4 October 2002 Organisations will increase their spending on software by about 4% in 2003, according to IDC. But the analyst group forecasts that revenues for the worldwide software market will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10-12% until 2006.
In 2003, software such as operating systems and customer relationship management (CRM) applications will remain the largest segment of the software market. The applications market will generate revenues of $131 billion (€132.8bn) by 2006.
However, IDC forecasts that the fastest growing market will be for application development and deployment software, which will have an annual compound growth rate of 11.5%.
“Application development is something that has been put off for several years because of the recession. Companies have been saying ‘new tools for our developers? We can put that off.’ But the emergence of web services and XML-enabled tools to develop those services are a reason to buy those new tools,” IDC senior vice president of global software Tony Picardi told InfoWorld.
Picardi added that, despite the uncertain current economic climate, organisations will continue to spend on software that they believe will enable them to achieve efficiencies in their business operations. Other key drivers behind increased technology spending will be more sophisticated mobile devices and embedded computers.
IDC concludes that rates of growth will be fairly uniform across the various different regions in the world.
Meanwhile, there was only one change in the ranking position among the four leading software vendors. German software giant SAP leapfrogged Computer Associates into fourth place, behind Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
