However, as a press release explaining the new report highlighted, defining “storage” for the purposes of big data is an exercise in subjectivity. There are systems for archiving data, and systems for storing post-processed data and systems — like the Hadoop Distributed File System — that put storage on the same servers that process data. There also are storage systems designed for operational data and those designed for transactional data, and very likely something in between.

Presumably, these numbers don’t account for the amount of storage baked into analytic database appliances like those from Teradata and Netezza. And, although the report doesn’t appear to address it, there also will be a market for storing data in the cloud — both provider-side and user-side. Even here, there are a variety of options from Hadoop services to data warehouse services to software-as-a-service applications.

The storage research is just IDC’s latest attempt at quantifying a big data movement that spans a wide section of individual markets. On Monday, for example, the firm predicted the market for analytics services would reach $70.8 billion by 2016. In January, it said big-data-specific servers, storage, networking, software and services will create a $23.8 billion market by 2016.

As we’ve said time and time again, though, trying to put a dollar value on the big data market is in many cases akin to herding cats (that we might also shear for fur and that might provide a valuable service killing off crop-damaging varmints). There are so many disparate facets and delivery models that touch so many different business uses and revenue sources that it’s difficult to capture big data, or any of its individual components, into a single market. But however IDC and other research firms define it, the only thing that matters in the end is probably the ever-rising revenue arrow.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Mmaxer.

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On Thursday, Goldman Sachs downgraded Microsoft shares to “Sell” from “Neutral” and Nomura Securities cut its call to “Neutral” from “Buy.” The moves came a day after  IDC called the first quarter of 2013 “the worst quarter” ever, with PC sales down 14 percent from the year-ago quarter. (Gartner numbers were slightly better: it had PC sales only off 11.4 percent year over year for the quarter.)

“At this point, unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not only didn’t provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have slowed the market,”  Bob O’Donnell, IDC Program Vice President, Clients and Displays said in a statement. (Full IDC statement here.)

Long-time Microsoft watcher Rick Sherlund at Nomura Securities wrote that the combination of “sluggish” Windows 8 adoption and the “lack of compelling new hardware is disappointing with no relief likely” until later this year when Intel releases the new Haswell notebook processor.

As if on cue, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported that Microsoft plans a new 7-inch Surface tablet to come later this year.

Updated: To be fair, for the first quarter, IDC also acknowledged that industry darling Apple also faded. While it did better than the overall U.S. market, IDC said shipments of Apple PCs  slipped 7.5 percent — apparently because more people are opting for iPad tablets as PC replacements.

MSFT data by YCharts

This story was updated at 6:54 a.m. PST with Apple PC share decline.

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On the company’s second quarter earnings call in December, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Oracle’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems made it “a leader in the highly profitable Engineered Systems segment of the hardware business.”  In his view, that’s a better, more lucrative place to be than in “low-margin undifferentiated products like commodity X86 servers.” Leave that race to the bottom to the Dells of the world, he seems to say. (In fact at one point during Oracle’s Sun acquisition, he actually did say that.)

Here’s the problem, since it entered the hardware business, Oracle hasn’t sold enough engineered systems to make up for lost sales of lower-end machines, according to third-party researchers. Its hardware revenue and unit share is headed south.

For the fourth calendar quarter of 2012,  Oracle server revenue  was down 18 percent year over year according to both Gartner and IDC. Meanwhile, as GigaOM’s Jordan Novet reported last week, the “other” server vendors — companies like Quanta and Wistron – saw their aggregate revenue rise nearly 22 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the year-ago period.

In units, the “other” category saw 35 percent growth. These are the types of servers that sell into huge web-scale data centers run by Facebook and Amazon. This is not a new thing: In the third quarter of 2012, Gartner numbers showed Oracle’s server revenue off 22.5 percent while “other” servers revenue was up 27 percent. Oracle’s own figures reinforce this narrative. In its third quarter, ending in November 30,  2012, Oracle hardware systems revenue fell 23 percent to $734 million from $953 million for the year-ago period.

