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