in spending to the economic recession.”
Fewer Mainframe Customers, But More Revenue
But while mainframes are evolving to handle more applications, the number of mainframes is shrinking, said John Phelps, the lead mainframe analyst for technology research firm Gartner. IBM has lost more than 75 customers who left mainframe platforms, and it has gained about 50 new ones. Mainframes are operating more efficiently, handling more MIPS — millions of instructions per second — year after year.
…
Mainframes bring in more money each year to BMC. Mainframe license and maintenance revenue increased from $671.3 million in 2006 to $680.4 million in 2007 to $747.4 million in 2008, although the economically challenged fourth quarter saw a dip compared to the same period the year before.
The Open Source Spending Gap
On more than one occasion, I’ve been on a call with someone from an ‘enterprise’ talking about how they are replacing Opsware or Bladelogic installations that were minimum high 6 figure checks to implement, wanting Reductive Labs services, and balking at spending ~$20,000 with us as too expensive. Someone convinced somebody that the promise of automation was worth X dollars, possibly didn’t deliver it, and now a solution is not worth X/50? What gives?
Lots of Folks at SXSWi
South by Southwest Interactive director Hugh Forrest said attendance at the festival grew about 25 percent over last year, which we estimate puts the number of people with access to SXSWi at more than 11,200 paid registrants. Previous estimates of attendance growth had ranged anywhere from 10 to 15 percent to 20.
Web 2.0 Coverage from ITDatabase.com
After last week’s SXSW coverage numbers, I asked Travis Van from RedMonk client ITDatabase.com to start highlighting some numbers from their database each week. Here’s his first, as of 7:03AM PDT:
The vendors that the tech media is writing about @ Web 2.0 Expo so far this week:
Google (33 content items), Twitter (30), Microsoft (27), Facebook (27), Palm (23), Apple (14),IBM (11),
Adobe (10), LG (8), eBay (8), Sprint (7), Nokia (6), Amazon (5), Socialtext (4), Paypal (4)…barely deviate from those discussed at the SXSW event last month:
Twitter (152), Facebook (116), Apple (79), Google (73), Microsoft (40), Palm (22), Adobe (19), Amazon (19), Dell (17), Intel (11), IBM (10), Nokia (9), Sprint (8), LinkedIn (8), Ryan (8)
The numbers show Webware’s Rafe Needleman (who reports being “accosted by Twitter” at Web 2.0) and ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio leading the coverage with 5 postings apiece thus far. What the numbers don’t show is that perhaps the most prolific journalist on the floor thus far has been Informationweek‘s David Berlind, who has filmed more than 20 Tech Radar “ReviewCam” episodes, despite spotty Internet access from our union friends at Moscone West [These ReviewCam episodes have a great, pro-gonzo format to them, check this one on the Sun Cloud -Coté]. Those ReviewCam episodes should be trickling onto Tech Radar after production, so keep an eye out. Another number (that we’re working on) is how many conferences Moscone West needs to host before they can figure out how to handle wireless for a large crowd. If anyone has an abacus we can borrow…
You Get What You Pay For…?
Apple’s recent Mac mini upgrade makes Microsoft’s value marketing all the easier. The configurations are simply atrocious, which is worth some comparison. The cheapest Mac you can buy is the $599 Mac mini, for which comes a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive and 128MB graphics memory. There is no keyboard, mouse or monitor. [Update: Matt Ray sends along this $399 listing.]
What kind of Windows PC can you buy for $599, which is about $59 more than February’s ASP? Best Buy offers the Dell Inspiron I530S-119B, with 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, 128GB graphics memory, 19-inch widescreen monitor, keyboard and mouse. Need I say more?
That’s a Lot of PS2s
Sony has sold more than 136 million PS 2s worldwide, making it the most popular video game console in history. By the end of the year, there will be more than 1,900 titles for the PS 2. [In addition to the US reduction from $129 to $99] Sony also cut the price in Europe, knocking it down from 130 euros to 100 euros.
Netbooks from Telcos
Subsidized netbooks are widely available from European wireless carriers, and now, the US has seen fit to follow suit. Verizon competitor AT&T is already selling an Acer Netbook through Radio Shack retail stores, pricing the device at $99 with a two-year wireless contract. And in January, it offered a $350 mail-in rebate if you purchased a $449 Dell Mini 9 with a two-year contract.
Meanwhile, from another story:
“Everything is shifting upwards quickly,” said Philip Solis, an analyst at ABI Research. “Netbooks are already very PC-like.” ABI predicts that 39 million netbooks will be sold worldwide this year, more than double the 16 million ABI said shipped in 2008.
App Stores
Apple said last week that there have been more than 800,000 downloads from a selection of more than 25,000 applications at the App Store. Google has already followed Apple’s example with the Android Marketplace. There are more than 2,300 applications now available from that store, and the average user of a T-Mobile USA G1 handset has downloaded 40 of them.
Growing Alfresco
Alfresco today announced a year of record growth in 2008, highlighted by 103 percent year-over-year growth and the addition of more than 270 enterprise customers. Alfresco also doubled community membership over the past year and surpassed the 1.5 million software downloads mark. [via email]
Disclosure: Dell, IT Database, Reductive Labs, Cloudera, and Spiceworks are clients. See the RedMonk client list for others mentioned.
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