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Mixed and Extended Reality Headsets to Drive Strong Growth Through 2028, According to IDC

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

Worldwide shipments of augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) headsets declined 28.1% year over year to 1.1 million units in Q2 2024, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker.

IDC Market Glance: Monetization Ecosystem Software, 3Q24

Mark Thomason — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance provides an overview of the ecosystem of software that monetizes an offering. These include solutions for recurring revenue management (formerly known as subscription management), price optimization and management, usage intelligence, ecosystem orchestration platforms, payment, entitlement and enforcement, and CPQ and guided selling.

IDC Market Glance: Retail Last Mile, 3Q24

Jordan K. Speer — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance outlines and examines the ecosystem of retail last-mile software and services vendors.

With its high volume of individual stops, the final mile of delivery has long been the most expensive part of the fulfillment and shipping processes, requiring labor, fuel, maintenance of delivery vehicles, multistop route planning, rescheduling, idling, and downtime. It is also a carbon-intensive stretch of the journey. Technology, processes, and partnerships that manage and optimize the last mile can significantly reduce its costs while improving customer satisfaction and experience.

Investing in Tomorrow: VC investments in EMEA's Emerging Tech

Martina Longo, Lapo Fioretti — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation examines venture capital (VC) investment trends in eight selected key emerging technology areas from the IDC's EMEA Emerging Technologies Radar, prospecting long-term implementation. We will introduce these technologies and the definition of tech-driven digital natives, the main target for investments made by VC firms, and the definition VCs themselves and why they are important to the innovation ecosystem.

Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Wearables Market, 2024

Ramon T. Llamas — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective (MAP) highlights consumer and commercial wearables market trends. In particular, this document analyzes the current and future state of the market, its major drivers and inhibitors, and how companies within the wearables ecosystem can prepare to capture and retain customers in this quickly maturing market.

"The worldwide wearables market continues to grow and shift, giving vendors and suppliers signals to adjust their strategies," said Ramon T. Llamas, research director with IDC's Wearables team. "Change is coming from several areas. First, artificial intelligence stands to change the health and fitness approach by analyzing user data and providing actionable advice. Second, key vendors within emerging markets stand to drive growth with fully featured yet inexpensive devices. This will give larger companies both challenges and opportunities. Third, new products including glasses and rings present novel ways for users to collect and generate data, potentially affecting other products. Taken together, the worldwide wearables market we see today will look entirely different in a few short years."

Meta AI Unveils Llama 3.1: Impacts and Implications for the Computer Vision and Document AI Ecosystems

Matt Arcaro — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Note shares an overview of Meta's Llama 3.1 model release. Meta AI announced the availability of its Llama 3.1 "herd" of foundation models in July 2024. This open source release (i.e., Meta provides model weights but not additional information like the source code or training data) included the availability of pretrained 405B, 70B, and 7B parameter models, as well as additional variants that were further fine-tuned for chat and instruction following tasks. In this Market Note, IDC analyzes the impacts and implications of this release on the greater current and future computer vision and document understanding technology ecosystems.

U.S. Augmented, Extended, Mixed, and Virtual Reality Headset Forecast Update, 2024–2028: CY 3Q24

Ramon T. Llamas — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation presents our forecast for the U.S. augmented, extended, mixed, and virtual reality headset market, also referred to as XR in this presentation, for 2024–2028. This includes unit shipments, ASP, and total value.

"Following a down year in 2023, the U.S. XR market is ready to rebound and show sustained growth in the years ahead with the rise of ER and MR. This will, however, come at the expense of VR and slow AR adoption." — Ramon Llamas, research director, Mobile Devices and AR/VR

Where and Why Are Retailers Boosting Store Connectivity Services Spending?

Margot Juros — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Survey Spotlight reveals that more than 50% of retailers are increasing their spending in 2024 on connectivity services, such as managed edge, cloud networking, managed wireless, and mobile/cellular broadband, seeking to address new connectivity challenges amid the escalating focus on the importance of data in successful AI/GenAI-driven initiatives. Retailers particularly cite the need for low-latency, high-speed data transmission as the most significant network challenge for store, followed by increased demand for IoT connectivity and management. The increasing spending on connectivity services goes hand in hand with the growing move toward implementing AI/Gen AI to optimize retail outcomes.

Analyzing Enterprise Connectivity Bandwidth Demand Shifts by Vertical Industry

Paul Hughes — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines how the enterprise bandwidth requirements have changed over the past 12 months as businesses continue along their own path to becoming agile and connected. Oil and gas companies are seeing the greatest increase in bandwidth demands as optimization of operations, health and safety, and increased use of IoT and AI drive greater demand for resilient networks to help improve business outcomes. Government and the public sector organizations had the lowest share of expected bandwidth increases over 50%, but nearly 57% stated that they were still seeing demands increase up to 50%.

The data in this IDC Survey Spotlight comes from IDC's Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 6, fielded in June of 2024 and capturing responses from 887 IT leaders across 19 countries.

Apple's New Wearables 2024: More Situation-Aware, Health-Minded, Thinner, and Bigger

Ramon T. Llamas — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMT

On Monday, September 9, Apple revealed its latest wearable devices, including two new AirPods 4 models, a software update to the AirPods Pro 2, new color options for the AirPods Max, a redesigned Apple Watch Series 10, and a new color option for the Ultra 2 watch. The AirPod updates come at a time when Apple was mostly silent on any news in 2023 and leverage of its new H2 chip for new active noise cancellation features. Meanwhile, the new Apple Watch takes a bigger-and-thinner-is-better approach along with some new features and applications. Altogether, Apple continues to keep pace with other market leaders while introducing new features. As the wearables market takes slow but sure steps to maturity, the company still has room to grow within its own base of iPhone users with conveniences and attention to health.