According to a new survey, CFOs are under increased pressure to implement and report on ESG programs across their organizations. The survey finds 60% of finance leaders indicated a substantial increase in the frequency and focus of their reporting related to ESG issues. Compared to last year, ESG metrics and measurement have become a top priority for CFOs in 2023 — up from its 11th position ranking in 2022. The survey also reveals 57% of publicly held and 40% of privately held companies have included measuring and reporting ESG risks and issues as part of their finance team’s responsibilities over the past year.

For the second consecutive quarter, a survey conducted by Gartner, Inc. revealed that dependence on a specific cloud provider for multiple business capabilities is one of the top five emerging risks for organizations. “The risk associated with cloud concentration is fast losing its ‘emerging’ status as it is becoming a widely recognized risk for most enterprises,” said Ran Xu, director, research in the Gartner Legal Risk & Compliance Practice. “Many organizations are now in a position where they would face severe disruption in the event of the failure of a single provider.”

Following a decade of cord-cutting, that has seen pay-TV subscribers churning to paid online video services, Omdia expects 2024 to bring a new stage of market evolution, with users of paid online video services moving to free online video.

Omdia is tracking several market developments that are driving this pay-to-free (P2F) trend. The clampdown on password sharing by streamers, for example, has created a welcome subscription boost for them. But Omdia sees this as a short-term phenomenon, with that segment of the streaming customer base vulnerable to P2F churn in 2024, particularly as industry strikes and the cutting back on programming budgets will start to affect content quality.

Drivers and passengers expect high-quality audio in their cars - and those expectations are growing. Many automotive companies now use audio to differentiate themselves and promote branded audio. As the automotive audio system market continues to gain traction, it is expected to generate $25B by the end of 2023 and rising to $29B by 2027.

The ability to ensure high-quality images, regardless of network conditions in a theatre of operations, has emerged as a critical success factor for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) activities that depend on video-based intelligence to establish situational awareness and support effective decision-making. This is because missions are rarely executed in controlled laboratory environments. Quite the opposite, says Mark Rushton, global defence and security lead at VITEC, a leader in the Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) technology community.

Forrester predicts that by 2024, 60% of those who are skeptical about generative AI will end up using and appreciating the technology, without even realizing it. Consumers who are skeptical of genAI will eventually adopt it for tasks that can boost their creativity and productivity, such as seeking help from conversational assistants, summarizing and translating content. Furthermore, the investment in genAI by business, technology, and marketing leaders in the coming year will increase employees' creative problem-solving time by up to 50%, driving customer-centric innovation and creating greater business value.

Despite the rise and fall of hype surrounding NFTs, a new study shows that businesses see benefits of NFTs and continue to apply them. The repor found that the global adoption of NFTs has been relatively constant since June 2022, emphasizing that mass adoption is not over, but rather will take time to unfold. Although there are challenges that may slow adoption speeds, NFTs do pose the potential to build community engagement, and revolutionize the way companies interact with their customers

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $5.1 trillion in 2024, an increase of 8% from 2023, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. While generative AI (GenAI) has not yet had a material impact on IT spending, investment in AI more broadly is supporting overall IT spending growth. In 2023 and 2024, very little IT spending will be tied to GenAI, but organizations are continuing to invest in AI and automation to increase operational efficiency and bridge IT talent gaps.

As the scale of emerging technology risks facing companies continue to multiply, IT auditors play a key role in identifying these threats and helping their organizations to navigate them. A new survey conducted by Protiviti and The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) reveals which risks are keeping IT auditors up at night.

Five years of disruption marked by trade wars, the pandemic, geopolitical tensions, and severe supply bottlenecks have profoundly redrawn the map of where global companies manufacture and source goods. A new report released today by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), titled Harnessing the Tectonic Shifts in Global Manufacturing, underscores the magnitude of these shifts.

The downward spiral for PC shipments continued during the third quarter of 2023 (3Q23) as global volumes declined 7.6% year over year with 68.2 million PCs shipped, according to IDC. Though demand and the global economy remain subdued, PC shipments have increased in the last two quarters, slowing the annual decline rate and indicating that the market has moved past the bottom of the trough.

As pay-TV and over-the-top (OTT) streaming service providers fight to retain customers through a challenging economic cycle, effective content navigation strategies have emerged as the key to improving audience engagement to prevent subscriber churn, according to Dr. Mark Kokes, chief licensing officer for media at Adeia in an interview for journalists.

The demand for BYOD is set to increase as the pandemic demonstrated the true value for the wider education market. The benefits aren’t just confined to EdTech channel specialists, but schools and students too. Schools can provide their students with the benefit of a more personalized learning experience without impacting their ever-tighter IT budgets.

A recent Gartner poll shows organizations are not just talking about generative AI but investing time, money and resources to move it forward and drive business outcomes. In fact, 55% of organizations reported increasing investment in genAI since it surged into the public domain ten months ago, and has now found a place on CEOs’ and boards’ agendas as they seek to take advantage of the transformative potential of this technology.

Spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud deployments increased 7.9% year over year in 2Q23 to $24.6 billion. Spending on cloud infrastructure continues to outgrow the non-cloud segment, with the latter declining 8.3% in 2Q23 to $14.4 billion. The cloud infrastructure segment experienced a decline of 23.2% in unit demand with an increase in average selling prices, mostly related to higher-than-usual GPU server shipments to hyperscalers.

According to Forrester, at least a third of B2B buyers in North America and Europe, and over a quarter in Asia Pacific, prioritize price in their purchasing decisions due to macroeconomic headwinds. To simplify the buying process, providers should offer transparent pricing and demonstrate their offerings' ROI throughout the journey.

TV sales remained weak during the first half of 2023 due to poor global macroeconomic conditions and out-of-sync product replacement cycles following unprecedented demand in major markets during 2020. Through the second half of 2023, Futuresource expects demand trends for TVs to remain sluggish as the economy continues to stabilize. A further drop in shipments of 4.1% during 2023 is anticipated, totalling 210.9 million units.

Worldwide end-user spending on security and risk management is projected to total $215 billion in 2024, an increase of 14.3% from 2023, according to a new forecast from Gartner, Inc. 2023 global security and risk management end-user spending is estimated to reach $188.1 billion. The continuous adoption of cloud, continuous hybrid workforce, rapid emergence and use of GenAI, and the evolving regulatory environment are forcing SRM leaders to enhance their security and risk management spending,

Worldwide revenues in the Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) market grew 6.9% year over year and 2.4% sequentially to $15.9 billion in the second quarter of 2023 (2Q23), according to IDC. For 2023, worldwide UC&C revenue is forecast to grow 8.6% year over year to $64.7 billion. This represents an upward revision of roughly $500 million from the previous quarter's forecast. In volume terms, the worldwide UC&C market grew 11.4% year over year and 2.9% sequentially in 2Q23 to $620.7 million.