This week IDC released the latest results from its Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker. Despite only modest gains last year in the worldwide software market, certain specific areas showed strong growth. According to IDC, the management and leveraging of information for competitive advantage is driving gains in markets associate with Big Data and analytics.
For 2012, the worldwide software market grew 3.6% year over year reaching a total market size of $342 billion. This was less than half the growth rate experience in 2010 and 2011 and is indicative of a more conservative growth period.
But, says IDC, despite the slowdown, there are faster growing market segments such as Data Access, Analysis and Delivery, Collaborative Applications, CRM Applications, Security Software, and System and Network Management Software. Every one of these markets grew in the 6-7% range, about double the rate for enterprise software as a whole.
The global software market, comprised of a multi-layered collection of technologies and solutions, is growing more slowly in this period of economic uncertainty,” said Henry D. Morris, Senior Vice President for Worldwide Software, Services and Executive Advisory Research. “Yet there is strong growth in selective areas. The management and leveraging of information for competitive advantage is driving growth in markets associated with Big Data and analytics. Similarly, rapid growth in cloud deployments is fueling growth in application areas associated with social business and customer experience. Both these initiatives require a reliable and secure infrastructure, driving investments in security and system/network management. The combination of these forces is advancing the growth to what IDC has termed the third platform.”
IDC identifies Application Development & Deployment (AD&D) as one of the three primary segments making up the total software market. AD&D was the fastest growing segment, comprising nearly 24% of software revenues in 2012 and growing at a rate of 4.6%.
Business Intelligence and relational database management systems are fueling this growth because of the growing adoption of Big Data and analytics. IDC goes on to say that “Big data and analytics are also closely tied to the fast growth social business software markets, where the combination of contextual data and the ‘right’ expertise is becoming critical for supporting enterprise decision making and data driven customer experience solutions. Oracle continued to lead the AD&D segment with steady market share of 21.6%, followed by IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and SAS. Among these vendors, Microsoft and SAP stood out by each gaining almost a half point of market share year over year.”
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