Text Analytics Adoption Grows by Leaps and Bounds

The text-analytics market advanced by leaps and bounds in 2010 to an estimated global value of $835 million. Growth was driven by the technology's central role in social-media analysis and by text analytics' contribution to advanced, semantic search and search-based applications.

I have created annual text-analytics market-size estimates for several years, in advance of each spring's Text Analytics Summit. My 2010 estimate has two major components. It projects a 2009 figure of $425 million forward by 26% to $535 million, covering the core text-analytics market plus a valuation of text analytics’ contribution to information acquisition and management and enterprise applications. The 2010 text-analytics market growth rate was nearly double the 2010 13.4% growth rate seen by Gartner for the larger business intelligence (BI), analytics, and performance management software market.

I created my first text-analytics market estimate in April 2008, when I calculated a $250 million global text-analytics market for 2007 and projected 25% year-on-year growth, which a year later I revised upward to 40% in computing a $350 million estimate for 2008. Figures reflect the value of software licenses, service subscriptions, and vendor-provided technical support and professional services. My 2009 estimate of $425 million indicated continued strong growth.

My $835 million 2010 estimate involves a more sophisticated analysis than I had pursued in previous years, partitioning the overall text-analytics market into five categories:

• Core text analytics including natural language processing (NLP), information extraction, sentiment analysis, text-BI, and other semantic applications: tools and solutions, whether installed or delivered as a service. (NLP is the use of statistical and linguistic methods, augmented by machine learning, to identify and extract information from unstructured sources.) Leading technology and solution providers include Attensity, Basis Technology, Clarabridge, Daedalus, Expert System, GATE, IBM, Lexalytics, Linguamatics, OpenAmplify, Open Text, Python NLTK, SAP, SAS, SRA, and TEMIS.
  
• Information acquisition, by which I mean Web crawling and page retrieval for analytical purposes, also basic information extraction and data cleansing and integration. Vendors include 80legs, Connotate, Informatica, ISYS Search, Kapow Software, Oracle, and SAP. I do not include in this category Web crawling for search-engine indexing.
  
• Semantic enterprise information management (EIM) and publishing applications that facilitate "smart content." Vendors include, most notably, EMC, IBM, JustSystems, MarkLogic, Open Text, and SchemaLogic.
  
• Enterprise applications of text analytics tap text/content sources to support business functions such as customer relationship management (CRM), market research, enterprise feedback management (EFM)/surveys, and competitive intelligence. Companies in this space will often license text technologies from third parties, including about half the companies in this solution-provider list: Allegiance, Cambridge Technologies, Crimson Hexagon, Cvent, Digimind, J.D. Power & Associates, Medallia, Mindshare, Radian6, Satmetrix, Scout Labs/Lithium, Sysomos, Verint, and Vovici.
  
• Search and search-based applications make use of extracted information to enhance information access, whether delivered via smarter search or in business-process-integrated applications. Providers include Attivio, Autonomy, Cataphora, Content Analyst, Dow Jones/Factiva, Endeca, Exalead, FirstRain, Google, IBM, Lixto, Microsoft, NetBase, Peer39, Recommind, Reed Elsevier, and Thomson Reuters. 

(Disclosure: Open Text is a consulting client. In the last year, SAP paid me to write a white paper and Lexalytics and IBM were paid sponsors of conferences I run.)

I anticipate 2011 text-analytics market growth in the 25-40% range, again paced by the desire to automate analysis of online and social media as recently reported by my colleague, Doug Henschen, in Social Media Shapes Up As Next Analytic Frontier. Larger BI-suite vendors, notably IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects, are embedding text analytics in their broad-market BI solutions, which will boost text-analytics uptake.

I'll leave you with one additional thought: It is a truism that 80 percent of business-relevant information originates in "unstructured" form, primarily text, yet a 2010 text-analytics market of $835 million represents only 8% of the $10.5 billion BI, analytics, and performance management software market seen by Gartner. 

I don’t expect text's 8% share to become 80% any time soon – text is hard to analyze well, which limits ROI and therefore investment itself – but I do see that business is willing to spend on analytical technologies that further better decision making. Text analytics does just that. Text analytics’ future is very promising.

Rash Of Leaders Test 10-Week Lines

With the market sliding into a correction this week, many leaders sold off as they digested gains from recent months.

