The IoT is fueling wireless connectivity innovation and driving ecosystem development of new technologies such as low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs). LPWANs are suited for IoT devices transmitting and receiving relatively small amounts of data over long distances (a kilometer of more) and or long periods of time (5 to 10 years, often relying on battery power). Read more

VDC recently published a white paper in collaboration with mobile data capture vendor, Scandit. This piece analyzes the unprecedented challenges facing retailers with brick-and-mortar store locations today and their need to make strategic investments in technology solutions in order to compete effectively for customers and revenues. Shoppers today seek instant gratification and their exposure to a variety of different platforms and brands has dramatically altered their retail-related expectations. Read more

The Asian logistics market has seen a flurry of activity this past week from an AIDC standpoint with market leaders Honeywell and SATO both making strategic announcements to address opportunities within it. This blog details the strategic investments and alliances forged by these conglomerates with an eye on the future. Read more

AWS announced its intent to enter the IoT & Embedded operating system (OS) market today by taking stewardship of the popular FreeRTOS operating system from WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems (WHIS). FreeRTOS is a small, MCU-focused Real-Time OS that has gained wide adoption since its release in 2003 as an alternative to paid options. Read more

Yesterday, McAfee announced a definitive agreement to acquire Skyhigh Networks. Although the terms of this deal are still unannounced, Skyhigh Networks CEO Rajiv Gupta will join McAfee CEO Chris Young’s leadership team to run McAfee’s cloud business unit. This deal allows McAfee to build a more comprehensive security portfolio with a full suite of cloud management and security tools. Given recent consolidation in the security market, and especially of large security companies acquiring cloud management companies, Skyhigh Networks’ security analytics capabilities are especially valuable to McAfee. Learn more

BlackBerry continues to move beyond its hardware roots―and speaks that way too. I had the opportunity to attend BlackBerry’s annual security summit in NYC earlier this week, and left with a different view of the storied vendor. While BlackBerry’s progress may not be visible, it has assembled a comprehensive security platform and has demonstrated it has fully transitioned from being “that phone company”. Learn more

The surge of consolidation VDC expected would reshape the software composition analysis (SCA) solution market advanced in earnest with the announcement Synopsys (NASDAQ: SNPS) intends to purchase segment-leading Black Duck Software. The deal, expected to close in December 2017, mirrors the 2014 acquisition of Coverity, which netted Synopsys the revenue share leader of a rapidly expanding test tool market segment. Synopsys first entered the SCA market by acquiring Protecode in 2015. Other M&A activity in the sector include the Flexera Software acquisition of Palamida and the purchase of Veracode by CA Technologies. Read more

Since joining the ranks of the ~100 US-based companies with $1B+ in revenues in early 2016, ServiceNow has made several notable tuck-in acquisitions. When viewed in aggregate, the business problems and the technologies the acquirees had focused on (the IoT, machine learning, chatbots, and mobile development) show that ServiceNow wants to become a more strategic partner to its customers. Learn more

Last week’s Arm TechCon conference highlighted many trends affecting the development of embedded systems and IoT solutions today. Security, distributed intelligence, and scalability took center stage and were the driving factors behind two of the biggest announcements from Arm at the event: the launch of its Platform Security Architecture (see Steve Hoffenberg’s blog on that announcement here) and Mbed Edge software for IoT gateways. The latter is in response to the growing importance of IoT gateways in current and emerging connected solution architectures. Read more

As the world’s leading provider of semiconductor intellectual property, Arm is in a unique position to help secure the tens of billions of devices that will be coming to the Internet of Things. And in light of the numerous high profile security breaches that have occurred over the past year, it should come as no surprise that security was the major focus of the 2017 Arm TechCon conference in Santa Clara, CA. Read more

VDC recently concluded its latest survey of the industrial automation community, receiving more than 225 web-based responses from a worldwide panel of industrial professionals in engineering, logistics, R&D, and executive leadership roles. In support of our findings, I am pleased to share a 3-part webcast series in which I discuss some of the key takeaways from our coverage on the Industrial Internet of Things. Part 1, which can be viewed here, previews the full set of results and takes a look at Industry’s progress toward Industry 4.0. Learn more

VDC headed out to Las Vegas last week to grab a seat at SAP’s annual developer conference, TechED 2017. SAP held the conference in the massive Palazzo convention center, with the focus of the conference centered on SAP platform developer education and outreach. CTO Bjoern Boerke kicked off the conference with a Star Trek themed keynote, introducing his crew of speakers in the classic attire of the USS Enterprise. Bjoern states that a small team at SAP chose the theme to convey the bold move to “boldly go where no man has gone before” and lay the foundation for today’s SAP Cloud Platform. Read more

Device management is part of the foundation of an IoT solution. “Device management” is also an overly simplified term in light of the IoT where preserving embedded software and security integrity means greater control throughout the lifecycle. However, enabling scalable and secure IoT device management today still requires a fair amount of engineering time and investments to build – even on top of “building blocks” provided by IoT and cloud services providers. Device management and monitoring are not functions that translate easily between connected device classes, vendors, and use cases but remain critical to all of them. Read more

In today’s world, transport and logistics are crucial to global trade, organizations have become reliant on sophisticated technologies and services to keep the flow of raw materials and finished goods constant. In this highly competitive environment, organizations have been taking advantage of a combination of cloud, mobile and satellite technologies as a way to manage demand, track assets, and address key challenges such as aging infrastructure, spiraling fuel costs, weather disruption, regulatory pressures, and complex intermodal networks. Learn more

Industrial PCs (IPCs) are evolving and gaining more market traction from the Internet of Things to enable connected applications and services. IPCs are by no means new but the growing IoT solution requirements for distributed processing, connectivity, and security are breathing new life into the device class. Beyond more traditional embedded control applications, IPCs are helping fill the gap between intelligent “things” and edge servers or the cloud. Read more

The network edge is a critical element to enabling 5G applications and services. While no one knows for certain which mix of 5G technologies, frameworks, and standards will be at the core of next generation networks, the edge is an area brimming with market opportunities today. Trends such as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Fog Computing are causing OEMs, service providers, network operators, and others throughout the IoT and embedded ecosystem to reevaluate their network architectures and data models to position themselves on the front lines of competitive differentiation and services delivery. Read more

Most people probably know that Japan-based Hitachi is a large corporation, but they probably don’t realize just how large it is. In its fiscal year ended March 31, 2017, Hitachi Ltd. had worldwide revenues of 9.16 trillion Japanese yen (about US$82 billion), making it one of that nation’s 10 largest companies. Larger than Sony, Panasonic, Softbank, or many other well-known Japanese technology brands. Hitachi is also old, founded back in 1910, originally to produce electric motors. Read more

ServiceMax's eighth annual field service conference has kicked into full gear. Hosted in the Encore at Wynn, Las Vegas, 'Maximize' features three days of industry-specific sessions, a CSO summit, and session tracks encompassing service leadership, service transformation, product technology, service industry trends, and service technology. With today's opening keynote and field service vision keynote, Maximize transitions to a series of breakout sessions that will last for the rest of the conference. Learn more

Equifax, a major credit reporting agency, announced in the beginning of September that hackers had gained access to company data that included Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, addresses, and other sensitive data for approximately 143 million people in the U.S, and about 44 million people in Canada and the U.K. This was recorded as one of the largest cyberattacks against one of the big 3 credit agencies and is the third cybersecurity threat Equifax has encountered since 2015. An astonishing 50% of people within the US were most likely affected by this breach, and practically anyone who has a credit report or has ran one in the past year most likely falls under this category. Learn more

At the inaugural Mobile World Congress Americas trade show and conference (formerly the CTIA Wireless show), attendees wound their way around the ongoing construction at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to find an event notable smaller than its MWC mother event in Barcelona. Nevertheless, IoT-related products, services, and conference sessions were prominent and plentiful. Read more

The market for security solutions serving embedded systems has grown considerably in recent years, and will continue to do so as the expansion of Internet of Things intensifies. The demand for security solutions is especially strong in the industrial space, where spending on embedded security software trailed only that of the mobile phones industry according to research recently published by VDC. Learn more

AIDC vendors today face intense competition in the barcode printer and scanner hardware markets. This has them adopting non-traditional approaches to maintain and grow their market share, and generate higher shareholder value. In recent months, incumbents and emerging participants alike have launched initiatives on the channel development front with an aim to address client and prospect engagement opportunities. Read more

