For SAP, SaaS is no longer a side story. It is SAP’s stated intention to become a leader in this business by 2015. Yesterday, Lars Dalgaard, SAP’s head of the Cloud business, has announced his route to make it big in this market. Basically, SAP sees the applications landscape in four solution areas: Human Capital Management (HCM), Financials, Customer Relationship [...]

Companies are facing the challenge of having to compute, manage and analyze huge amounts of data (big data). In addition to the increase in data volume, companies also need larger capacities for data analyses: Various divisions within companies demand a fast deployment of analysis results, while requiring increasing depth of detail. In-memory computing-aided analysis systems can accelerate the evaluation of [...]

PAC recently took a look at some offerings from the Finnish company, Headlong. Headlong has built an SMS contact & response platform and then constructed some business solutions on top of it. “Why such a traditional technology?” was PAC’s first question. “Coverage, simplicity, accessibility and low cost” they replied. It turned out to be an interesting conversation. Their offering has [...]

In the beginning of 2012 PAC asked more than 200 German companies (with 20 and more employees in Germany) about the use of cloud communication and collaborations services. The main results of this study are summarized below. The entire report with many facts and figures on the German UCC cloud market is available for download here (published in German). Attitude: Openness [...]

The biggest buzz in the Indian IT industry is “non-linearity.” Indian IT service providers have built their business on being able to meet client requirements through recruiting and training large numbers of highly qualified staff at low cost. But the law of large numbers means this model doesn’t scale out for ever, and they know this. Furthermore, customers worldwide are [...]

BearingPoint recently announced the results of a recent study on Solvency II across Europe of 350 insurers, primarily in the UK and France. The survey found that 84 per cent of European insurers have not implemented Pillar 3 (reporting) of the Solvency II framework despite the deadline for the directive being set for June 2013. So far insurers have been [...]

Despite an unclear business outlook, SMEs (companies with less than 2,000 employees) will continue to invest in business applications and SaaS, with key areas of investment including CRM, analytics, mobility, and industry-specific software. PAC expects the SME market for business application and SaaS to grow to over £2.1bn by 2015, which is a faster rate than in the large enterprise [...]

Despite weaker performance in the beginning of 2012, PAC forecasts that the growth momentum for Indian IT companies will pick up later this year. The woes continue in the Indian IT Services industry, following the April-June 2012 forecasts of declining revenue both from Wipro and Infosys. While TCS celebrated its first ever $10 billion annual revenue with positive future forecast, [...]

Intellect and the UK Payments Council held the second annual “Driving Change in Payments Conference 2012” last week. The one-day event attracted almost 300 people from banks, telcos, software and services companies. Not surprisingly, mobile payments dominated many of the discussions at the event. Despite lagging behind some other countries, the UK payments industry has progressed considerably since the last [...]

The deadline of May 10th is approaching for Sygnity. It is the deadline until when the shareholders of Sygnity need to make a decision on Asseco’s call to take over its smaller competitor in a hostile bid. Asseco put on the table PLN 250 million  (EUR 60 million). After five years of consecutive losses and struggles, and after being almost on [...]