Some of these stocks have pulled back and are in secondary buy zones, but investors should hold off on buying stocks until the environment clears. Buying in a down market is tougher, since investors don't have the wind at their backs.

Informatica (INFA) reversed from a near-record high but found support at its 10-week moving average. That's the stock's first test of the key line since its March 24 breakout from a flat base. The pattern was not a late-stage structure since Informatica reset its base count last May.

Last month, the data integration software maker beat views with a 33% rise in Q1 earnings and a 24% gain in sales.

Group mate Tibco Software (TIBX) is also testing its 10-week line for the first time since its March 24 breakout. Despite volume being only 18% above average on breakout day, it managed to climb 17% before the latest pullback.

In late March, Tibco reported a 33% increase in Q1 profit and a 20% gain in revenue. Both were above analysts' expectations. The company also guided Q2 sales above views.

Fossil (FOSL) will unveil its first-quarter results before the market's open May 10. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters see the watchmaker's earnings rising 25%. Fossil's bottom-line growth has slowed for the past two quarters. Sales are slated to climb 30% to $512 million.

The stock is in its second test of its 10-week moving average. Trading volume has dropped sharply, a good thing to see in pullbacks.

Through Thursday's close, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) is having its worst week since the week ended Jan. 21. But the stock found support at its 10-week line. Rackspace cleared a cup base March 30.

Rackspace provides website hosting and cloud-computing services. The company reports Q1 earnings May 9 after the close. Views are for 12 cents a share or up 71% from a year ago

Will your organization benefit from big data processing technology?

Proprietary data management software vendors like Informatica Corp., DataFlux and others will increasingly add big data processing capabilities to their portfolios in the near future -- and that means now is a good time for organizations to figure out if they stand to benefit from the technology -- according to Cambridge, Mass.-based IT analyst firm Forrester Research Inc.

SearchDataManagement.com wanted to learn more about the upcoming influx of big data processing technologies and got on the phone with Brian Hopkins, a principal analyst with Forrester and one of the authors of a new research paper called Big Opportunities In Big Data. Hopkins explained why “big data” is actually a misnomer and talked about the definition and potential benefits of big data processing. He also had some advice for organizations that want to determine whether big data processing tools are right for them. Here are some excerpts from that conversation:

For more on big data processing

Learn about Apache Hadoopopen source big data processing

Find out why some think the phrase 'big data' is annoying

Read the Whatis.comdefinition of big data

How will big data processing technology change the IT industry in the near future?

Brian Hopkins: I think what technology consumers are going to see over the next 12 to 18 months is a whole rush of vendors incorporating big data capabilities into their technologies [and some] have already actually been doing it. They're approaching the point where they're going to start releasing versions of products that have that capability and so [consumers of technology are] going to be asking themselves, Is this important to me? I think that it's really important to come up with an initial view of what [big data processing] means, [why] it's important and what [organizations] should do about it right now while the technology is still in the very early stages.

Why do you think the phrase big data is a misnomer?

Hopkins: It's a bit of a misnomer because people [equate big data to] big volume. [But] it's really about volume, velocity, variability and variety. [Velocity obviously refers to] how quickly the data comes at you and so that incorporates into the scope of big data the notion of capturing a stream of data. Then high variability and high volume are also issues. [For example, there] may be a variety of formats [as opposed to] just one relationally structured data set. You could have data from a Web log, unstructured content from the Internet, content files that are tagged with metadata and hierarchical file systems. [The concept of big data addresses] how you deal with this variety of formats and how you draw meaning from them.

How does variability come into play in big data processing?

Hopkins: When I say variability, I mean variance in meaning, in lexicon. The best example of that would be the variability problem that the [supercomputer] Watson at IBM was trying to take on. [Watson] would get an answer and would have to dissect that answer into its meaning and then use some really sophisticated parallel processing technology to try to figure out what the right question was within that three-second response time.

Why will big data processing technology be attractive to some organizations?

Hopkins: The thing I keep coming back to is that [big data processing] is about making decisions earlier in the process. Firms that can consume a lot of data make some decisions about what they should do faster than firms that can't. The typical decision making process in most firms that have a data warehouse and [business intelligence] infrastructure [goes like this]: Let's go capture some data. Let's integrate that data together and put it in a warehouse. Let's put some analytics on top of that. [Then] after we've done the analytics, let's make some decisions and then go execute those decisions. The problem with that approach is integration is expensive. It takes time, it takes resources and by the time you get to the decision making [part] it may be too late. [Big data processing technology] says, Hey, let's enable you to try to change the model up. Let's enable you to capture some data and iteratively discover what's in that data and maybe make some early decisions.