VMware announced it was expanding its partnership with Google this past May to accelerate the adoption of Chromebooks (the announcement was timed for Dell EMC World). The company has now revealed the partnership has expanded since, and that its AirWatch EMM platform has achieved full integration with Google’s Chrome Device Management. Learn more

VDC’S Enterprise Mobility & Connected Devices practice is announcing the release of our report on the mobile worker population. According to our research the mobile worker population has exceeded 1.76 billion as of 2016, and accounts for approximately 59.4% of the total global employment. VDC classifies mobile workers as someone who spends the majority of their day performing tasks and responsibilities in some type of mobile capacity. These include specialized line of business workers such as sales reps, field workers&nsbp;/ technicians, delivery drivers, registered nurses, and even telecommuters as well. Learn more

VDC recently published Interim Findings for our upcoming 2017 Mobile Barcode Scanning Solution Report. The following blog highlights some of our thoughts on this market and its potential. Handheld barcode scanning is no longer restricted to the traditional pistol grip form factor or rugged mobile devices. Mobile barcode scanners including companion scanners, sleds, ring scanners and barcode scanning software platforms saw strong demand globally in 2016 and will generate more than $150M in revenues by 2021, according to VDC’s latest research on the topic. Read more

Zebra Technologies announced its Q2 2017 earnings on August 8, beating analyst expectations on EPS by $0.03 and revenues by $18.07M. The company saw an improvement over Q2 2016 across all regions with its various product lines; this included 9% sales growth in North America driven by an especially strong performance in mobile computing, 4% increase in EMEA, and an 11% rise in Latin America brought on by exceptionally strong data capture, printing, and supplies sales. Read more

The Internet of Things is now a staple of competitive strategies for both embedded platforms and IT solutions alike. The recent merger of Kontron, a leading global provider of embedded technology, with S&T Deutschland Holding AG (S&T) is critical to the company regaining its foothold in the market. Kontron designs and manufactures embedded boards and systems spanning a swath of form factors. The company is a pioneer in the computer-on-modules market and remained the leading global supplier in 2016. Read more

The capabilities of technologies used by today’s police force are not keeping up with advances of policing operations according to recent research conducted by VDC. Today’s public safety officers are already juggling various technologies as part of their daily workflow, including two-way radios, vehicle-mounted computers, radar guns, recording devices, mobile phones etc. Learn more

Cybersecurity firm Symantec has announced its plans to acquire mobile threat defense vendor Skycure. The deal was for an undisclosed sum, and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2017. This is the second acquisition of an Israeli cybersecurity startup that Symantec had announced in a week. Earlier, Symantec had announced its intention to buy Fireglass, best known for its anti-ransomware browser isolation capabilities. This deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2017. Learn more

Customers want a range of choices not only in products they are looking to purchase but also in the shopping channel. Omnichannel enablement today is therefore becoming increasingly critical to secure purchases and brand loyalty. Technology leaders BT, Intel, Nexgen Packaging, RetailNext, SATO Global Solutions (SGS), and Valmarc Corporation have come together to form the Acuitas Digital Alliance (launched in 2016), which is aimed at transforming the in-store retail experience by enhancing buyer behavior predictability, inventory visibility, and stock accuracy. It combines analytical concepts and the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve overall retail in-store efficiencies. Read more

I returned to Boston earlier today after spending an interesting two days at the 2017 GS1 Connect conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. I had the opportunity to present a session titled “How Retailers are Using Inventory Accuracy to Streamline Operations” with a representative from Target (Kevin O’Dare, Lead Business Partner). Here we talked about the importance of in-store inventory visibility to help facilitate a seamless and consistent omnichannel shopping experience for customers while at the same time elevating their retailer/brand loyalty levels. Read more

Everyone is talking about the rise of e-commerce, and what it means for traditional brick-and-mortar businesses across a wide array of industries; however, it also has meaning for warehouses and distribution centers, and, more specifically, how organizations are designing warehouses and distribution centers to efficiently fulfill this growing swell of e-commerce orders. Keeping up with demand – especially during peak holiday seasons – has proven itself a massive challenge. The warehousing industry is roughly a $31 billion industry, when you include warehousing, distribution centers, storage and e-commerce fulfillment, employing more than 650,000 people each year in the U.S alone (globeconfreight.com). Learn more

