Ultrabook and tablet boom to increase reliance on cloud infrastructure

Sales of mobile computing devices are set to rocket over the next five years, with Intel’s Ultabooks gaining mass popularity while tablets become nigh on ubiquitous.

According to report by Juniper Research Ultrabooks and tablets will in fact make up a total 73 percent of the mobile computing market in 2016.

Intel might have been a tad ambitious with the its aim of 40 percent of the notebook market this year, but Juniper analysts reckon that with ongoing consumerisation of IT the traditional notebook is rapidly becoming old hat.

Tablets too are set to vastly increase over the popularity already seen.  Apple boss Tim Cook has stated tablet sales will soon overtake desktop sales, and with growing opportunity for ‘own brand’ devices to be produced by channel players, a tablet on every table is a likely proposition it seems.

With the reliance of the future mobile devices on SSDs which the majority of these devices rely on, there are challenges over the cost for storage however. This is likely to increase reliance on cloud storage and infrastructure.

Many Ultrabooks come with 128GB drives so analysts reckon vendors will need to think about what cloud services are able to make up for the shortfall compared to the 500GB drives which some early Ultrabooks have been shipped with.

Overall, it is expected that Ultrabook shipments will reach an Intel-pleasing 178 million units by 2016, with a growth rate of around three times that of tablets.

Tablet shipments will be higher however, at 253 million annually.

It is expected that the imminent release of Windows 8 will also help drive Ultrabook adoption, with features that enhance battery life and fast boot ups that are synonymous with the new wave of notebooks.

Netbooks will fall to just a third of today’s volumes by 2016 as tablets and low cost but higher performance notebooks threaten to finally close the curtain on the short lived segment.