What recommendations to you have for organizations as they assess the need for big data processing technology?

Hopkins: The first thing we're recommending is that you as enterprise architects look at what big data is, draw some conclusions yourself about what it means [and] then have a dialogue with your business about the capabilities that it brings, because the biggest challenge with big data is not the technology. [We've] been doing high performance computing and massive parallel processing for years so it's not that new, but what you really need to do is have a conversation with your business about the way it changes the processes you go through to make decisions based on information.

What else should organizations interested in big data processing think about?

Hopkins: We're encouraging clients not to forget that [big data processing technology is] a tool in a larger information management set of tools. Capturing large or rapidly streaming, high-variable, high-volume [data] introduces the same issues that you have with other kinds of information: Who owns it? How do you assure quality? What are the security implications of it? Do you need to keep this data for compliance reasons? [There] are all these issues that don't go away that are very similar to other information management issues. So we're encouraging our clients to really think about big data as just another important component of their larger information management approach.

LMAX Deploys Informatica Ultra Messaging for Sub-Millisecond Latency

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the world's number one independent provider of data integration software, today announced that LMAX, the 'on exchange' multilateral trading facility (MTF) for contracts for difference (CFDs) and rolling spot foreign exchange (FX) contracts, is delivering a more efficient and open way to trade using Informatica Ultra Messaging low latency software, a part of the Informatica Platform.

"Dynamic market conditions will continue to put a strain on legacy systems. LMAX spotted this opportunity and in selecting Informatica, LMAX has been able to address a real gap in the market with a unique and compelling trading platform."

The London-based trading venue has standardised on the highly reliable Informatica low latency messaging software to execute trades at predictable, sub-millisecond latency at high throughput. This gives retail traders the advantages of exchange trading, so they benefit from the pricing transparency, market depth, neutrality and control that has until recently only been available to institutions in the wholesale market.

"LMAX's use of Informatica Ultra Messaging has meant that our time to market was significantly reduced and has been a key ingredient in LMAX winning the 2011 FST Award," says Martin Thompson, chief technology officer, LMAX. "For the first time, retail customers can set their own market price on an exchange covering multiple asset classes. Using Informatica Ultra Messaging, our customers can trade rolling spot FX contracts and CFDs in a low latency, reliable environment. As dynamic market conditions continue to challenge legacy systems, LMAX has positioned itself to win market share with its next-generation system, built with Informatica Ultra Messaging."

LMAX is client-neutral and does not take positions against its customers. LMAX traders benefit from the ability to place orders directly into the MTF, with the benefit of faster execution, no dealer acceptance and no re-quotes. The firm launched six months ago and is currently offering customers the opportunity to trade FX contracts and CFDs in equity indices, commodities, bonds and interest rates with more asset classes to follow in due course. Every aspect of this innovative service is about giving institutional trading advantages to retail clients, effectively taking out the middle man and the broker chain. A retail client can now trade direct into the market and be a market maker, not just a trader.

One of the main advantages of using Informatica Ultra Messaging is the speed of performance. LMAX customers need to be able to react incredibly quickly to market movements and speed of execution is therefore a key requirement for retail users on a trading venue. The LMAX trading system consistently performs at below one millisecond.

Informatica Ultra Messaging was instrumental in the LMAX MTF winning the award for the 'Best Trading System' at the 2011 Financial Sector Technology (FST) Awards. According to FST judges, the LMAX MTF is a next-generation trading system that, with ultra-low-latency messaging at the center of its platform, will fast capture market share and accelerate profits for the retail trading industry.

"We are immensely proud that LMAX has chosen Informatica's market-leading, low latency messaging software that is also the most efficient, configurable and widely deployed messaging solution," said Mark Mahowald, general manager, Messaging Business Unit, Informatica. "Every millisecond counts for retail and institutional buyers and sellers and by using Informatica Ultra Messaging, LMAX is benefiting from reduced infrastructure costs, increased throughput and higher system availability."