The IDC findings are below. Obviously, Oracle sees huge potential in these high-end boxes — Nomura Securities’ analyst Rick Sherlund said “the Exaseries of servers are growing about 100 percent, but that has not been enough to offset the loss of the other business yet.” The question is how patient Oracle is prepared to be.

I’ve reached out for comment and will update this if one is forthcoming.  Update:  An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment, citing the company’s quiet period before its next earnings report. Here’s the thing, while Oracle regroups and repositions its server business, the trajectory for “other” servers is way up and Oracle keeps heading in the other direction. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any indication of a change on Oracle’s third quarter earnings call March 20.

This story was updated at 9:40 a.m. PDT with a statement from Oracle.

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I was joking about the tablet “fad” of course; I’ve been sharing details of the fast-growing tablet trend for some time. Over a year ago, I explained in a GigaOm Pro report why the “PC” you buy in three years won’t be a PC, but instead will likely be a tablet (subscription required).

The numbers are in

To be fair, desktops are the dinosaurs of the PC industry as laptops first enabled mobility that smartphones later extended. So maybe the fact that only 20.1 million more desktops than tablets shipped in 2012 doesn’t impress you. Instead, take a look at the laptop market, where tablet shipments approached 63.5 percent of laptop shipments last year.

Think about that for a second. The consumer tablet market arguably started with Apple’s iPad in 2010. And in three years, the market is nearly equal that of desktops and is on track to surpass laptops possibly this year. All it would take is the roughly the same rate of growth for both tablets and laptops.

That’s not an unreasonable assumption and if it holds true, 229 million tablets would hit the market in 2013 while the laptop market would shrink to just under 200 million units.

What’s different? Everything.

Why is this market changing? Again, one need only look to the past to see the future. I said this last March when discussing how tablets could outsell PCs in 2013:

“Mobile devices are enabling new economies, opportunities and functions we couldn’t envision just a handful of years ago. Ignore this trend and you’re sure to think there’s no way tablets could ever outsell PCs, let alone do so within the next two years. Look at the next generation embracing tablets, however, and you start to see that the idea isn’t so far-fetched after all.”

With new application stores selling touch-optimized software on lightweight but capable hardware, tablets — and smartphones to an equal degree — are disrupting the traditional computing markets along with our ideas of what “computing” actually is. Full-featured legacy apps and devices will be around for years yet, but mobile apps are breaking features into bite-sized chunks of instant functionality at the tips of your fingers.

An alternative view of this disruption is to suggest that the PC and tablet market don’t really compete against each other. That sounds reasonable on the surface. After all, if there are tasks you need to complete requiring a desktop or a laptop, you’re likely to use one of those. But three points come to mind with that way of thinking.

Three reasons the trend will continue

First, many consumers and enterprises see tablets as more than just the toys that some dismissed them as in 2010. That’s evident by the actual figures of shipments and to a degree, sales. How often do you see a particular laptop or desktop that’s sold out or has a several week wait before delivery? Now consider the same for tablets: short supply for them could be related to production issues, of course, but strong demand is part of the equation as well.

Second, I’m seeing more and more instances of people hanging on to their older computers longer. That’s just anecdotal of course; I don’t have a massive sample size to work with. Don’t take my word for it, though. Check with your family and friends and see if the trend holds: Potential tablet purchases are likely to outweigh PC acquisitions.

Last, you can see the industry reaction to the tablet market. It’s undeniable; look at WinTel: Intel is working feverishly on getting its chips to work with mobile operating systems while also reducing the power draw. Microsoft’s Surface products? They’re Redmond’s answer to the tablet market with Surface RT trying to offer a best of both worlds between tablets and traditional desktop software such as Microsoft Office.

Again — because I know I’ll get the “PCs aren’t going anywhere” responses — the traditional PC will be around for years yet. Some computing activities just aren’t suited to the capabilities of tablet. But the problem for PC makers, Microsoft and others that figured their market was secure for ages is that the disruption already happened. Reacting now is too late because the market has already shifted in a new direction. It’s only just now that the evidence really shows the PC market won’t have a chair to sit in when the music stops playing.

