gartner

About 42 percent of chief information officers have cut their budgets to grapple with the economic downturn, a new survey by Gartner shows.

Among the 900 CIOs questioned, 42 percent said they had lowered their budgets for the first quarter of 2009, an overall drop of 4.7 percent compared with the previous quarter, according to the report released Monday. This contrasts with Gartner's study for 2008's fourth quarter, where most of the 1,500 CIOs surveyed said their IT spending was relatively flat.

For the recent survey, 54 percent of all CIOs indicated no budget changes, while … Read more

It used to be so easy to be a proprietary-software vendor.

That is, until the open-source neighbors moved in. As noted in a Gartner analysis from late last year, proprietary software is on the wane within enterprises while open source is gaining:

That's not the sort of chart that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer likes to wake up to, but it's a message to which CIOs are increasingly warming.

The reason? Well, cost is the primary driver for open-source consideration, as a recent Forrester report suggests, but what is most significant is the overwhelmingly positive experience CIOs are having … Read more

The global economic crisis is taking its toll on the cell phone business, with sales even in the hot smartphone category also expected to slow in 2009.

Two major market research firms published figures for the fourth quarter of 2008 this week. And they each have bleak news for the cell phone industry.

IDC said it expects the volume of all mobile handsets to decline by 8.3 percent in 2009. And it expects sales of hot smartphones, like Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry phones, to slow to about 3.4 percent growth. Smartphones have been … Read more

About 7.5 percent of U.S. adults lost money as a result of financial fraud last year, mostly due to data breaches, according to a new Gartner study to be released on Tuesday night.

In the survey of nearly 5,000 consumers, 70 percent said they had never been a victim of identity theft fraud. Meanwhile 14 percent said they had had their credit card information used to charge purchases or get money, 7 percent said their debit card was used, 6 percent said a new account had been opened in their name, 5 percent had money transferred out … Read more

Market researchers IDC and Gartner made their cases on Wednesday for worsening chip sales in 2009, with both firms predicting that chip revenue will fall by more than 20 percent.

The worldwide semiconductor market will not recover until 2010, primarily due to a very weak fourth quarter, according to IDC. The market researcher expects a decline in global chip sales of 22 percent in 2009, due, among other things, to low chip factory utilization rates and price erosion.

Memory revenue (DRAM and NAND flash) should stabilize by the second half of 2009, but revenue growth will not return until 2010, … Read more

This is a guest post by Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile. The views expressed are his own.

I know it's the dead of winter when Gartner releases its report "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms." Since its release in mid-January, I've had some time to talk to a variety of colleagues and to think about its accuracy, and wanted to share some of my conclusions.

Gartner receives a lot of criticism about these reports, especially from open-source vendors, but my views are mixed. I believe that this new report on business intelligence contains solid insight on what … Read more

A recently published, Gartner report examines the 3G networks of all four major U.S. wireless carriers. What they found was that most of these networks provide slower speeds than customers were led to expect. AT&T customers had the most complaints about its network, and the iPhone 3G was singled out.

The report was quick to point out that both companies and consumers should be a bit more realistic about their expectations of network performance and that consumers should look closely at the fine print which "doesn't guarantee such speeds." Claims of speeds as high … Read more

Gartner sounded a warning on Wednesday about the impact on software of the rapid growth of multicore chips and the number of threads each processor can handle.

In a research note, the analysts argued that software is struggling to keep pace with the fast growth of multicore processors, first from two and four cores per processor, and now to eight and even 32 cores in high-end servers. With 32 processors per socket already shipping, four years from now machines could host 1,024 processors, Gartner said.

Analyst Carl Claunch said: "Many of the software configurations in use today will … Read more

Microsoft's weak results this quarter have led the company to its first-ever major workforce reduction.

Layoffs are never a good thing, especially for a bellwether tech company like Microsoft. And generally, when a company grows beyond 10,000 employees (let alone 100,000), there are always staff reductions that can be made that have minimal effect on the overall revenues.

But the crux of Microsoft's problem wasn't people; it was the insistence that Windows Vista was better than XP, and the long-term denial of customer and analyst comments illustrating the fact that Vista was not great.