Salesforce Eyeing Europe For Growth

According to Gartner, worldwide customer relationship management (CRM) software sales grew 13.3% to $23.2 billion in 2014. While the top 10 ranking order hasn’t changed and Salesforce continues to reign at the top, competition has been stiff in the market with price wars and consolidation. While the market share of Salesforce and Microsoft has increased, most vendors in the top 10 have lost market share. >>>

Online Travel Consolidating Rapidly

The online travel industry is seeing rapid consolidation as Priceline and Expedia look to dominate the industry in the face of competition from new rivals like Google. While Priceline is expanding into new areas with acquisitions like OpenTable, Expedia has been on an acquisition spree to gain scale.

Priceline’s Financials

Priceline’s (NASDAQ: PCLN) second quarter revenues grew 7.4% over the year to $2.28 billion, close to the analyst estimate of $2.29 billion. Gross travel bookings for the quarter increased 10.5% to $14.96 billion. EPS was $12.45 versus $12.51 a year ago and analyst estimate of $11.85.
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India Becomes a Key Center for Analytics Outsourcing

Across the globe, enterprises are making huge investments for leveraging data analytics tools and technologies to provide customized offerings and improved digital engagement with customers. By 2018, the market for data analytics is expected to be worth $48.3 billion. Enterprises are now increasingly outsourcing the data analytics processes to less expensive locations like India. According to TechNavio, the Global Data Analytics Outsourcing market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 30.54% over the period 2014-2019. >>>

Carnival in the Cloud: Aria Helps Recurring Revenue Companies Bill

According to market reports, companies with businesses focused on recurring revenue models, such as those of cloud technologies,  telecom, digital entertainment, and even retail contribute nearly $300 billion to the global economy. There is a growing demand of cloud-based billing services especially tailored for these companies. Recent market reports suggest that the cloud-based billing market will be a $9.5 billion market by the year 2018.

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Mode Media Takes on Video Streaming

It is rare to see an Internet company that has impressive user metrics for over a decade and has still not decided to go public. One such company is a content curator and Billion Dollar Unicorn club hopeful Mode Media, formerly known as Glam Media.

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Will IBM Acquire FireEye?

According to Gartner, the global spending on IT security is projected to grow 8.2% this year to $77 billion. Gartner expects this spend to grow to $101 billion by the year 2018. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member FireEye (Nasdaq: FEYE) is already benefiting from this growth.

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Jive Software Continues to Tumble

According to a ReportsnReports research report, the global enterprise social software market is projected to grow 11.3% annually from $4.77 billion in 2014 to $8.14 billion in 2019. But despite a strong industry growth rate,  Billion Dollar Unicorn club hopeful Jive Software (Nasdaq: JIVE) is feeling the pressures of the stock exchange. The stock market has been unrelenting in its treatment of the loss-making business model, causing Jive to implode.

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Lufax May be Risky, But Valuations Remain Lofty

According to a BusinessInsider report on the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending industry, the total loans generated by P2P lenders in the US grew 128% to $6.6 billion in 2014. The US is the biggest P2P lending market in the world in terms of loan volume, but other countries are catching up. In 2014, Europe grew 144% in P2P loan volume to $3.9 billion. China is not to be left far behind as is evident from the Billion Dollar Unicorn status of Chinese P2P lending firm Lufax.

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