Commenting on the 2011 FST Award, FST judging panel member Sophie Baker, editor, FST says, "Dynamic market conditions will continue to put a strain on legacy systems. LMAX spotted this opportunity and in selecting Informatica, LMAX has been able to address a real gap in the market with a unique and compelling trading platform. We also felt that LMAX had given traders access to wholesale liquidity and wholesale prices. The LMAX MTF is a next-generation trading system that puts ultra-low-latency messaging at the center of the platform."

Informatica Stock Hits New 52-Week High (INFA)

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA) hit a new 52-week high Friday as it is currently trading at $56.70, above its previous 52-week high of $56.49 with 33,950 shares traded as of 9:36 a.m. ET. Average volume has been one million shares over the past 30 days.

Informatica has a market cap of $5.8 billion and is part of the technology sector and computer software & services industry. Shares are up 27.8% year to date as of the close of trading on Thursday.

Informatica Corporation provides enterprise data integration and data quality software and services worldwide. Its software solutions include a set of technologies that enable various enterprise-wide data integration initiatives. The company has a P/E ratio of 60.2, equal to the average computer software & services industry P/E ratio and above the S&P 500 P/E ratio of 17.7.

• Practice your INFA trading strategies and win cash in our stock game.

TheStreet Ratings rates Informatica as a buy. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its robust revenue growth, largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures, solid stock price performance, impressive record of earnings per share growth and compelling growth in net income. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had somewhat disappointing return on equity. You can view the full Informatica Ratings Report.

See all 52-week high stocks or get investment ideas from our investment research center.

Insurance Technology - PSA Insurance & Financial Services Selects Informatica Cloud

Looking to synchronize business and customer data across all of the company’s business divisions, PSA Insurance & Financial Services, Maryland’s leading independent, multi-disciplined financial services firm, has selected Informatica Cloud.

The Informatica Cloud delivers enterprise-class software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) integration applications and a powerful platform for developing and deploying custom integration services to non-technical users over the web.

Allowing employees to provide better customer service, speed renewals, offer new products or services, and fulfill legal or regulatory requirements, PSA Insurance & Financial Services now has a customer hub with complete information. The sales team at PSA can review data by a number of important criteria, including revenue, policies and activities. The Informatica Cloud deployment unites a number of business information and customer data collection tools and repositories.


“Informatica Cloud delivers powerful, yet easy to use data integration as a service,” said Ron Papas, general manager, Informatica Cloud. “Working with partners like Silverline allows us to deliver industry-specific cloud integration solutions to our customers. For PSA, this means accurate revenue projection and retention through timely renewals as well as a powerful customer view that enables improved cross-selling.”


Informatica Cloud showed expertise and delivery benefits that would simplify the renewal process as well as enhance customer service overall, as an important aspect of the insurance industry is having renewals occur on time. Specializing in delivering industry-specific methodologies to ensure successful Salesforce.com (News - Alert) deployments, the cloud-data integration between Salesforce CRM, AMS360 and other systems was managed by Informatica INFORM partner Silverline. Informatica Cloud synchronizes key objects in the different systems every 15 minutes, the company has stated.


In October 2010, the company announced that Shaw Industries Group, world's largest carpet manufacturer, implemented Informatica Cloud Services to help drive sales productivity across multiple lines of business. Shaw leverages Informatica Cloud Services to integrate various product catalogs residing across 20 custom applications into its Salesforce.com customer relationship management or “CRM” solution, enabling sales representatives to find relevant Shaw products and quickly create sales proposals.

4 Hadoop Helpers Promise Speedy Big-Data Analysis

Integration vendors launch commercial add-on products for the hot open-source framework. Here's how four products streamline high-volume workloads.

Apache Hadoop is one of the fastest-growing open-source projects going, so it's no surprise that commercial vendors are looking for a piece of the action.

Witness a spate of recent announcements from well-known data-integration vendors including Informatica, Pervasive Software, SnapLogic, and Syncsort, all of which are aimed at making it faster and easier to work with a very young big-data processing platform.



To recap, Hadoop is a collection of distributed data-processing components for analyzing large volumes of unstructured data, such as Facebook comments and Twitter tweets, email and instant messages, and security and application logs. Relational databases, such as IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL can't handle this data because it doesn't fit neatly into columns and rows.

Even if these commercial databases could do the job, the cost of the licenses would be prohibitive because due to the scale of the data. We're generally talking about hundreds of terabytes, and into the petabytes.

