IDC finds that the refresh cycle of Surface and iPad will keep tablets market alive in the EMEA region

The EMEA tablet market reached 10.9 million units in the third quarter of the year, a drop of 8.2 percent on the same quarter last year, according to data from IDC. The contraction in consumer demand continues to be the main inhibitor of tablet adoption. 

As consumers lack compelling reasons to refresh their devices, life cycles continuously increase, leading to a market slowdown. However, the deployment of tablets in the commercial segments remains healthy, with a 4.2 percent year-on-year increase, due to the larger number of usage scenarios generated by digital transformation.

"In a quarter usually marked by seasonality, where there is a balance between the top two companies, Apple maintained and consolidated its market leadership," said Helena Ferreira, research analyst, IDC Western Europe Personal Computing Devices. "The growing market saturation is driving consolidation, as the top five companies become increasingly dominant, and in developed economies, like in Western Europe, the top five represented more than three-quarters of the market."   

The overall tablet market in Western Europe declined 6.0 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of this year, while and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) declined 12.0 percent year-on-year.

"Slate tablet shipments are continuing to drag down overall tablet results in both CEE and MEA, mostly due to the consumer consumption slowdown and significant drops in below-10in. tablets, due to stiff competition from large-screen smartphones," said Nikolina Jurisic, program manager, IDC CEMA.

Apple retained the market leadership in EMEA, ahead of its product refresh cycle. Samsung posted a double-digit decline, as the main focus is on pushing its prosumer S series and driving more profitability. Lenovo regained third position, filling the gap left by Huawei's decline. 

Huawei dropped to fourth and continues to suffer from the impact of the ban on consumer confidence. Amazon remained in the top 5 and continues to dominate the ultra-low-end price ranges, particularly during promotional periods such as Prime Day in the third quarter.

The EMEA tablet market is forecast to decline by 10.2 percent year-on-year in both the fourth quarter and for the whole year 2019. The dynamics affecting the market, particularly in the consumer segment, are expected to persist both in the consumer and in the commercial segments in the coming quarters.

"Despite the decline in total units shipped, the tier A vendors will sustain market value, particularly through the most recent iterations of iPad and Surface," said Daniel Goncalves, senior research analyst, IDC Western Europe Personal Computing Devices. "The new iPad with a first party keyboard and a new operating system designed to enhance productivity features in a tablet environment is expected to generate interest among prosumers and to continue boosting renewals of old tablets. On the other hand, the adoption of Surface Pro as a notebook replacement is expected to continue to thrive and to increasingly drive horizontal deployments in enterprise." 

The commercial market in EMEA is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 4.6 percent between 2019 and 2023.

"In the long run, the commercial segment is expected to grow due to the transition to mobility and growing user case scenarios for deploying tablets into businesses," said Jurisic.

KIOXIA’s PCIe 4.0 enterprise NVMe SSDs strengthens storage performance; achieves PCI-SIG compliance and NVMe certification

KIOXIA America Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corp., announced Wednesday that its lineup of PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) has achieved PCI-SIG compliance for PCIe 4.0 and University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) certification. 

KIOXIA’s CM6 Series passed interoperability tests at the August 2019 PCI-SIG Compliance Workshop – that includes official PCIe 4.0 specification tests. KIOXIA America will be on hand at Supercomputing 2019 later this month to showcase new levels of flash performance enabled by its CM6 Series SSDs. 

KIOXIA develops PCIe 4.0 NVM Express SSDs and continues to push the limits of flash storage performance. The CM6 Series brings planned performance improvements of three times over its PCIe 3.0 predecessors and is 12 times faster than SATA drives. KIOXIA’s lineup of Gen4 PCIe SSDs also includes the CD6 Series, which is targeted to cloud and scale-out environments.

The PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise SSDs utilizes KIOXIA’s 96-layer BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, PCIe 2x2 or 1x4 lane configuration options, targeted transfer rates up to 6,900 megabytes per second; and supports SFF-TA-1001 (also known as U.3) operation with universal backplanes for simplified customer use with SAS, SATA and NVMe SSDs.

KIOXIA was at Microsoft Ignite earlier this month to demonstrate the CM6 Series running in a Microsoft Azure hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform with Quanta Cloud Technologies – and enabling twice performance gains over a PCIe 3.0 solution. 

“We were able to show that our CM6 Series SSDs are capable of pushing SSD sequential read performance to over 55 gigabytes per second (GB/s) across eight drives – nearly 7GB/s per SSD – and we’re not done yet. KIOXIA will continue to push the performance envelope for our customers,” noted Alvaro Toledo, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning for KIOXIA America.

PCI-SIG hosts Compliance Workshops several times a year in various locations worldwide, giving members the opportunity to test and validate their products before entering the field. Compliance testing is completed against both PCI-SIG maintained systems and other manufacturers of PCI products. 

As the key testing and certification lab for NVMe technology and software, the UNH-IOL provides conformance and interoperability testing across various operating systems, drivers, and hardware platforms, as well as PCIe SSDs and PCIe-enabled servers. “The SSD market is quickly moving to NVM Express technology, and standards compliance is critical to ensure smooth adoption,” added Toledo.

NTT Electronics contributes Goldstone - open source network OS for disaggregated coherent transponders to telecom infra project

NTT Electronics delivered on Wednesday its Goldstone Network Operating Software (NOS *1) for disaggregated coherent transponders to the Telecom Infra Project’s NOS Software Project hosted by the Open Optical and Packet Transport project group. Launched in February 2016, TIP was started with the goal of accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecom industry.

Goldstone utilizes many existing open source components which have been developed in Open Compute Project (OCP *2) and Telecom Infra Project (TIP *3) including Open Network Linux (ONL *4), SONiC *5, Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI *6) and Transponder Abstraction Interface (TAI *7) to provide a full-fledged open source solution. ONL is used as the base operating system and provides a wide range of open network device support. 

NTT Electronics (NEL) has been developing and commercializing optical communications devices since 1995. It has complete portfolio of optical and electronics products to cover the industry needs for 100G-and-beyond link systems, ROADM components and FTTH networks.

On top of ONL, Kubernetes *8 is employed to enable containerized application management, which realizes flexible and modular software composition. SONiC/SAI is deployed as a fleet of containers when the target hardware comprises Ethernet switch ASIC, whereas TAI is used when the target hardware has coherent transponder components. 

Due to its modular architecture, Goldstone can be extended to support networking devices, which don’t have Ethernet ASIC, but may include conventional transponders, ROADMs or amplifiers in the future.

Goldstone was originally started as a prototype NOS for Edgecore’s Cassini Platform by the proposal from NTT Electronics. This has led to a production deployment by mixi in Japan. 

More than five industry partners are using Goldstone for evaluation on the Cassini platform. It is also being incorporated in Wistron’s Galileo platform.

The NOS is planned to be contributed to TIP Open Optical Packet Transport (OOPT *9) group as an open source project. Goldstone is planned to be part of a live running demonstration at the TIP Summit 2019.