Major SaaS Players Become Consolidators

According to Gartner, the content, communications, and collaboration segments are the largest SaaS revenue generators, followed by customer relationship management (CRM) with a total of $2.3 billion in revenue in 2009. SaaS has continued to represent a key driver of growth in the CRM market over the past four years, from 8% of the market

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Intuit Moving Ahead With Connected Services Strategy

In fiscal 2008, Intuit’s (NASDAQ:INTU) new CEO, Brad Smith, announced the company’s connected services strategy, which targets a market where people and businesses are increasingly connected, whether through desktop, laptop, or handheld devices. Last year, Intuit made two major acquisitions – PayCycle (now Intuit Online Payroll) and Mint.com, that support this strategy. More than 56%

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Indian IT Services: Globalization and Products

A recent Morningstar report on the IT services and consulting industry projects client demand to rise. Morningstar notes that the U.S. Tech Pulse Index has been rising since May of last year and registered 14.2% annualized growth in December 2009. No wonder ITO and BPO players in India are hiring and expanding their delivery capabilities

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Content Players Contemplating iPad Effect

Ad spend analysts labeled 2009 as one of the worst years in terms of ad numbers. Ad spending in 2009 fell 10.2% over the year, according to ZenithOptimedia. Numbers are expected to improve in 2010, which should see 0.9% growth over the year to $448 billion. Overall ad spend is expected to continue to grow

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Changing Business Mix At HP And Dell

Over the past decade, IBM (NYSE: IBM) has exited commoditized businesses and shifted its focus to high-margin software and services. HP is taking a different path of diversifying its portfolio to capitalize on the trend towards converged infrastructure products that integrate storage, networking, servers, and management software. In 2008, HP acquired EDS for $13.9 billion,

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30,000-foot SaaS Trends: Huge Growth

The recession has highlighted the importance of SaaS and its cost efficiencies. In a report released this week, Global Industry Analysts projects the SaaS in enterprise application software (EAS) market to reach $23.15 billion by 2015.

Mobile Phone Market Movements

IDC recently reported that the worldwide mobile phone market grew 11.3% in the fourth quarter of 2009 after five consecutive quarters of decline. The smartphone market, which grew consistently even through the downturn, was up 39% in the quarter. Motorola (NYSE:MOT) returned to the top 5 smartphone vendors list, while in the mobile phone market its share

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CDN Market Trends

Content delivery network (CDN) market leader Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM) has long charged a premium for its services, and rivals such Level 3 (NASDAQ:LVLT) have survived by being much cheaper. However, over the past quarter Akamai has been very aggressive in its prices, matching those of its rivals and sometimes undercutting them. The CDN market is crowded

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