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Worldwide, Dell and Acer were among those PC makers hit the hardest. Lenovo and Acer, which saw positive gains, didn’t fare as badly, as IDC’s chart shows below. Apple, whose sales data from IDC is only available in the U.S. was basically even with Mac sales from the previous year.

To add insult to injury, not only did the PC fare terribly during the gift-giving discount-frenzy holiday season, the results also reflect the inauspicious debut of Windows 8. Even Microsoft is moving its customers toward tablets for basic computing. At this point, it can’t be too much longer until tablets outsell PCs.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user ercwttmn

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This is why the traditional computer makers, and Microsoft now that it sells its own Surface slate, should focus more efforts on tablet design and optimization. The desktop PC market hasn’t gone away, but the growth in it has. IDC’s forecast suggests that the same will happen in the laptop market, which will be usurped by tablets. Many PC makers were either late to the mobile device game, or not part of it at all, and have watched sales dollars filter to those making smartphones at first, and now tablets.

Of course, the unit revenue for mobile devices may be less than that of a desktop or laptop. IDC says the entire industry will see average sales price of devices “drop from $534 in 2011 to $378 in 2016.” That means computer makers will have to make up the difference in volume and the best chance to do that is by seizing momentum early, much as Apple did with its iPad.

Although it’s difficult to look forward several years in the device market, I believe that IDC’s general prediction is correct. In my opinion, it may be too conservative. Yes, desktops and laptops are still heavily in use, but that’s mainly because they support a legacy model of computing and will need to do so for some time to come. That model is changing.

Additionally, tablet hardware is improving quickly, and perhaps more importantly, so are the applications that run on tablets. Activities that once sounded absurd on a tablet just two or three years ago are now possible on an iPad, Android slate or Windows RT device. Instead of looking back at “old-school computing,” laptop makers should be looking ahead at potential software and cloud services that tablets will benefit from.

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The predictions, which also include estimates for PCs, are informed by the expectation that a lot of people are going to unwrap mobile device gifts this month: Tablet shipments are expected to increase 55.8 percent this holiday over last year’s; smartphone shipments are expected to jump 39.5 percent in the same time frame, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker, published Monday. And yes, this all continues to happen at the expense of PCs, IDC says.

Total expected shipments this holiday quarter of 362 million devices would be a 26.5 percent increase over the same period a year ago. It would also be a big step up from the last quarter, which also broke records. The third quarter of 2012 saw 303.6 million mobile devices shipped worldwide, worth $140.4 billion.

As the above chart shows, worldwide connected mobile device shipments continue to be mostly a battle between Samsung and Apple. Samsung currently leads with about 22 percent of the worldwide market, and Apple is next with 15 percent. However, Apple continues to dominate in profits: IDC says Apple devices commanded an average selling price of $744; Samsung’s $430.

Together, the two account for close to 40 percent of all connected mobile device shipments. Lenovo, which is in third place, continues to see major growth in its shipments, but its market share is still half that of Apple’s and a third of Samsung’s.

Numbers like these helps explain why Apple and Samsung continue spending millions on court battles all over the world – no one else is remotely a threat to their dominance in sales or profits.

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Not that they’re saying anything publicly but the companies that run the data centers in and around the New York financial services hub have to be wondering how to deal with such storms going forward.

Scratch a cloud, you’ll find data centers

Recent research from IDC shows that the total number of data centers  will fall to 2.89 million in the US in 2016 from 2.94 million this year. (IDC includses internal server rooms and closets in its count.)  One reason is that companies will not build as many small data centers in house and will shift more work to the cloud computing typicaly handled  by the mega data centers built by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. That means while the number of data centers — including company server rooms nad closets is falling– total data center space will actually grow to 700 million square feet in 2016 from 611.4 million square feet, this year.

Cedexis offers load-balancing to AWS shops

A cottage industry is growing up around helping customers use their Amazon Web Services most efficiently. Cedexis last week announced an extension to its OpenMix Software as a Service that it said will help Amazon EC2 customers route their traffic around multiple AWS regions as needed to avoid problems — including weather related issues — and maximize performance.

