Online Travel Counts on International and Mobile Growth

According to PhoCusWright, a travel research firm, global online travel bookings grew 8% over the year last year to $313 billion. The researcher estimates that online travel market sales will grow 7% a year this year. Meanwhile, the online travel sector is focusing on international and mobile expansion to ensure it captures a bigger share of the slowly recovering travel market.

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Athena Health Acquires Epocrates

A 2011 report by IDC estimates that the electronic health reform (EHR) market will grow from $1.9 billion in 2009 to $3.8 billion by 2015. Outpatient EHR is projected to account for $1.41 billion of the market, and the inpatient EHR services will contribute the remaining $2.4 billion by 2015. A more recent report by IDC continues to project growth, as it suggests EHR penetration to grow from 25% in 2009 to 80% by 2016. Hopefully, this will positively impact healthcare administration costs at large.

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Pure Storage Grows on Flash Memory

According to the 2013 McClean Report, the total flash memory market (NAND and NOR) is estimated to have grown 2% last year to $30.4 billion.  While growth in the flash memory market has been driven by the increased consumer adoption of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, the enterprise segment is also shifting toward this segment. Flash memory is helping improve faster communication channels and system response times in organizations. A Gartner study estimates that the enterprise Flash memory market will be worth $4 billion by 2015.

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Cloudera’s Big Data Growth Story

In a report published by IDC earlier this year, Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012-2016 Forecast, the worldwide big data technology and services market is projected to grow annually at 31% to be worth $23.8 billion by 2016. This is a conservative estimate compared with Wikibon’s research, which projects the big data market to be worth $50 billion by the year 2017, up from $11.4 billion last year.

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MobileIron Protects Ever-Growing Mobile Data Pool

Analysts at Gartner believe that the mobile device management (MDM) market will see strong growth in the coming years. Studies estimate that nearly 20% of medium and large businesses in the country have already purchased MDM tools. The MDM market is still small and was estimated to be worth more than $500 million in revenues in 2012. This is up from an estimated value of $265 million in 2009. But as more and more organizations adopt the “bring your own device” (BYOD) approach within the workplace, the MDM market will grow.

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Adobe’s Creative Cloud Takes Stock to 52-Week High

According to Gartner, the global public cloud services market was estimated to have grown 20% last year to $109 billion. Business process services (BPS) was the largest segment in the market at $84.2 billion, with a 77% market share, compared with $72 billion a year ago. The software as a service (SaaS) market is estimated to be worth $14.4 billion, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) reported the highest growth, from $4.3 billion in 2011 to $6.2 billion in 2012. Besides businesses, the industry is seeing increased adoption of cloud services by individuals. Digital services provider Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) is counting on this increased adoption to drive their own growth.

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ExactTarget’s Growth Continues

According to a recent report, the marketing automation industry is the fastest growing segment within the $4 billion CRM market. Researcher SiriusDecisions believes that adoption of marketing automation will grow 50% by the year 2015. Another report by TechNavio pegs the growth of the worldwide marketing automation market at 8.2% annually from 2011 through 2015. Growth within online marketing is projected to be driven by the increasing availability and adoption of SaaS-based marketing tools and the increased adoption of these tools by small and medium businesses. >>>

OpenTable at 52-Week High

According to recent market reports, traffic to restaurants in the United States is projected to grow a mere 3% this year. But there are still opportunities, and online restaurant reservation services provider OpenTable (Nasdaq:OPEN) is working to improve their offerings to capture a bigger share of this diner growth.

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Coursera’s Business Model Challenge

According to a report, The U.S. Market for Self-Paced eLearning Products and Services: 2010-2015 Forecast and Analysis, by market research firm Ambient Insight 2015, the number of post-secondary students in the U.S. who are taking online classes will rise from 12.36 million in 2010 to 21.13 million by 2015. Annual growth over the five-year period is expected to be 11%. While many students will continue to take both online and offline classes, the largest growth is projected among students taking exclusively online courses. The report projected annual growth of 23% for students taking only online courses; this is up from 1.37 million in 2010 to 3.86 million in 2015. The online education industry will benefit from the growth of massive open online courses (MOOCS), which are usually free courses offered to a big online population.

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Groupon’s Mason Is Fired

If analysts were expecting the daily deals market leader, Groupon (Nasdaq:GRPN), to show impressive results during the holiday quarter last year, they were surely disappointed. According to market research conducted by Manta prior to the holiday quarter, 82% of small businesses surveyed claimed that they had no desire of running deals during the holiday season last year. And it is not just the holiday season that is affected. According to a Raymond James survey of merchants who have used daily deals services earlier, 39% claimed that they did not want to run another daily promotion due to the high costs and low repeat customer rate. Thirty-two percent of the merchants surveyed reported the deals to be loss-making ones.

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