Market Analysis

Despite UK businesses having a legal obligation to protect their employees, 48 per cent of businesses in the channel have insufficient measures in place to protect their staff when working alone, according to recent research.

Beecham Research predicts almost one billion cellular M2M connections worldwide by 2020, according to its new report.

Following BT's announced that it has agreed definitive terms to acquire EE for £12.5bn, and with the due diligence now complete and financing in place, attention turns to getting the necessary regulatory clearance from UK competition authorities, pointed out Matthew Howett, Practice Leader, Regulation, Ovum.

The core catalysts of innovation impacting all of humanity are connectivity and convergence, claims Frost & Sullivan's Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL) 2015: Europe.

IDC estimates that global PC shipments fell 2.4% yr/yr in Q4 to 80.8 million - a bigger decline than Q3 and Q2's 1.7%, but better than its expectations for a 4.8% drop. Gartner is more positive, estimating shipments rose 1% to 83.7 million.

Gartner has slashed its 2015 global IT spending forecast from 3.9% to 2.4% ($3.8tr) blaming its downward revision on the rising US dollar and a modest reduction in growth expectations for devices, IT services and telecom services.

The Las Vegas CES event points mainly to new consumer products that users and channels can expect to see later this year, but those looking further ahead are taking stock of the building blocks for those technologies.

The global network security appliance and software market is on track to end 2014 with strong growth - up 7% in 3Q14 from 2Q14 to $1.76bn, calculates research house Infonetics.