The Multi Region Load Balancer (MRLB)  service uses real-time information about latency and throughput to redirect traffic, as needed according to the company. The service is available o the Amazon Marketplace .  Cedexis Multi Region Load Balancer can help companies assure better performance even during weather-related emergencies by shifting workloads around trouble spots. Problems in one of the availability zones in Amazon’s US-East data center complex in Ashburn, Virg. caused problems for Amazon customers like Reddit a few weeks ago. More here from TechCrunch.

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The past two weeks have seen some depressing news on the cleantech front: inverter manufacturer Satcon Systems declared bankruptcy, PV module manufacturer JA Solar got a delisting letter from Nasdaq and Sunpower shut most of its Philippines factories. But the worst news came with two particular announcements: Better Place, the ambitious Israeli electric vehicle start-up, pushed out its CEO and evangelist-in-chief Shai Agassi, while A123 Systems, the Massachusetts-based battery manufacturer which was once the darling of the advanced battery industry, announced bankruptcy.

Is this the long-awaited cleantech apocalypse, or will some of these fighters rise from the mat? The short answer is this: those with effective business models (i.e. Better Place) have excellent prospects; those who don’t have a viable product to sell in the marketplace (i.e. A123 Systems) won’t be rising from anywhere.

All the news of the past few weeks certainly hasn’t helped cleantech, as an investing concept, to gain any respect. The fundamental problem with cleantech is that the name itself is a useful fiction: any company with a technology that might somehow be labelled environmentally positive can affix itself with the cleantech label and start selling shares. That leads to a bucket filled with a variety of companies with no real relationship to each other: from natural gas drillers to solar module manufacturers to high-tech laundromats.

In addition, most of the sectors that these companies play in are very hard to disrupt, such as energy and transportation. For a new company to compete, long lead times and many years prior to cash-flow positivity are to be expected. Meanwhile the Silicon Valley venture capitalists who backed such enterprises are quick to head for the exits when their expected 10x returns didn’t materialize within two years.

Thus cleantech as a whole was doomed to fail simply because it was a square peg of a marketing term that could never have fit into the round hole of expectations. That doesn’t mean that every cleantech investment will be a failure. The acid test for success will be the business model that the company is betting on. Many of them are still relevant and filled with value, even in the age of dropping PV and battery prices. Others are just plain bad bets.

Which brings to mind A123 Systems. I first became aware of the importance of the company’s technology when talking to model plane hobbyists. They were willing to pay a lot of money to get their hands on the first batch of production batteries from the company because they offered something unique: increased density at lower rate. The A123 battery, I realized, had a chance to disrupt the entire transportation sector.

Unfortunately, so did every other battery manufacturer. And there in lie the weakness in betting on A123′s: they were competing against dozens of other battery companies, most of whom had deeper pockets and access to cheap, government-subsidized capital. Thus LG Chem, AESC and Panasonic won the first round of the transportation battery wars. And A123 ran out of cash before they could even get to the second round.

The good news for the car and grid storage industries is that even if A123 won’t be able to compete anymore, its ghost certainly will. That’s because the factories in Massachusetts and Michigan have been acquired Johnson Controls, a company with pockets even deeper than LG’s and Panasonic’s. Thus the equipment and manufacturing spaces that once belonged to A123 will continue to crank out advanced batteries, albeit under a different logo. Johnson Control’s next generation chemistry, based on a Nickel Cadmium Aluminum cathode, will be even more energy dense and safer than A123′s iron phosphate chemistry and will have a shot at being a transformative battery technology for both the grid storage space and for the vehicle industry.

The Better Place situation is very different from A123′s. Better Place planned on launching a network of battery switching stations that would allow subscribers to their system limitless driving range. The idea was that Better Place would bring the wireless communications business model to personal transportation. They opened the first network in Israel and, lo-and-behold, the subscribers didn’t show up. Yet.