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As an open-source project, Hadoop software distributions can be downloaded for free, and the software is designed to scale out on low-cost commodity servers. There aren't legions of companies that need Hadoop, but the capabilities and economies have attracted outfits including AOL, eHarmony, eBay, Facebook, JP Morgan Chase, LinkedIN, Netflix, The New York Times, and Twitter.

Hadoop is getting to be a magnet for commercial vendors. Cloudera offers a popular distribution of Hadoop and it's the leading provider of enterprise support and services. Datameer offers supporting data-integration, storage, analytics and visualization software, and Karmasphere adds a graphical environment for development, debugging and monitoring Hadoop jobs.

EMC announced Monday that it will offer its own distributions of Hadoop software, one open-source and a commercial enterprise edition including proprietary components. As I covered in my last column, EMC also announced an appliance capable of running the EMC Greenplum relational database and Hadoop on a single hardware platform.

Informatica and SnapLogic

Data-integration vendors Informatica and SnapLogic both announced partner announcements with EMC this week. Informatica says it will integrate its data-integration platform with the EMC Hadoop distributions, which are set for release in the third quarter. Informatica previously partnered with Cloudera on a similar integration.

Informatica is the largest independent data-integration vendor out there, with more than 4,200 customer firms, so EMC and Cloudera need Informatica every bit as much as Informatica wants big-data-crunching Hadoop users.

SnapLogic announced SnapReduce, a module for the SnapLogic platform that will pipe data into MapReduce, the core Hadoop data-filtering algorithm. SnapLogic will also introduce its own version of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS); that will let Hadoop users pull data from the many sources handled by the SnapLogic platform and to go the other way, too. Both products are expected in the second half of this year.

I've previously reported on Hadoop-supporting tools from Talend, an open-source data-integration vendor, and from Quest Software. Most integration partnerships are aimed at making it easier to get data into and out of Hadoop. In the case of Syncsort and Pervasive, commercial add-on products are aimed at speeding processing within Hadoop.

HP creates software for massive documents

HP Exstream is a new solution for Hewlett Packard (HP) aims to reduce by 80% the use of resources in the processing of mission-critical documents, ie they are produced in bulk, such as bank statements, receipts account and bags of insurance.

The software is designed for the creation of any corporate documents, from initial design and integration of variable information to delivery in any format.

In an interview, Eduardo Jimenez, manager of HP Exstream Latin America, said this is a product of communication created to mass produce documents, but customized by profile area or even to improve customer relations.

Features

Among the main features Eduardo Jimenez finds are its ease of use, "the more complex programming layer on HP Exstream is simpler than the competition."

The solution is a program created more than 10 years, which HP acquired in 2008 to improve and implement a larger scale because it adapts to any type of platform used by a company.

Jimenez stressed that this program makes it possible to automate a process for the business department of a company has direct control on changes in statements generated and thus not entirely dependent on an IT department. "

He stressed that one of the key benefits of the product is making a statement in a "market" enabled in the blanks of mission-critical documents to insert advertisements, control elements and any type of message formats text and / or image.

Penetration
HP Exstream is intended for large corporations, however, the regional manager said that if we analyze the importance of a mission-critical document in an SME, and this is crucial in customer communications, it justifies the expense.

External their presence in Latin America and Mexico is small in contrast to regions like the U.S. where they are present in at least 15 of the largest organizations in telecommunications, insurance and banking respectively.

At the end said he did not have the exact percentages, but in our country the sector is the increased penetration of telecommunications and this type of software has an important future in sectors like insurance accounts in this region because no penetration only low HP, but also for competition.

Spain has 18 SAP business applications for mobile

Madrid, May 20 (EFE) .- The Spanish division of the German multinational SAPenterprise software company has filed 18 applications for mobile devices aimed atbusinesses, said Monday representatives of the company in a press conference.
Among these are pieces of software applications to manage resources and to monitor the status of shipments and to improve employee production process frommanaging smart phones or "smartphones. "
For now, only available 2 of these applications, the company said, requiring the remaining 16 may be contracted between late second and early third quarter.
The expert in SAP mobility solutions Iberia, Ernesto Schmitz explained that thecompany will have 50 applications for mobile devices next year.
80% of companies have teams connected by tablets in 2014 as calculated by the company, which also presented at the conference management software solutionsbusiness in the cloud, ie remotely operated .
Schmitz said a study by the University of Texas pointed out that if the Fortune 1000companies increased by 10% of the available information would be an increase of 2,000 million euros in revenue.

