The AMI-Partners Blog » USA

U.S. medium businesses consider server virtualization as key to their company’s success

amipartners — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:24:35 +0000

AMI has a new press release.

New York, New York — June 3, 2010 — Interest in server virtualization among US medium businesses (MBs, firms with 100-1000 employees) increased significantly in the past year, according to AMI’s latest MB tracking study. The percentage of U.S. MBs that consider server virtualization strategically important has increased from 46% to 75%.

Read the full release here.

Web Conferencing will drive the growth, but Audio conferencing is top bill for 2010, says AMI

amipartners — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:14:00 +0000

AMI has a new press release on audio and web conferencing:

New York, New York — April 14, 2010 — The total US audio and web conferencing market was $1.5 billion in 2009, AMI research estimates. Web conferencing is expected to drive spending over the next five years, boasting a 22% CAGR, while audio conferencing is expected to grow a more modest 4% YOY, according to a new report titled “Audio and Web Conferencing: Usage, Spending, Distribution, Market and Growth.”

Full release here.

Healthcare reform and SMB

amipartners — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:15:37 +0000

With President Obama signing healthcare into law, AMI’s analysts found ourselves revisiting our wealth of research into how this legislation could affect SMB.

Benefits in the form of tax incentives will kick in for small businesses immediately. But how will it affect SMBs’ IT landscapes?

Look for a press release on that soon, here.

Google’s battle with China

amipartners — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:08:26 +0000

On Monday, it was announced that Google would no longer censor its search results for Chinese users, a move that was bound to enrage the Chinese government.

On Tuesday, China responded.

As the Times reports,

The Chinese government moved on Tuesday to restrict access of mainland users to the Hong Kong site, the use of which Google had hoped would allow it to keep its pledge to end censorship while retaining a share of China’s fast-growing Internet search market.

But mainland Chinese users on Tuesday could not see uncensored Hong Kong content because government computers either blocked the content or filtered links to searches for objectionable content.

See the whole article here.

Job loss decreasing, a government graph shows

amipartners — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:33:21 +0000

This chart posted on the Obama administration’s website makes the job situation visually pretty clear.

WaPo: U.S. economy “soars” in 4th quarter, 2009

amipartners — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:32:54 +0000

Good news today in the Washington Post. The U.S. economy “soared” at its highest growth rate in six years (5.7%):

The U.S. economy roared ahead in the final months of 2009, growing at its fastest rate in six years, as corporate America stopped slashing its inventories and again started to invest for the future.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, rose at a 5.7 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday. That is the highest pace of growth since 2003, and it constitutes strong proof that the recession reached its end earlier in 2009. It was also a surprisingly positive result, well above the 4.6 percent rate of GDP growth forecasters had expected.

Some of this is just an adjustment from the prior quarter, the article notes:

But there remained reason to doubt how strong the economic recovery will be in 2010. The biggest component of the GDP growth was a steep drop in the pace at which businesses were cutting back on their inventories. Firms reduced their inventories by $33.5 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $139 billion in the third. In the math of GDP, which attempts to capture the value of goods and services produced within U.S. borders, that added 3.4 percentage points to overall growth.

Read the whole story here: