SaaS Growth Story Back On Track

Over the past two weeks, we have looked at the CRM and talent management sectors in the SaaS market. The talent management sector is consolidating at a fast pace and even SaaS CRM is seeing acquisitions in social networking. In August, Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS), a leader in virtualization, acquired VMLogix, a provider of virtualization management for private and public clouds, while NetSuite (NYSE:N) and Concur (NASDAQ:CNQR) have not had any M&A activity in the recent past. >>>

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Shifts In The Online Jobs Market

The Monster Employment Index has been on the rise and the November Index reported the tenth consecutive month of growth, reporting 13% growth over the year. Compared with October, the index slipped two points to 134 attributed to seasonal trends. More recently, though, for the week ended November 27, the U.S. jobless claims rose by 26,000 to a seasonally adjusted 436,000, and analysts claim that the number is making a slow recovery. The four-week moving average of claims stood at 431,000, the lowest since August 2008.

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The 4G Race

Apple started selling the iPad on Verizon on October 28. This makes the Verizon iPhone more of a reality. The Verizon CDMA iPhone was expected in early 2011, but there hasn’t yet been any official confirmation. Meanwhile, Verizon has rolled out its LTE 4G network in 38 cities. Sprint has already launched its WiMax 4G network, which is available in 60 cities, and the company is seeing strong demand for its Samsung Epic and HTC EVO 4G devices. Let’s take a closer look. >>>

Infineon Looks Good After Its Wireless Sale to Intel

Both chipmakers Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL) and Infineon (NYSE:IFX; IFX.DE) last month reported strong results for their recent quarter as demand for their chips increased in an improving economy. Infineon, which recently sold its wireless unit to Intel, proposed its first dividend payout in a decade. >>>

Netflix Needs To Improve Streaming Quality

Sandvine’s report on streaming services in the U.S. claims that Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) represents more than 20% of downstream traffic during peak times and is heaviest between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.  The growing popularity of the streaming service is already taking a toll on Netflix’s streaming capabilities, and the service recorded a big outage earlier this quarter. But, despite outages, the company continued to report stellar quarterly performance.

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Talent Management Continues To Consolidate

The talent management sector continued to consolidate the past quarter as Salary.com was acquired by Kennexa, Learn.com by Taleo (NASDAQ:TLEO), and YouCalc by SuccessFactors (NASDAQ:SFSF). I earlier suggested Salary.com as an attractive acquisition prospect for Taleo or SuccessFactors, the leaders in the talent management sector. >>>

With Etao, Alibaba Seeks To Challenge Baidu’s Search Dominance

According to the latest China monitoring report issued by the China E-Business Research Center, the transaction values of B2B, B2C, and C2C e-commerce services in China reached RMB2.25 trillion (~$337 billion) in the first half of the year.  The transaction value of B2B services topped at RMB 2.05 trillion (~$307 billion). The total trading value of e-commerce is expected to exceed RMB 4.3 trillion (~$644 billion) for the year 2010. China’s leading internet e-commerce player, Alibaba, is also having a good run.

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Symantec Releases Mobile Solutions; Websense A Good Buy For Oracle Or HP

Gartner projects worldwide security software revenues to grow 11.3% over the year in 2010 to cross $16.5 billion. The consumer security software market will remain the largest security software segment, with 2010 revenues projected to reach $4.2 billion in 2010, compared with $3.9 billion in 2009. The enterprise market is expected to reach $3 billion in 2010 from $2.9 billion in 2009. Computer security players Symantec (NASDAQ:SYMC) and Websense (NASDAQ:WBSN) also delivered results that exceeded the market’s targets for the quarter.

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Impact Of AMD’s Fusion Chips

According to iSuppli, about 80% of PCs shipped in 2014 are expected to have hybrid chips. AMD (NYSE:AMD) recently shipped its first chips combining graphics and microprocessor capabilities in a single chip. Intel is close behind with a similar hybrid chip. Such hybrid chips mean a loss of business for NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) as they can render low-end graphic chips obsolete. But for now, both AMD and NVIDIA posted strong results. >>>

SaaS CRM On A High

The SaaS market had worldwide revenues of $13.1 billion in 2009, and IDC expects revenues to reach $40.5 billion by 2014. Research firm Gartner says SaaS accounted for nearly 24% of total CRM market revenue in 2009. SaaS is forecast to account for 26% of total CRM market revenue in 2010. Let’s take a look at two SaaS CRM vendors, Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the big daddy of SaaS CRM, and RightNow (NASDAQ:RNOW).
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