Monday Morning Impact – September 26

IDC: Artificial Intelligence Spending Rises Sharply

Worldwide revenues for the artificial intelligence (AI) market, including software, hardware, and services for both AI centric and AI non-centric applications, totaled $383.3 billion in 2021, an increase of 20.7% over the prior year, according to the most recent International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Artificial Intelligence Tracker. IDC expects the AI market value will reach nearly $450 billion in 2022 and maintain a year-over-year growth rate in the high teens throughout the five-year forecast.

“Across all industries and functions, end-user organizations are discovering the benefits of AI technologies, as increasingly powerful AI solutions are enabling better decision-making and higher productivity,” said Rasmus Andsbjerg, associate vice president, Data & Analytics at IDC. “The reality is, AI offers solutions to everything we are facing at the moment. AI can be a source for fast-tracking digital transformation journeys, enable cost savings in times of staggering inflation rates and support automation efforts in times of labor shortages.”

AI Software again accounted for the largest share the overall AI market in 2021. Combined, the four AI Software categories – AI Applications Delivery & Deployment, AI Applications, AI System Infrastructure Software, and Artificial Intelligence Platforms – delivered more than $340 billion in market value in 2021 with AI Applications representing nearly half the total. Artificial Intelligence Platforms delivered the strongest year-over-year growth at 36.6%, albeit from a smaller baseline.

Within the AI Applications category, AI Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Applications and AI Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) Applications each delivered about 16% of the category total. The remainder was delivered by the myriad of other AI Applications available in the market. With nearly 300 companies vying for opportunities to gain share, the AI Applications market remains highly competitive.

IDC’s AI Tracker also shows that AI centric applications continued to slowly grow its share of the AI Software market. In 2021, AI-centric applications captured 12.9% of the market, up 29.3% year over year. In 2021, 47.3% of AI Software purchases were deployed to the public cloud, an increase of four percentage points over 2020 and 8.4 percentage points over 2019. The AI Services market saw its total value increase 22.4% year over year to $24 billion in 2021. The AI Business Services category grew 24.2% year over year as organizations sought assistance on AI governance, business process, and talent strategies.

Channel Impact^®
Artificial Intelligence is a new frontier for the indirect sales channel, and the numbers demonstrate why key players are building strategies around it.

Riverbed Launches Service that Transforms Data into Actionable IT Insights

Riverbed has rolled out Alluvio IQ, a new cloud-native, SaaS-delivered Unified Observability service that empowers IT with insights and automation to support service quality more effectively. The platform leverages network performance and end-user experience data and applies AI and machine learning to correlate data streams and alerts to identify the most business-impacting events.

“Observability today has evolved in the market to deal beyond the challenges of application monitoring, testing, and management,” said Dan Smoot, CEO of Riverbed. “As IT teams continue to face issues managing complex, highly distributed environments, Riverbed saw the need for a broader definition and approach to solve an expanded set of challenges. We believe a unified approach to observability is key to allowing organizations to take back the reigns of IT by transforming massive amounts of data into actionable insights that drive enterprise performance and deliver exceptional digital experiences.”

Promised benefits include reduced Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), improved first-level resolution rates by enabling junior teams to do the job of senior staff, and increased agility and productivity by reducing alert fatigue.

Channel Impact^®
The new service is designed to help IT teams and channel partners address the challenges caused by today’s complex IT environments, resource constraints, and data silos through AI and machine learning while empowering lower-level IT staff to do the jobs of more experienced colleagues.

Redstor Launches New Partner Program, Creates Advisory Board

Redstor, an England-based backup and recovery company targeting MSPs, has unveiled its new All Access Partner Program, offering MSPs co-branded online marketplaces to simplify and accelerate the sales process, including sales, marketing, and technical support, NFR and discount pricing, plus a new Partner Advisory Board.

The company’s platform is intended to unify the protection of modern, legacy and SaaS infrastructure via a single app supporting fast restoration of service in a cloud-first model. Artificial intelligence polices backups to identify and isolate malware for safe restores.

Promised features and benefits include a co-branded online marketplace that enables easy and efficient end-to-end onboarding, lead referrals, MDF, NFR bundles.
Strong Sales and Marketing: Features and a library of sales resources.

Redstor has also announced the expansion of its leadership team as growth continued throughout its Q3. Linda Misauer has been named VP Software Security, and Douglas Sawyer, Director of Partner Acquisition, raising to four the number of senior industry executives to recently join Redstor.

Channel Impact^®
The new channel program is designed to help MSPs capitalize on high demand for cloud-based data protection services across on-premise, cloud-native, and SaaS business application workloads.