Internet giants meet in Paris on his first e-G8

The global Internet giants meet on Tuesday and Wednesday in Paris in the first edition of "e-G8" whose proceedings are intended to feed the G8 in Deauville (west) to be held on 27 and 28 May.Facebook to Google via e-Bay or Amazon, all the big Internet names will share in a series of roundtables and his vision of the Network and the economic model that will be put in place to ensure their development and duration.This e-G8 was organized by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, current president of the G8, to prepare the traditional summit of heads of State and Government of the club that brings together the world's richest economies, whose agenda is first After an encounter.Following the forum, to be held in the Tuileries Gardens, a delegation of participants will Deauville a summary of the discussion to "facilitate the reflection of the heads of state," said Maurice Lévy, Publicis company director, responsible by the Elysee presidential palace, for organizing this summit."The Internet is a major phenomenon of our time who has never been addressed by the G8 or other major international summit. The desire of the heads of state is to listen to the biggest names in the world of INTERNET his vision for the future," said the French presidency.On the agenda of discussions included the issues common to industry players, such as the Internet's impact on growth, the problem of respect for privacy and intellectual property, or the development of networks at the explosion of width band.The French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, wanted, according to French daily Le Figaro on Saturday that Internet companies "contribute much more to finance the creation."However, it is unlikely that the e-G8 reaching specific ads worldwide on sensitive and strategic issues, such as storage of personal information or the financing of new infrastructure."In practice, we can attend a series of monologues as the difference of views between States on the one hand, and between actors, on the other, are considerable," says one participant, Benoit Sillard, director of CCMBenchmark group.Some associations, such as Attac http://www.attac.org/, go even further by announcing a purely economic vision of e-G8 and the fact that civil society and Internet users are not represented."This forum is a smoke screen. Under the guise of a process pseudoconsultivo the will expressed by the rulers is to control a bit more online," said Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesman for the French, the square of the WebIf the Internet can embarrass states and governments as demonstrated by sites like WikiLeaks revelations is another image of the network that the French Presidency to highlight."The issue of Internet freedom will have a fundamental dimension" in the G8, said the French presidency. "It is clear that the Internet in all its forms has probably played a decisive role in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions," he admits."The Internet is an element of freedom and political and social emancipation absolutely unavoidable. The G8 countries are democracies, they should make a wholehearted support for this mission," concluded the French presidency of the group.

Google, Microsoft or Apple: What will be the next king of software?