Apple released its long-anticipated AR tracking and recognition SDK, ARKit, at its 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last Monday. Many in the AR industry had anticipated the release for quite some time, given Apple’s 2015 acquisition of leading AR SDK provider Metaio – a German company incubated within Volkswagen in 2003. Until last week, Apple had remained content to play at the mobile hardware, OS, and application distribution levels, shuttering all licensing of Metaio’s SDK and tracking solutions, along with the popular insideAR conference that Metaio had organized since 2006. Read more

Customers want a range of choices not only in products they are looking to purchase but also in the shopping channel. Omnichannel enablement today is therefore becoming increasingly critical to secure purchases and brand loyalty. Technology leaders BT, Intel Labs, Nexgen, RetailNext, SATO Global Solutions (SGS), and Valmarc Corporation have come together to form the Acuitas Digital Alliance (launched in 2016), which is aimed at transforming the in-store retail experience by enhancing buyer behavior predictability, inventory virtualization, and stock accuracy and visibility. It combines analytical concepts and the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve overall retail in-store efficiencies. Read more

I recently attended National Instruments’ annual customer conference, NI Week. Each year, NI augments hands-on training sessions, partner showcases, and customer success stories with a series of announcements regarding new or enhanced product offerings. This year, as detailed by my colleague Dan Mandell, the focal point of these announcements was very clearly the unveiling of LabVIEW NXG. However, NI also revealed some important enhancements within its suite of CompactDAQ solutions, centered on the concept of Time Sensitive Networking (TSN). Learn more

We recently published market estimates and forecasts as part of VDC’s 2017 coverage of the global market for Mobile Thermal Printers. The market grew nearly 2% from 2015 to 2016, per our research. E-commerce fulfillment and retailers’ omnichannel initiatives are transforming supply chains and how they operate. Retail, Transportation & Logistics, and Commercial Services segments are the biggest adopters of mobile printing solutions, and will continue to be the main segments driving growth for the mobile printers market through the forecast period (2017-2021). Read more

We were in Austin, Texas this week for National Instruments’ annual conference, which brings together thousands of engineers, scientists, and industry professionals from a variety of backgrounds. NIWeek is a showcase of how the organization is accelerating development and increasing productivity in test, measurement, and control systems using its platforms. This year’s show was full of exciting new announcements and customer demonstrations of new technologies at the forefront of 5G and the Industrial Internet of Things. Read more

VDC recently published a report analyzing Machine Vision as a growth opportunity for AIDC participants. The following blog highlights some of our thoughts on the market and its potential. In the enterprise, cameras have historically been associated with machine vision solutions such as Smart Cameras and PC-Based Machine vision systems that leverage industrial cameras & software applications for advanced machine vision applications. However, camera technology has over the years expanded to traditional AIDC markets through the introduction of camera-based imager engines. Imager engines today have overcome previous performance limitations including decode snappiness, ambient light performance, depth of field, and price, all of which has helped the technology do what laser scanners can and more. Read more

We recently published market estimates and forecasts as part of VDC’s 2017 coverage of the global market for Handheld Barcode Scanners. The market contracted nearly 2% from 2015 to 2016, per our research, with vendors generating close to a billion dollars for the segment during the year. Revenues from the laser scanner category declined 20%, in keeping with the overarching trend of migration to camera-based imaging. 2D imager-based scanner sales were up more than 7% in USD terms. From VDC’s perspective, it has been interesting to see the transition from 1D to 2D scanning take place with this form factor, especially from the standpoint of the changing dynamics of the global competitive landscape. Read more

Retail store closings have dominated headlines these past few weeks with several major brick-and-mortar chains announcing significant changes to their existing landscape. Retailers today have a heightened focus on creating a meaningful, engaging, and consistent shopping experience for their customers across all channels of operation. In keeping with this theme, VDC’s Richa Gupta, Director of the AutoID & Data Capture (AIDC) Practice, will be presenting on the topic “How Retailers are Using Inventory Accuracy to Streamline Operations” as part of the Apparel and General Merchandise Track at the GS1 Connect® 2017 conference on June 20, along with Kevin O’Dare, Lead Business Partner at Target Corporation. Read more

This interview is part of an ongoing series VDC conducts with IoT and embedded technology providers to share views on their company, products, and state of the market. In part one of this blog, Majid touched on the evolving IoT threat landscape and how open source communities are crucial to securing embedded platforms. Read more