The problem with writing an obituary for Better Place is that the underlying business model is still very sound. I’ve spend a lot of time examining that model and various iterations of it. It makes sense. And it makes money. The problem, unfortunately, has been in the execution of the marketing plan. The Israeli car market is held hostage by a small oligarchy of leasing firms. Better Place chose to thread the needle by having those leasing firms be their distributors while at the same time not sharing enough profits with them. The leasing companies balked at becoming a middle-man, and froze Better Place out of the market.

The solution to the impasse is for Better Place to either re-mold its Israel operations as a head-on competitor to the leasing companies or to renegotiate its contracts with them. That’s a relatively simple fix. It will lead to a much higher market penetration and a flood of sales. It is my opinion that Better Place will eventually succeed in the market and will quickly thereafter be faced with EV network competitors. The company still has quite a bit of cash on hand to restructure its Israel operations and then can worry about international expansion.

Here are two companies that were both looking to disrupt the transportation industry with their respective products. One couldn’t compete with the large Asian behemoths. The other stumbled in the details of a specific local market. Both are being buried by the cleantech punditocracy. A123 Systems is definitely down for the count, although its tools will be put to be good use by Johnson Controls, which purchased them. Better Place, on the other hand, has a lot of fight in it and could mount a spectacular, albeit bruising, comeback.

This article originally appeared on IDC Energy Insights.

IDC Energy Insights provides research-based advisory and consulting services focused on market and technology developments in the energy and utility industries. IDC Energy Insights serves a diverse global client base, including electric, gas and water utilities, IT vendors, independent power producers, retail energy providers, oil and gas companies, equipment manufacturers, government agencies, financial institutions, and professional services firms. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world’s leading technology media, research, and events company.

Images courtesy of Better Place, A123 Systems.

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In the survey of 5,526 Appcelerator Titanium developers in late August, 66 percent of respondents said it was “likely or very likely” that a mobile-first startup could break Facebook’s dominance in social. The results highlight the dynamic shift underway as more consumers move to smartphones and tablets from PCs, creating a potential for disruption for incumbents. And it helps further explain why Facebook bought Instagram, a mobile photo sharing social network that now counts 100 million users. Especially as younger consumers grow up on mobile, there’s a danger that something built from the ground up on a mobile platform can undermine Facebook, which is falling out of favor with some young mobile users. 

The developers also expressed their disappointment with many of the features in HTML5. Developers said they were neutral to disappointed with HTML5′s monetization (83.4 percent), security (81.8 percent), fragmentation (75.4 percent), performance (72.4 percent), timeliness of updates (67.9 percent), user experience (62 percent) and distribution control (60.3 percent). Developers were only positive on HTML5′s cross-development capabilities (83.4 percent) and immediate updates (81.8 percent).

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted earlier this month that the company’s biggest mistake was betting on HTML5 over native apps. Even though Facebook’s web apps actually get more traffic than its native apps, Zuckerberg said the company’s hope that it could squeeze good enough performance from HTML5 proved too optimistic. Facebook reversed course with the latest iOS apps, which are built with native code instead of relying on HTML5.

The developer survey results help further explain why Facebook couldn’t rely on HTML5 at this point. As Zuckerberg pointed out, developers often can’t get the quality they want out of HTML5 apps. Shifting to native apps, however, has produced a 2x boost in the number of stories read on Facebook’s new apps, he said.

The developer survey also included some other points:

• Developers believe that by 2015, they’ll be writing a lot of mobile apps for devices beyond the smartphone and tablet. The most popular predictions were for the TV (83.5 percent), connected cars (74 percent), game consoles (71.2 percent), Google Glass (67.1 percent), and foldable screens (69.1 percent).
• Apple is the top developer platform for Titanium developers with 85 percent of developers very interested in building apps for iOS smartphones and 83 percent very interested in building iPad apps.
• Research in Motion’s traction with developers hit a new low with 9 percent very interested in building BlackBerry apps compared to nearly 40 percent in January 2011.
• Android support is also slipping with developer interest in Android smartphone apps falling to 76 percent while tablet app interest has slid to 66 percent.

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