The television landscape is changing rapidly, with players such as Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), entering into deals aimed to attract more viewers by increasing streaming content library and thus posing stiff competition for cable giants such as Comcast. Earlier, Netflix signed a billion-dollar deal with Epix for exclusive digital rights to stream Lionsgate, MGM, and Paramount content.
Last week Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the pioneer of SaaS customer relationship management (CRM) with annual revenue of $1.3 billion, reported strong results that beat estimates. Earlier this month, Salesforce.com settled its legal dispute with Microsoft. RightNow (NASDAQ:RNOW), another SaaS CRM vendor, also reported strong results this quarter. Let’s take a closer look.
As the U.S economy recovers, analysts expect spending on media and communications to increase at an annual average rate of 6.1% to $1.42 trillion over 2009 to 2014. Entertainment and leisure media spending will grow 6.3% annually to $353.9 billion by 2014. Internet and mobile services within the segment are forecast to increase 15% annually during
Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU), the leading small business accounting and tax software provider, last week reported strong fourth quarter results that beat estimates. Early in the month, it acquired the assets of personal finance management application Cha-Ching. Let’s take a closer look.
Both HP (NYSE:HPQ) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) reported strong results last week. Early this month, HP rattled the market when it announced the resignation of CEO Mark Hurd. In his five years at the helm of HP, Hurd has turned around the company and steered it through the recession and through many strategic acquisitions such as EDS, 3Com,
According to Gartner’s latest IT spending report, worldwide enterprise IT spending across all industry verticals is projected to grow 2.9% in 2010 and at 3.5% in 2011. As IT budgets grow, discretionary spend will rise. Revenues at U.S.-headquartered Cognizant Technologies (NASDAQ:CTSH) have already grown as a result of such demand.
Lazard Capital Markets estimates that the server virtualization software market will grow 14% in 2010 to $1.28 billion. Software needed to manage virtual environments is expected to grow 44% over the year to $1.88 billion, and desktop virtualization sales are projected to grow 184% in 2010 to $847.8 million.
Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO) and SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) are the leaders in the talent management market with revenues of almost $200 million each. The rest of the market is trying to catch up through acquisitions. Let’s take a closer look.