Aberdeen Group’s annual State of the Market Report gives the results of five years of research spanning 550,000 locations and more than 2.5 million interviews, as well as insights from 4,645 snapshot survey respondents.

Last year, mobility was identified in the Aberdeen Report as the number one technology growth area. This year the results indicate that mobility will take a back seat to business intelligence (BI) and analytics as the technology capabilities having the greatest impact over the next 3-5 years. One interesting omission in the Top 100 most influential technology companies was the lack of human capital management solutions, despite the fact that 31% of survey respondents identified a "shortage of talent" as being the second greatest challenge facing their organization this year. More...

Markets for cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) communication modules – the radio units providing wireless connectivity to a range of devices that communicate without human intervention – are expected to show strong growth in the coming years. According to new market data from ABI Research, shipments will total nearly 80 million modules in 2013.

"The latest cellular M2M module market data collated by ABI Research shows strong growth trends that are closely in line with our earlier forecasts," said senior analyst Sam Lucero. "We see four applications that will be particularly fertile for M2M and should provide significant opportunities for vendors." More...

According to a proposal put forth by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the 500 largest US public companies will have to start filing their financial data in XBRL, or extensible business reporting language, in early 2009. Most of the remaining companies would have to comply by 2011, the SEC said. The goal is to make it easier for investors to analyze corporate financial data of public companies.

XBRL electronic tags are specific XML tags identifying each separate piece of financial data. Similar to the way that WITSML and PRODML tags define the various data types for drilling and production data, XBRL is a data schema for financial data to enable importing certain data parameters into financial applications for analysis. More...

Royal Dutch Shell has signed three different five-year contracts in the billion-dollar range for outsourcing its information technology support and services. The first is a $1 billion IT Master Services Agreement (MSA) with Plano-based EDS. The second is a $1.6 billion managed network services contract with San Antonio-based AT&T. The third is a €1 billion deal for worldwide hosting and storage services with T-Systems, a unit of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG. A total of 2,960 Shell employees will be transferred to these three companies to provide these services.

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Technology workers looking to keep their skills out in front of employers’ future needs would be wise to focus on wireless technologies, according to research commissioned by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). A survey of more than 3,500 information technology (IT) managers revealed that wireless and RF mobile technology are the skills expected to increase the most in importance over the next five years. In all but two of fourteen countries surveyed, IT managers said wireless skills will increase in importance over the next five years more than other skills needed. Wireless skills ranked second in South Africa (behind security) and France (behind Web-based technologies).

Other skills expected to grow in importance in the next five years include Web-based technologies such as Web 2.0, service-oriented architecture (SOA), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), rich internet applications and AJAX, along with specific programming languages. More...