Market Analysis

Avnet's Q2 results need careful analysis as they include the acquired Premier Farnell business in Europe and have to allow for the pending transfer of Avnet TS to Tech Data this year. Avnet began reporting the TS business as a discontinued operation in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 and prior periods have been adjusted for comparability.

The number of VoLTE connections will grow to 3.33 billion by 2021, according to the latest research from Ovum. VoLTE currently stands at just 324 million connections, but by 2021 the technology will have penetrated 53% of total cellular subscriptions worldwide.

Across seven key enterprise infrastructure segments vendor revenues for the last four quarters declined by 1% on an annualised basis, claims Synergy Research Group. Aggregate revenues for the last four quarters reached $88bn, with revenue in each of the last 12 quarters typically in the $20-23bn range.

Worldwide shipments of 3D printers rose +25% in the first three quarters of 2016 thanks again to shipments of low priced personal/desktop 3D printers, according to figures from researcher Context.

Mobile device adoption in the workplace is not yet mature, found a recent survey from Gartner. Although 80 per cent of workers surveyed received one or more corporate issued devices, desktops are still the most popular corporate device among businesses, with more than half of workers receiving corporate issued desktop PCs.

Broadcom's purchase of Brocade will further consolidate the chip and data centre systems markets and heighten competition in next-generation workloads says Krista Macomber, Senior Analyst at researcher TBR.

The global Call Control (PBX/IP PBX) extensions and licenses market (excluding Micro PBX products) in the calendar year (CY) Q2 2016 continued to follow the expected downward trend and fell by 2% year-on-year, reports MZA.

The technologies defining the Fourth Industrial Revolution, more commonly referred to as Industry 4.0, are being powered by cloud infrastructures, according to The Oracle Cloud: Opening up the Road to Industry 4.0 report. The document states that from robotics to artificial intelligence, businesses view the cloud as a blank canvas upon which to build their innovation strategies.