Big Data, Cloud Drive Enterprise Software Spending to $342B

Big data and cloud pushed enterprise software spending to $342 billion in 2012, but now the market is going through a period of slower growth due to an uncertain economy, according to the latest data from IDC (News - Alert).

Last year, the worldwide software market grew 3.6 percent, confirming IDC’s previous forecast of a more conservative growth period compared to 2010 and 2011.

However, within the overall market there are faster growing segments. Data access, analysis and delivery, collaborative applications, CRM applications, security software and systems and network management software all grew between 6 and 7 percent in that time – about double the rate for enterprise software overall.

While the growth of the global software market as a whole is slowing, segments associated with big data and analytics are growing more rapidly, according to Henry D. Morris, senior vice president at IDC.

“The management and leveraging of information for competitive advantage is driving growth in markets associated with big data and analytics,” Morris said in a statement. “Similarly, rapid growth in cloud deployments is fueling growth in application areas associated with social business and customer experience. Both of 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.”

Big data and analytics are also closely tied to the fast growth of 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, IDC officials said.

Oracle (News - Alert) continued to lead the application development and deployment (AD&D) segment with steady market share of 21.6 percent, followed by IBM, Microsoft, SAP (News - Alert) and SAS. Among these vendors, Microsoft and SAP stood out by each gaining almost half a point of market share year over year.

While not a direct enterprise applications driver, mobile is a contributing factor and driver for businesses moving to newer and more mobile device agnostic enterprise software.

From a vendor perspective, IDC said Microsoft led the applications primary market in 2012 with 13.7 percent of market share, followed by SAP, Oracle, IBM (News - Alert) and Adobe. IBM showed the highest growth rate of these, as it is expanding its portfolio coverage in the middleware, infrastructure and information-related markets to the applications markets.