As for the 'cloud' side of things - this hasn't had a huge...

As for the 'cloud' side of things - this hasn't had a huge effect on hardware sales. I'm in the industry as well. Good run-down by Klogg above. Analysts have been predicting the death of the PC for 6 or 7 years now at least. It hasn't happened. Part of the reason is that even if your data resides on a server (whether in the cloud or not), you still require an end-point (computer, laptop, etc) with which to access said data. Sure, some people are gong to laptops, tablets, etc but if you walk into most corporates in the country they still have a computer or thin client sitting on each desk.

Also, schools are increasing their IT programs across the board. Again, there are some which will tout the wonders of having an iPad for all the kids, but most of them have a laptop program and these days many are going to a ratio of 1 device per student, whereas a few years ago they might have had a computer lab or some trolleys of laptops which were shared amongst several classes.

Good to see DDR is going the cloud path as an aggregator of services. Most other disties have some sort of cloud strategy like this in place (or on the way), so this is not posturing by DDR - it is part of their strategy moving forward.