According to recent research, online leisure and unmanaged business travel sales for the U.S. market fell 6.7% in 2009. eMarketer projects the trend to reverse in the current year with growth peaking at 7% in 2012 to reach $105.4 billion. Travel companies will also benefit from increasing travel fares. International fares are already up 23%
In my most recent post on Intuit (NASDAQ:INTU), I said that the company had two choices in broadening its SaaS strategy: to broaden its market to include businesses that are outgrowing QuickBooks, and to broaden its portfolio of offerings. Intuit’s recent acquisition of SaaS healthcare company Medfusion for $91 million indicates that it is following
In my most recent post on both companies, I looked at the changing business mix at HP (NYSE:HPQ) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) and suggested that they should either get out of the PC business altogether or strengthen their offerings in it by getting into convergence devices with a Palm or RIM acquisition. HP recently bought Palm
With Apple’s iPad sales soaring to more than a million, shares of SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK), the leading flash memory chipmaker with annual revenue of $3.15 billion that makes the flash memory used in the iPad, are also rising. SanDisk shares have tripled over the past year, while those of the more traditional hard drive maker Seagate
Ad spending growth has triggered earnings increases in all media companies. Time (NYSE:TWX) Warner recently delivered the highest quarterly profits in the company’s history. During the quarter, it also announced the biggest revenue gain in nearly two years.
The big names in enterprise software are focusing their acquisitions on the SaaS sector. IBM says that it is going to spend $20 billion on acquisitions over the next five years, and SaaS is going to be one of the focus areas. Let’s take a look at how the acquisition spree of these major companies
Gartner estimated recently that worldwide IT services revenues declined 5.3% over the year in 2009 to $763 billion. Revenues for all players in the industry declined, with HP and Accenture reporting the biggest drops of 10.4% and 11.8% respectively. But India-based service providers saw revenues increase 3.6% for 2009 in dollar terms. However, growth was
HP recently introduced seven laptops with AMD’s (NYSE:AMD) chips. This should boost AMD’s efforts to increase its laptop microprocessor share, which has been declining. According to IDC, AMD’s market share dropped from 15% last year to 12.1% in the first quarter, while Intel dominates the market with an 87.8% share (up from 84.3%). Let’s take a