Brainshark: IPO or Acquisition Target?

As part of my sales 2.0 case studies, I introduced Brainshark, a provider of an SaaS platform that helps organizations create, narrate, share, and track online multimedia presentations. Analysts expect that Brainshark may now be deciding whether to start an IPO process. Let’s take a look at how the business has fared so far.

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Couchsurfing: Could It Be the EHarmony of Friendship?

We have been covering AirBnb for a while, and the trend of travelers crashing on the couches of locals is surely an interesting one. Recently, Benchmark Capital funded a non-profit company in this area, which intrigued us greatly.

The idea for social travel network Couchsurfing.com came in 1999 when Casey Fenton made a network of friends in Reykjavik. Fenton was looking for an inexpensive couch to crash on in Iceland, and he e-mailed more than 1,500 students in Reykjavik searching for one. Not only did he end up finding a couch to crash on, he also got to experience Iceland in a new way and figured out a new non-profit business idea.

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Oracle Succeeds in Software, Struggles in Hardware

Last week Gartner lowered growth projections for the enterprise software market because of worsening macroeconomic conditions. Worldwide spending on enterprise application software is projected to grow 4.5% over the year to $120.4 billion this year, compared with earlier estimates of 5% growth. The researcher expects enterprise resource planning (ERP) sales to remain the largest enterprise application software segment, with revenues of $24.9 billion this year. Sales of office suites will come in at $16.5 billion. Business intelligence revenues are projected to be worth $13 billion, and CRM revenues are expected to be more than $13 billion this year.

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HubSpot Aims for 2013 IPO

According to a study published by inbound marketer HubSpot, The State of Inbound Marketing Report, organizations that use inbound marketing channels as the preferred mode of marketing find costs per lead to be 62% lower those that prefer outbound marketing tools. Inbound marketing is also benefiting from increased adoption. The report shows that in 2011, the share of inbound marketing channels for lead generation increased to 17%, from 9% in 2009. Social media sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and even blogs are helping to push up inbound marketing efforts. Businesses were willing to spend nearly 29% of their lead generation budgets on social media platforms in 2011, compared with a 24% allocation in 2009. Today, more than 65% of businesses have blogs on their websites, compared with 48% in 2009. The impact of blogs can be seen in the fact that 57% of  businesses using blogs acquired customers through these blogs.

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Baidu, Alibaba Dominate Search and E-Commerce in China

iResearch’s statistics show that during the first quarter of 2012, China’s search engine advertising sales fell 5.2% over the quarter but grew 68.2% over the year to 5.49 billion yuan (~$0.87 billion) in Q1 2012. Baidu’s market share remained the highest last quarter, when it grew to 77.6%  from 77.3% a quarter ago. Google continued to struggle in the quarter and saw its search market share fall from 18.3% a quarter ago to 17.8% this quarter. Smaller player Sogou saw marginal gains, from 2.5% to 2.7%

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AppSense Also in the IPO Pipeline

According to the report Global Mobile Virtualization Market 2011-2015,  the global mobile virtualization market is projected to grow at an annual rate of 20.1% over that four-year period. Growth will be fueled by the increased adoption of cloud-based computing from both corporate and home users. Researchers also expect that in the coming years, cloud computing application vendors will witness increased demands from corporate clients for customization to cater to their specific business needs. Also, as the use of smartphones to access enterprise applications becomes more common, there will more demand for safe and secure network interfaces in the virtualization market.

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MindTree and Persistent Systems Represent New Wave of Indian IT Growth

The Indian IT body NASSCOM expects the IT services market in India to grow 11%-14% in 2012. Growth is projected to slow down from the previous year’s rate of 37%. The depreciating rupee has helped Indian outsourcers, which have been able to report higher earnings. But the industry continues to be plagued by the challenges of increasing labor costs, diminishing the benefits of labor cost arbitrage.

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Marin Software Readying an IPO

In a recent report, research firm Global Industry Analysts predicted that the global online advertising market will grow to $84.8 billion by 2017. This growth is attributed to increased use of mobile, online video, and social networking advertising platforms by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and e-commerce companies.

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Intel Battles ARM For Apple’s Love

Gartner estimates that in 2012, worldwide PC shipments will grow 4.4% over the year. Another report cites that growth in IP traffic will lead to increased demand for data centers. Further, analysts believe that IP traffic will triple by 2015, and lead to 50% growth in data storage needs. Growing demand for computers and data centers signals a strong market for processor firms Intel and ARM, both of which saw quarterly results surpass market expectations.

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CollabNet Eyeing IPO

According to Gartner, global spending on SaaS is projected to grow by 18% this year to $14.5 billion. Growth is projected to continue through 2015 when the SaaS market spend will grow to $22.1 billion. Mature markets of North America, Europe and Japan will see growth of more than 16% each. North America will remain the biggest bringing in $9.1 billion, followed by Western Europe’s $3.2 billion share. Japan is the smallest market segment with SaaS spending projected to grow to $495.2 million from $427 million. Emerging markets of APAC and LATAM will see continued adoption as SaaS spends grow more than 25% each to $934.1 million and $331.1 million respectively.
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