Gartner: Worldwide Software Market Grew 4.8 Percent in 2013

InsightaaS: We don’t ordinarily post links to press releases here, but this one seemed worthy of an exception. Gartner has released its 2013 software market figures, revealing that the entire market grew by 4.8%, driven primarily by spending in established economies. It’s a remarkable finding, given the attention that has been afforded to cloud, and the general concern that cloud pricing models are reducing overall software spend – but the analyst firm believes that “organizations are focusing investment on technologies to support existing system structure, in order to maintain competitiveness, while still taking advantage of cloud/subscription-based pricing where it makes sense to grow and advance the business.”

Also interesting are the relative vendor rankings, and their impact on the market. The top four vendors – Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP – accounted for 35% of global software revenues in 2013, and two of these firms, Microsoft (6% growth) and SAP (9.5%) substantially exceeded the overall market growth rate of 4.7%. The six next-largest vendors – Symantec, EMC, HP, VMware, CA and Salesforce.com – account collectively for 7% of total market; high growth was recorded by Salesforce.com (33%) and VMware (14.1% ). All other software vendors accounted for 58% of total software revenue.

The release is below. Please click here if you’d like to see it on the Gartner website.

Gartner Says Worldwide Software Market Grew 4.8 Percent in 2013

Microsoft Retains No. 1 Spot; Oracle Moves Into No. 2

Salesforce Moves Into the Top 10 and Drives the Highest-Growth Rate of Top Vendors

Worldwide software revenue totaled $407.3 billion in 2013, a 4.8 percent increase from 2012 revenue of $388.5 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The developed geographies were the primary growth drivers offsetting the relative sluggishness in emerging markets.

The software industry is in the middle of a multiyear cyclical transition as organizations are focusing investment on technologies to support existing system structure, in order to maintain competitiveness, while still taking advantage of cloud/subscription-based pricing where it makes sense to grow and advance the business.

“There is a shift in vendor rankings from 2013 at the top of the worldwide software market,” said Chad Eschinger, research vice president at Gartner. “This is the first time in Gartner’s global software market share research that Oracle has ranked second in terms of total software revenue with $29.6 billion and capturing 7.3 percent of the global market. Global trends around big data and analytics with business investment in database and cloud-based applications helped to drive Oracle’s top-line growth.”

“The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) movement,” said Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner. “A clear indicator of this is that for the first time we have a pure cloud vendor in the top 10.”

Salesforce.com, with more than $3.8 billion in revenue during 2013, climbed two positions to capture the No. 10 slot of the worldwide enterprise software market, and it achieved the highest growth among the top 10 vendors at 33.3 percent (see Table 1). Salesforce.com has also moved into the top five for overall application revenue.

“Investors continue to focus on revenue growth and market share gains as the primary criteria when evaluating vendors,” said John Rizzuto, research vice president and Invest analyst at Gartner. “At this point, the new and emerging technology markets in software, such as digital marketing and public cloud computing, are so nascent that investors are favoring those companies that are early and aggressive in grabbing both market and mind share – in many cases dismissing progress on earnings and cash flow in hopes that they will one day follow.”

Table 1. Top 10 Worldwide Software Vendors, Worldwide, 2012-2013 (Billions of Dollars) 

Source: Gartner (March 2014)

More detailed analysis is available in the report “Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2013”. The report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/document/2695617.