Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Big Data, Analytics, and Cloud Drove Enterprise Software Growth in 2012


International Data Corporation (IDC) released the latest results from the WorldwideSemiannual Software Tracker. For 2012, the worldwide software market grew 3.6% year over year reaching a total market size of $342 billion, which was in line with IDC's previous forecast of 3.4% and less than half the growth rate experienced in 2010 and 2011. In that sense, 2012 confirms the beginning of a more conservative growth period. In the middle of this scenario, 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.

Three primary segments comprise the total software market in IDC's software taxonomy: Applications; Application Development & Deployment (AD&D); and Systems Infrastructure Software. Among the three primary segments, the AD&D segment, which comprised nearly 24% of total software revenues in 2012, was the fastest growing market with a 4.6% year-over-year growth rate. Growth in the AD&D segment was largely driven by the performance of the Data Access, Analysis, and Delivery and the Structured Data Management secondary markets with 6.0% and 5.9% growth rates, respectively. Business Intelligence and Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) solutions are pushing the growing trend for these markets because of widening Big Data and Analytics adoption. 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.

In the Applications primary market segment, which comprised 49% of total software revenue, year-over-year growth for 2012 was 3.3%, which is slightly lower than for software overall. Within this market segment, CRM and Collaborative Applications stood out with year-over-year growth rates near 7%. While the former is driven by the cloud migration trend and the large investments by businesses to deliver a better customer experience to the "social customer", the latter is largely driven by the Enterprise Social Software market, which grew at 24.8% year over year and gained more than 5 points of market share over three years. Mobile, while not a direct enterprise applications driver, is however a contributing factor and driver for businesses moving to newer and more mobile device agnostic enterprise software..

The third primary segment of the software market is System Infrastructure Software, which comprised 27% of total software revenue and grew 3.3% year over year in 2012. The Security Software and System/Network Management Software secondary segments both grew more than 6% year over year as these solutions provide the infrastructure - whether in the cloud or on-premise - to support the 3rd Platform. Although the other two System Infrastructure Software secondary segment (Storage Software and System Software) had flat growth in 2012, the Virtualization sub-segments had double-digit growth rates.

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