SAN equipment sales rise: The service providers' race to build out new data center facilities drove 2 percent growth in the global SAN equipment segment in Q3 2011 over Q2 2011, to $764 million, as SAN switch sales increased while SAN adapter sales declined. On a year-over-year basis, the SAN switch and adapter market was up 12 percent worldwide. From a vendor perspective, Cisco's (Nasdaq: CSCO) data center convergence strategy helped propel it into the second position behind Brocade in overall SAN equipment revenue. Meanwhile, QLogic and Emulex battled for the top spot in the combined host bus adapters (HBA) and converged network adapters (CAN) segment in Q3 2011. Release
Users like their Internet connections: In 2011, there were 2.1 billion Internet users, with the under 25 age group making up 45 percent of all users. According to Pingdom, a website monitoring company, there were 591 million wireline and 2.1 billion mobile broadband connections. At the same time, there were 3.15 billion email accounts worldwide, with Microsoft Outlook (27.6 percent) holding on its title as the popular email client. Article
WiFi takes center stage in home entertainment: As the popularity of over the top (OTT) video services like Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) and Roku continue to climb, so has the use of WiFi to access that content. Users now expect that their entertainment devices (i.e., TVs, Blu-ray players, gaming consoles, and STBs) have a built in WiFi connection. In-Stat forecasts that consumer's WiFi expectations will drive the number of in-home video WLAN-enabled video services to almost 600 million in 2015. "WiFi has moved from a nice-to-have feature to a must-have feature as it provides the connectivity necessary to support IP-based video content," says Frank Dickson, Vice President of Research. Dickson added that "WiFi is growing from being simply about getting content from a network to devices, to sharing content between devices, as WiFi evolves from being a network-centric connectivity standard to one that enables peer-to-peer connectivity." Release