This interview is part of an ongoing series VDC conducts with IoT and embedded technology providers to share views on their company, products, and state of the market. Majid Bemanian is Director of Segment Marketing for Imagination Technologies, responsible for driving the company’s strategic security initiatives and leading its market strategy for the networking and storage segments. He also co-chairs the prpl Foundation’s security working group, focused on developing open standards and APIs around next-generation embedded security solutions. He has more than 30 years of high-tech industry experience. Read more

Retailers with physical storefronts face mounting pressure today. Department store chains nationwide are closing hundreds of stores, e-fulfillment is on the rise, and changing consumer habits are forcing many brick-and-mortar retailers to re-evaluate their operations and move towards a more omnichannel sales model. Brick-and-mortar retail still accounts for over 90% of overall revenues. Despite that, retailers are feeling the pressure to create meaningful and highly engaging in-store experiences that align with shoppers’ expectations in order to facilitate customer conversion Consumers’ access to non-traditional retail channels, including online shopping (both desktop and mobile), and click-and-collect, has transformed retail and logistics, perhaps forever. Read more

SOTI announced an expanded product strategy and direction today with the release of its SOTI ONE platform. SOTI’s flagship MobiControl remains at the center of the offering, but the vendor has added important enhancements and integrations to its platform that will help make the vendor a viable alternative to other competing EMM solutions. Learn more

Zebra Technologies announced its Q1 2017 earnings on May 8, beating analyst expectations on EPS by $0.07 and revenues by $17.25M. The company saw an improvement over Q1 2016 across all regions with its various product lines; this included double-digit sales growth in EMEA and Latin America and a 5% growth in North America. Strong demand from retail and e-commerce customers contributed to success this quarter that exceeded Zebra’s guidance range. Read more

Dell EMC World is underway this week in Las Vegas, and VMware didn’t miss the opportunity to be part of the news cycle at the mega vendor’s annual powwow with its marquee customers, the analyst community, and media outlets. VMware announced today that it is integrating its AirWatch mobility management suite with Dell’s Client Command Suite—the integration will make sticking with the Client Command Suite more compelling for current customers. Learn more

Amid presentations from senior executives and demos from partners, on May 3 Intel invited dozens of press and analysts from around the world for Autonomous Driving Day, literally rolling up the garage door on its new autonomous driving engineering facility in the former Altera building in San Jose, California. Read more

As a first time attendee at Hannover Messe, I was simply blown away by its scale. This year’s show drew an unprecedented 225,000 attendees and featured 6,500 exhibitors from more than 70 countries. The Hannover Fairground—the largest exhibition ground in the world, with more than 5 million square feet of covered exhibition space spread across 27 halls—was sold out down to the last square meter. The largest single exhibitor, Siemens, constructed a “booth” that was nearly the size of a football field. Another exhibitor, FANUC, featured a massive robotic arm lifting and spinning a full-size sport-utility vehicle as if it were a Matchbox toy. Learn more

Motorola Solutions has recently announced their intent to acquire Kodiak Networks, a privately held company and the leading carrier-integrated PTT over cellular (PoC) solution provider. The agreement was announced on May 1st of 2017, and according to Motorola’s Corporate VP they expect to close the deal during the second half of the year. Kodiak has positioned itself as the leading PTT partner for wireless carriers with its technology supporting AT&T’s enhanced PTT (EPTT) solution, Verizon’s PTT+ and soon to be announced Direct Connect from Sprint. This deal significantly enhances Motorola’s workgroup communications and PTT capabilities adding to its already popular over the top (OTT) WAVE solutions. Learn more

Security startups, particularly those with a cloud-first focus and architecture, have attracted close to $250 million in venture funding in just the last 24 months. This group of vendors have busily expanded their headcounts, growing customer rosters, and have introduced key cloud security innovations to the market. Two notable CASB vendors have been acquired as well – Microsoft acquired Adallom in July of 2015, and Oracle acquired Palerra this past September. As this market has matured, we see CASB vendors expanding well beyond policing “Shadow IT” roots – vendors have pivoted to address more complex cloud security challenges and have mobile security ambitions as well. We expect to see tensions grow between CASBs and Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) vendors. Learn more

AT&T has recently been awarded a multi-billion dollar contract over a 25 year period to maintain and install FirstNet, the first responder safety network originally created by the 911 commission. The contract value is totaled at around $46.5 billion, with AT&T contributing 40$ billion and the government contributing $6.5 billion through the FCC’s AWS – 3 Spectrum auction proceeds. The contract will create 10,000 jobs over the first 2 years, and will require AT&T to access over 40,000 towers in the U.S increasing their tower activity significantly since 2014. Learn more

This interview is part of an ongoing series VDC conducts with IoT and embedded software solution providers to share views on their company, products, and state of the market. Parasoft is unique in our support of embedded, IoT, and enterprise IT markets, providing broad testing support for developers and testers – static and runtime analysis, unit testing, API testing, load testing, penetration testing, security testing, virtual test environments via service virtualization, and intelligent reports and analytics. Read more

In a city like London, where there are five airports for travelers to choose from, airports need to optimize the experience they provide flyers. Travelers are accustomed to interactive displays for announcements, kiosks and electronic check-ins, and weather and delay updates via smartphones. So then, how can airports continue to improve? To be competitive, they will have to become “Smart Airports.” Learn more

Samsung has long viewed the enterprise market as a strategic growth priority for its popular Galaxy line of smart mobile devices. However, while Samsung has sat atop the global smartphone share charts, this has not always translated into enterprise sector success. For example, while Samsung’s overall smartphone share in the US is around 28%, its share of the enterprise smartphone market is estimated by VDC Research at 17%. Learn more

Embedded World is without a doubt among the most important annual events for the engineering ecosystem. Each year, more than 30,000 visitors and 900 exhibitors descend upon the historic city of Nuremberg, Germany to discover new embedded technologies and solutions spanning the gamut of industry applications. The conference itself continues to grow year-over-year bolstered by burgeoning IoT solutions within automotive, building automation, communications, energy, white goods, and more. Learn more

Dynamic deployment environments require real-time and contextual insights. While the argument of securing devices versus data persists (MAM/CASB vs. EMM), there is no question that the need to manage devices will remain a key requirement in compliance-intensive industries (e.g., financial services, insurance, health care, and telecommunications), as well as in enterprise deployments, where large fleets of purpose-built devices remain on premises, or are permanently affixed to objects (such as a wall or a piece of furniture, or onto a vehicle, airplane or train). Government and military deployment environments also figure prominently—in toto, these deployments are vast, and account for the majority of the current EMM revenue opportunity. Learn more

To tackle the challenges of data management and security in the supply chain and address new regulations surrounding centralized interoperable database implementation, there is rising interest in the blockchain. Today, IBM unveiled the IBM Blockchain at InterConnect 2017 - A blockchain as a service offering for the enterprise. Known to most as the underlying technology supporting Bitcoin digital currency transactions, a blockchain is a digital ledger that uses cryptography to allow participants (each with a unique signature) on a network to use the ledger and record transactions to enable granular traceability. Read more

VDC director Steve Hoffenberg and analyst Roy Murdock made their way through the crisp, chilly (19F!) Boston Monday morning to Cambridge to attend the MIT Connected Things 2017 conference. As usual, the event took place in the MIT Media Lab, giving attendees a spectacular view of the Boston skyline and the Charles River during breaks throughout the day. Learn more

The tech world is at a point of unparalleled change. You've heard that phrase, or things similar to it, in just about every year since the Dark Ages. Walking around MWC, however, something did feel different this time. Yes, there was a lot of hype and even a healthy sampling of good old fashion vapor-ware. But there were real tangible products, customer deployments and the beginning of some fundamental shifts in the vendor ecosystem structure. Learn more

WikiLeaks has recently published a treasure trove of over 8,000 pages of CIA documents. Among many other bombshells, it appears that CIA has been stockpiling far more vulnerabilities than the U.S. government has implied. In particular, the agency has demonstrated its ability to compromise mobile phones. Learn more

VDC recently published a report focused on OEM Barcode Scan Engines. The following blog highlights some of our thoughts on this market and its potential. The global OEM scan engine market grew 6% year over year from 2015 to 2016 and is expected to grow to $362M by 2020, according to VDC latest study. VDC defines OEM barcode scan engines as products that are embedded in devices to enable and facilitate enterprise-grade barcode scanning. Read more

