The CES trade show in Las Vegas covers a lot of territory, both literally and figuratively. In more than 2.75 million square feet of exhibit space in venues across Las Vegas, the show organizer Consumer Technology Association created 27 “marketplaces” devoted to topics such as Augmented Reality, Baby Tech, Drones, Fitness, Gaming, IoT Infrastructure, Robotics, Sleep Tech, Smart Cities, and so on. Notably absent from the list, however, was Automotive, which might lead an outside observer to believe that such a market wasn’t represented. On the contrary, the Automotive market had a huge presence at CES 2018. Read more

VDC’s Enterprise Mobility & Connected Devices practice is announcing the release of our report on omni-channel retailing, the challenges retailers have experienced implementing omni-channel operations and the impact they have had on retail organizations operations when done right. VDC defines omni-channel as an evolutionary step above multi-channel, and involves organizations taking a channel-agnostic approach to customer service and retail by attempting to seamlessly integrate shopping across both physical and digital channels. Learn 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 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