TCS, Infosys Eying Healthcare IT Acquisitions in the U.S.

The $76 billion Indian IT outsourcing industry is facing some of its biggest challenges in recent years. With an average 12.9% increase in salaries in 2011, the country claims to deliver among the highest wage increases in the world. Competition from other countries and regions such as Latin America, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe is also on the rise. The Indian IT majors are looking for a fresh bout of growth through acquisitions into other regions and newer market offerings.

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Worries For Kayak, But Travel Market Holding Steady

A travel study conducted by Trip Advisor on more than 2,700 U.S. travelers revealed that 31% of U.S. travelers will spend more on travel in 2012 than in the current year. Forty-nine percent of those surveyed are expected to keep their travel spending constant during the two-year period. The optimism in travel spending is reflected in the online travel players’ results.

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Genpact And Cognizant Growing Steadily

According to researchers, Global Industry Analysts, global market for business process outsourcing (BPO) is projected to be worth $280.7 billion by 2017. Growth will be driven by expansion in finance and accounting outsourcing with the financial services, manufacturing, logistics and travel industries adopting the F&A outsourcing trend. The report estimates that while the U.S. will dominate the global market, demand will increase from emerging countries and regions, including China, Latin America, and Central Europe. Clearly, outsourcers need to ensure their operations are present in these locations to be able to address this market.

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SAP To Intensify Cloud Strategy

SAP, one of the largest companies in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market, recently reported strong results – its seventh straight quarter of double-digit growth. It even reported a double-digit gain in market share against Oracle, which recently announced its plans to acquire customer service SaaS vendor RightNow for $1.5 billion. Let’s take a closer look.

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Payroll Providers Using Acquisitions To Grow In Still-Shaky Market

Analysts estimate that the third-party payroll services industry accounts for $45 billion annually in the U.S. Industry observers project growth in the sector in the following year as the economic conditions improve. Meanwhile, payroll service providers in the country are already seeing strong results.

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U.S. Solar Industry Reorganizes In The Face Of Challenges

Reduced feed-in-tariffs from European markets, lower prices, and increased competition from Chinese manufacturers continued to hurt the solar power sector. Three U.S. solar players have already announced bankruptcy this year and the recent quarterly results of the country’s two major solar powers, SunPower and First Solar, don’t look promising.

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LinkedIn’s Mounting Challenges With Large Address Books

Researcher eMarketer projects ad revenues from social networks to grow to $5.54 billion this year and double by 2013. Although half of the current year spending is in the U.S., researchers expect that trend to shift to a point that the non-U.S. market will account for 52% of the market. They expect the professional social network LinkedIn to account for $249.6 million in ad revenues worldwide by 2013, compared with $140.8 million expected this year. Although growth at the site will continue, it will do so at a much slower pace.

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ARM Gaining Momentum

HP last month announced that it would be selling low-power servers based on ARM technology. Earlier, Microsoft announced that future generations of Windows operating system would support ARM-based chips, and Google announced that its Chrome operating system will run on ARM technology. These developments indicate how popular ARM’s low-power technology is becoming, even in the traditional computing industry where Intel dominates. Let’s take a look at their recent performances.

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Overvalued At 80 Billion, Facebook Expects 4.27 Billion In Revenue For 2011

According to a comScore report released for the third quarter of the year, Facebook accounted for 15% of total online display advertising spend, compared with Google’s and Yahoo’s 10% share each. Within the U.S., Facebook owns 28% market share of all display ads, compared with 23% a year ago. Surprisingly, though, Facebook is ranked fourth in unique U.S. visitors. Google has the most unique visitors in the U.S., followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. However, users spend more time on Facebook than they do on any of these other web portals.

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Athenahealth Takes Leading Role In Healthcare Administration Changes

A Frost and Sullivan report, U.S. Hospital EHR Market, 2009–2016: Charting the Course for Dramatic Change, published earlier last month, reveals that the electronic health records (EHR) market is on path to grow more than six times its 2009 revenues of under a billion dollars to $6.5 billion in 2012, a clear indication that the implementation of the HITECH Act resulted in increased spending by health care providers on IT infrastructure. The researcher believes that significant change has happened since 2009, when approximately 12% of hospitals were using basic or advanced EHR, and only 2% of those were using EHRs in a way that would qualify for meaningful use. HITECH Act laid out several parameters to identify providers using their inter-operable EHR system for meaningful use of delivery of healthcare services, and offered incentives to these providers with additional payments received through Medicare and Medicaid. To help healthcare providers to benefit from these financial incentives, EHR providers are expanding their offerings.

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