In the 80, the war was for control software of computers. And finally prevailed and prevails Microsoft. The race today went to cellular and emerging digital tablets.
This is a critical fight to impose the dominant operating system, heart and soul of these devices, including giants like Google, Apple, RIM (BlackBerry) and Microsoft.
The winner takes it all, or almost.
In the case of PC, Microsoft was able to devote to their operating systems (DOS first and then the famous Windows) in the standard platform until today, from which he built an empire. This new chapter may end up different, because there are so many that attempt to replicate the formula as those trying to avoid it.
There are several players who punched a point, but the film is in its infancy. And the pieces are constantly moving. Two recent data prove it: a little over two years and today Google launched Android is shaping up to lead the segment. But last year, Finland's Nokia, the largest mobile phone maker in the world, struck up an alliance with Microsoft to incorporate Windows Phone to its products and at the same time, decided to retire Symbian their own operating system. Should be clarified that Symbian is the most popular platform of the moment. Therefore, to understand the move is necessary to review some numbers.
A Gartner study indicates that closed in April 2010, 37.6% of phones sold worldwide have Symbian.
Android (22.7%), BlackBerry (16%), Apple IOS (15.7%) and Windows (4.2%) came from behind. The projections for 2011, Gartner argues that Android will forward, with 38.5%, displacing iOS (19.4%) and Symbian (19.2%).
BlackBerry (13.4%) and Windows (5.6%), occupy the fourth and fifth, respectively.
In this context, and the high penetration of mobile telephony throughout the world, handset manufacturers try to sustain profitability through the sale of software and services (online shopping, music, videos, maps and mail.)
Software corporations, meanwhile, have on the ability to sell mobile applications, development and advertising, such as Google.
Thus, each player does your game. Some sell hardware, others software. In this regard, Android is a remarkable case. Ricardo Blanco, Google spokesman for the region, remember that the first version of the operating system was launched in 2008 by HTC team of Chinese origin. "Today there are 27 brands of cell phones in 96 countries who have Android" he says.
Google, says White, is different because it has no phones. "The business is search and advertising", says the manager. Unlike Windows, Android is free delivery, but to the barons of the hardware (manufacturers) that involves some cost. The operating system is related to applications referred to Google: Gmail, Android Market (online store iTunes type), Google Maps, among others.Some brands, like Samsung and Motorola, to give those territories to focus on the hardware business. Further, Apple and BlackBerry, prefer to bet on both ends. And that's why they use their own operating systems. Tomas Ferrari, Samsung says that the Korean company is very large at the time of adopting platforms, but always with Android as the first option. Bada even over its own operating system.
What is the game of business? "The phones are finite differences, the advantages are very short, at most last for six months", explains the executive. So, with cell considered as a commodity, the position goes on the other side. "Samsung looks at the problem backwards: ours is to offer software applications and services to differentiate and sell more hardware," says Ferrari.
Apple applies a closed form. All your iPods, iPhone and iPad come loaded with its own operating system, from which they connect their online stores: iTunes (music, videos and books) and Apple Store (applications, services and games). His strategy recognizes as limit the expansion of their own devices, it is not little.
The big competitor to Android, as things stand right now is Microsoft.
And Nokia. Already mentioned above: the Finnish Symbian transferred last month to Accenture (with its 3,000 employees), which will provide software to go replacing it with Windows Phone.
Fernando Freytes, management of Nokia, said that from here until 2012 estimate placed 1,500 million Symbian phones.
"The transition to Microsoft will be gradual, and the first models with Windows come to Argentina in mid-2012," he said.
The clash of two giants of the alliance is the main obstacle that has absolutely dominate Google for your business. While today's figures mobile operating system from Microsoft are very low, IDC projections indicate that Android will have 45% of the market and Windows, almost 21%.
Lardiez Hernán, director of the Windows division for the region Phone says that current market share data are quite variable and there is still no strong trend. "The smartphone market is forming and the statistics are very volatile.
6 months ago, Android was not present, it was all Symbian "exemplifies.
For Nokia, Microsoft allows you to promote the business through software. For the software giant, not only is the meat of the sale of Windows licenses.
"There are a number of related services: the Bing, maps, music, games and the entire Office suite of applications," says Lardiez.
However, no formula is absolute. Canada's RIM (Research In Motion), owner of BlackBerry, do not plan to move your operating system, the heart from which offers all kinds of services, mainly oriented toward the corporate world. But just closed a deal with Microsoft to install Bing on their smartphones.
Motorola, like Samsung, joined Android to its entire catalog of products. Even so, Greco said iEco Germain, the director of product, "we focus on selling hardware but also software bet. Like most cell phone brands, Motorola implemented its online store to sell applications, which are planning to promote. "We are looking for developers," said Greco.

The video game software market grew 5% in Spain in 2010

Madrid, May 17 (EFE) .- The video game software market grew 5% in Spain in 2010to 1,000 million euros and forecasts, according to a study by the consultancy DBK isto continue to rise in the period 2011 -2012, to the 1,225 million.
DBK has been reported in a statement that the games "online"and those designedfor mobile devices increased by 14 and 19%, respectively, and together accounted for 37% of market sales.
These increases were due, according DBK, the increasing use of social networksand the growth of smart phones or "smartphones. "
Consoles accounted for 58.7% of market revenue, after sales increased 1% over thesame period last year.
The consultant said the video game software market has revived thanks to theincorporation of technological improvements.
Meanwhile, sales of PC game software fell 15.4% to 4.4% assuming the sales of thissection.
With these data, the sector recovered billing, 2008, which amounted to 1.015 billioneuros, after which in 2009 lowered to 950 million.
In the note sent, DBK said the revenue growth despite the stage of "economic weakness" and the "high number " of unauthorized downloads.
The consultant identified 135 companies in the gaming sector, among which were thelargest subsidiaries of foreign groups.
It also stated that Spanish developers "tend to have a small size"and that the top fivecompanies account for 44% market value of the market.