"Enterprises are seeing new opportunities to drive new and improved products and services by leveraging information. Therefore, it stands to reason that software to manage, access, and share information (structured and unstructured) continues to be a priority for competing in today's economy and a driver of software market growth," said Henry D. Morris, Senior Vice President for Worldwide Software, Services and Executive Advisory Research.
All three primary segments that comprise the total software market in IDC's software taxonomy - Applications; Application Development & Deployment (AD&D); and Systems Infrastructure Software - grew between 5% and 6% year over year in 1H13. It was the Applications primary market which finished slightly higher with a 5.8% growth rate because of the strong gains in the Content and Collaborative Applications markets. Within the Collaboration market, Enterprise Social Networks solutions grew 28.3% year over year and now represents almost 13% of the total Collaborative Applications market. It has gained 10 points of market share in the last five years within an environment that includes mature solutions such as Email Applications. In contrast to previous years, CRM solutions seem to have reached some stability while Content Applications have accelerated because of recent product launchings, the increasing trend of content-collaboration support for business processes, and digital marketing. Microsoft has improved its leadership in the Applications primary market by gaining one point of market share up to 14.9%. Microsoft's strongest Applications secondary markets are Content and Collaborative Applications. SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Intuit complete the Top 5 vendors for the Applications primary market, with Intuit gaining 0.6 points of share in this market.
In the Applications Development & Deployment (AD&D) primary market segment, which comprised 23.4% of total software revenue, year-over-year growth for 1H13 was 5.1%, which is slightly lower than for software overall. Within this market segment, Integration and Process Automation Middleware and Structured Data Management stood out with year-over-year growth rates above 6%. While the former is driven by Business Process Management adoption, the latter is largely driven by the Relational Database Management Systems market growth, which grew at 7.0% year over year because Big Data and analytics adoption continues. Big data and analytics are also closely tied to the fast growth of social business software markets on the Applications side. From a vendor perspective, Oracle led the AD&D primary market in 1H13 with 23.1% of market share followed by IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and SAS. Microsoft and SAP experienced the highest growth rates due to the demand for their RDBMS solutions.
In the System Infrastructure Software primary market segment, which comprised 23.4% of total software revenue and grew 5.1% year over year in 1H13, the System Software secondary segment grew more than 8% year over year driven by the launching of Windows 8 and Cloud enablement solutions adoption from vendors like Vmware and Citrix. Microsoft has improved its leadership in the System Infrastructure Software overall with 30.1% of market share, gaining more than 1.5 points and followed by IBM, Symantec, EMC, and VMware.
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