Intuit Needs An Emerging Market Strategy

Earlier this year, Credit Suisse reported that the total digital units for H&R Block for year-to-date figures for the tax season 2011 grew 7% over the year, while Intuit reported a much smaller 1% gain in total digital units. More recent data showed that H&R Block’s online units grew 27% compared with 6% for Intuit. Statistics show that Intuit lost market share to H&R Block, but the company still managed to surpass analyst expectations for the quarter.

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EMC, VMWare Rocking

Driven by the strong demand of virtualization, both VMWare and EMC continued to deliver strong results. In addition to organic growth, the two have used this year to acquire other players to be able to deliver a broader set of solutions for their customers.

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HP, Dell Chase Tablet Market

Global PC shipments fell 3.2% during the Q1 this year, according to IDC. The drop was driven by wary business and retail consumers, rising fuel and commodity prices, the tsunami in Japan and political turmoil in the Middle East. The researchers expect the U.S. market growth to continue to be strained in the current quarter. Last quarter, shipments in the country fell 10.7% over last year to 16.1 million units. Both EMEA and Japan saw contraction in shipments, and it was only Asia Pacific markets, excluding Japan, where shipments grew, albeit a mere 5.6%. PC makers HP and Dell seem to be up for tougher times in the coming quarters.

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Low Margins Haunt Salesforce But Investment Paves Way For Later SaaS Companies

Leading SaaS customer relationship management (CRM) vendor, Salesforce.com recently reported its first quarter results that topped analyst estimates even as profits slumped 97%. Salesforce.com continues to report record revenues, but margins have been a concern. Let’s take a closer look.
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Genpact, Wipro, HCL Seeking Stronger Presence In Niche Verticals

Everest Group’s Market Vista report for Q1 2011 estimates the first quarter global transaction volumes for outsourcing contracts at an annual contract value of $3 billion. The number of contracts signed during the year by the business process outsourcing (BPO) segment grew 25% sequentially driven by significant growth across all sectors including the BFSI, manufacturing, distribution and retail and healthcare verticals. However, IT outsourcing (ITO) transactions fell 17% over the previous quarter. Overall outsourcing transactions fell 5% over the quarter but grew 14% over the year.

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Spotify Expected To Launch Movies, U.S. Service

According to ABI research, mobile music streaming will see significant growth in the coming years with the subscriber base expected to cross 161 million by 2016, compared to 5.9 million projected by the end of the current year. That translates to a compounded annual growth rate of 95%. By 2012, Asia Pacific should become the biggest market for mobile music streaming. The report also claims that service providers such as Spotify will be one of the big gainers in this music trend. Below is a graph from the report that shows the geographic spread of this growth.

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Boingo In A Tough Business

According to a report by Cisco, global mobile data traffic grew 2.6 times in 2010. Last year, mobile data traffic recorded data flow of 237 petabytes per month. Mobile video traffic accounted for 49.8% of total mobile traffic last year and is projected to grow to 52.8% in the current year. The growth was seen across smartphones and other handheld devices, and average smartphone usage doubled in 2010 to 79 megabytes per month. Tablets have also become a big user, with more than 3 million tablets connecting to the mobile network last year and each tablet generating five times more traffic than the average smartphone. The report further estimates that 94 million laptops were on the mobile network in 2010, generating traffic of 1.7 gigabytes per month. >>>

Fusion-io In The IPO Pipeline

Today, the VC-funded startup market is full of Internet companies that command sky-high valuations without a robust monetization strategy in place. However, there are also organizations such as Fusion-io that are able to support valuations and IPO plans with a sound product strategy. The company, which was ranked Number 2 by The Wall Street Journal out of the top 50 venture-backed companies last year, recently announced plans to go public. Here is a brief review of a company that has, to date, shipped more than 20 petabytes of flash memory to more than 1,000 organizations.

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Competition In Learning Management Heats Up

In my most recent post on the talent management sector, I said that talent management companies were increasingly leaning toward learning systems. Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO) acquired Learn.com and another talent management vendor, SumTotal Systems, acquired Learn.com’s rival, GeoLearning. All these acquisitions in the learning space had left SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF) with no learning partner and forced the company to make its own acquisition in the space. Let’s take a closer look.

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Is Cisco’s Restructuring Too Little, Too Late?

Government spending during the quarter is estimated to have fallen 8% over the year – not good news for Cisco, which gets 22% of its revenues from the sector and is already seeing troubled times. The company’s stock price fell 15% last year. During the current year, while the Dow Jones has gone up 10%, Cisco’s stock is among the worst performers, having recorded a 12% drop in the year. Recently, CEO John Chambers accepted Cisco’s failings and has stepped up effort to pull the company back on track.

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