Data is king. It’s all about transparency. And the rack’s the limit.

Those are some of the 12 hot server trends for 2020, according to the techies at Dell EMC. The Dell crew published their findings earlier this month in a report, Dell EMC’s 2020 Server Trends & Observations.

The report was compiled by Robert Hormuth, VP, technology fellow and CTO of Dell EMC’s server solutions group. Hormuth joined Dell in 2007 after working at Intel and National Instruments.

What your employees don’t know about data could be hurting you. Same goes for your customers and their employees.

A new survey finds that nearly 1 in 3 workers have taken a sick day in the last year due to stress related to data, information and technology issues.

That works out to lost productivity that’s costing organizations worldwide an estimated $109.4 billion a year.

All that’s according to a new report from consultants Accenture and Qlik, a provider of end-to-end, real-time data integration and analytics solutions.

Chromebooks have found a real niche in the K-12 education market, and why not. Light yet tough and durable, full-powered yet easy to use, they’re perfect for use by schoolkids.

And because Chromebooks are essentially Chrome OS thin clients with applications running in the cloud, school admins find the devices a lot simpler to manage than “regular” Windows or Apple PCs. Typically retailing for around $300, Chromebooks are a lot less expensive too.

Not enough hours in the day? Intel is here to help.

The company’s NUC Elements give you an entirely new way to design, build and deliver high-performance embedded solutions and mini-PCs quickly, easily and flexibly.

Intel NUC Elements were designed to simplify system assembly for integrators and system builders. They do this by providing a line of components that you can mix-and-match to deliver the flexibility of modular computing.

Work with Intel NUC Elements and you can enjoy these benefits:

IT spending worldwide is on track to hit $4 trillion. State CIOs want to be innovative, but find it hard to achieve. And IT infrastructure budgets are in the cloud.

That’s the latest in IT market research. Here’s your tech provider’s roundup.

Global IT spending: nearly $4 trillion

IT spending worldwide will total $3.9 trillion this year, Gartner predicts, an increase over 2019 of 3.4%.

Intel is making a big push into AI – make that several pushes.

Last fall, the company hosted an AI Summit at which it introduced AI circuitry.

And at the CES 2020 show earlier this month, Intel introduced AI-powered processors, demonstrated progress made by its Mobileye unit, and highlighted an innovative and possibly life-saving AI-powered project with the Red Cross.

Together, these events highlight AI’s determination to make advances for AI applications in business, society and research. Here’s your tech provider’s update.

Is there a mismatch between the way you sell storage and what your customers actually need?

Lots of tech providers sell parts. A new server. New storage drive. New PCs.

But your customers may not care about buying new server or storage hardware. What they definitely care about is a solution. That is, finding a combination hardware, software and services package that solves an important business problem.

Windows 7 standard support ends today, and it seems this deadline really helped drive demand for PCs in the fourth quarter of last year.

Worldwide unit shipments of PCs grew by a surprisingly strong 4.8% in Q4:19, according to new figures from IDC. That not only beat the market watcher’s earlier forecast, it also marked the highest quarterly shipment volume of PCs since the fourth quarter of 2015.

Were your customers among those who took advantage of the tech sales during the just-passed holiday season? If so, they were far from alone.

Overall digital spending during the 2019 holiday season increased 8% over the previous year, hitting $723 billion worldwide, according to a new report from Salesforce.

In-store shoppers shun help from robots. Brand loyalty is fragile. And smart speakers are proliferating.

That’s some of the latest research released in time for retail’s big show, NRF 2020. This conference and expo, sponsored by the National Retail Federation, gets started in New York tomorrow, Jan. 11. Its organizers expect nearly 40,000 people to attend.

Here’s your tech provider’s research roundup:

People, not robots