Children's Medical Center of Dallas, the seventh largest pediatric healthcare provider in the country, was recently handed down a $3.2 million fine by the Department of Health and Human Services for multiple HIPAA violations, dating back to 2009. The violations in question include the loss of a BlackBerry device containing the records of 3,800 patients at the Fort Worth Airport in November of 2009, and the more recent the theft of a laptop containing the records of nearly 2,500 patients from the Hospital premises in April of 2013. Learn more

Two major issues that face retail stores every year are the low matching accuracy of inventories and potential revenue lost from inventory shrinkage. According to Bill Hardgrave, dean of Auburn University's Harbert College of Business and the founder of the RFID Lab, current accuracy of retail inventories range from 30 percent to 60 percent . In terms of shrinkage, $45.2 Billion was lost last year in the United States alone according to the 2016 National Retail Security Survey conducted by the NRF. Read more

At the RSA Conference, one of the annual kickoff events is the Innovation Sandbox “Most Innovative Startup” competition, in which 10 cybersecurity startups vie for the title. Each competing company has three minutes to present their case before a panel of expert judges and a room packed with thousands of attendees. (When we say three minutes, we mean exactly three minutes. A countdown clock is visible to everyone, and when it reaches zero, a loud buzzer sounds, cutting off any presenter that is still speaking.) Learn more

IBM is at the vanguard of blockchain, focusing on its applications for banking and financial technology. The company sees blockchain as a way for the many competitors and collaborators in a business network to share data such as bank routing codes. Previously, all information and requests for confirmation had to be forwarded to a central authority, a bottleneck for every participant in this configuration. With blockchain, the leger of all transactions across each partner is distributed. Learn more

I was recently invited to Keynote RealWear’s launch event for their head-mounted HMT-1 wearable computer to discuss the next wave of enterprise mobile computing and the opportunities for “hands-free” wearable solutions, a market we have been covering at VDC Research for over 10 years. Learn more

BlackBerry invited more than 100 technology and financial analysts to San Ramon last week and shared details on its progress transitioning from a hardware-centric vendor to a software and services company. I was one of three VDC analysts that made this trip ― here are some of my quick takeaways. Learn more

Manufacturers’ ability to effectively harness the power of Big Data to maximize operations will be the single biggest Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) trend to watch in 2017.Though nearly two-thirds of respondents within the Industrial Automation segment of VDC’s Voice of the IoT Engineer survey reported their organization’s customers are not currently realizing the full benefits of IoT connectivity, this will be a major emphasis this year. Learn more

This interview is part of an ongoing Q&A series VDC conducts with AIDC solution providers where they share their views on their company, products, and state of the market. We had the opportunity to catch up with Samuel Mueller, CEO and Co-Founder at Scandit to learn about the company and its recent initiatives. Read more

VDC recently published a report focused on Dimensioning Solutions. The following blog highlights some of our thoughts on this market and its potential. The market for dimensioning solutions (also known as cubing solutions) is expanding. For years, these solutions were used for dimensioning products and parcels for efficient storage, package sizing, and quality checks and have recently come to gain greater attention beyond the transportation and logistics industry. According to the new report from VDC Research on enterprise requirements for dimensioning solutions, 55% of respondents across the manufacturing, retail, wholesale/distribution and logistics industries indicate currently using dimensioning solutions to support applications from inventory management, to order management and shipping in hubs across supply chains including distribution centers, manufacturing shop floors, warehouses, retail back of stores, and offices. Read more

Steve joined GE in September 2015. He reports into GE Digital and is based in San Ramon, CA. He serves as the Core Product Marketing lead for Predix – the Industrial IoT Platform. As a ‘go-to-market’ expert, he has launched multiple products in the mobile and enterprise infrastructure markets. He has held senior roles in both public and private companies in the US and UK. Learn more

Once again the annual consumer electronics lovefest known as CES invaded Las Vegas. With more than 3,800 exhibitors occupying 2.6 million square feet of floor space (not to mention numerous private meeting suites), the show seemed more overwhelming than in past years. We couldn’t possible see it all, much less sum it all up in a blog post, but we’ll briefly highlight a few themes.Learn more

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal has highlighted the falling productivity of American workers. Focusing on the aspect of economic growth known as “total factor productivity,” the article argued that recent gains in research and technological development have failed to adequately equip the workforce with tools that can expand its current capabilities. Learn more