Global software market rose 5.5% to $179bn during the initial six months of 2013, which was mainly driven by big data/analytics, content applications, and system software, according to a new IDC report.
IDC Worldwide Software, Services and Executive Advisory Research senior vice president Henry Morris said that 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."
The three primary segments including Applications; Application Development & Deployment (AD&D); and Systems Infrastructure Software reported growth between 5% and 6% year during the first half of 2013.
The strong gains in the content and collaborative Applications drove the Applications market which reported 5.8% growth.
The market for enterprise social networks solutions rose 28.3, which now represents about 13% of the overall collaborative applications market.
CRM solution market has also been stable while Content Applications rose mainly due to recent product launches that increased the trend of content-collaboration support for business processes, and digital marketing.
Microsoft topped the list of vendors in the Applications market with a share of 14.9% and is followed by SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Intuit.
The Applications Development & Deployment (AD&D) primary market segment reported year-over-year growth of 5.1% during H1, which is less compared to overall software.
Within the AD&D market, integration and process automation middleware and structured data management reported highest growth rate of over 6%.
On the Application perspective, big data and analytics are closely tied to the rapid growth of social business software markets.
Oracle topped the list of vendors in the AD&D primary market in 1H13 with 23.1% of market share followed by IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and SAS.
The system infrastructure software primary market segment accounts for 23.4% of total software revenue and reported 5.1% year over year growth.
During H1, the system software secondary segment reported over 8% growth, which was mainly driven by the launch of Windows 8 and Cloud enablement solutions implementation from suppliers including Vmware and Citrix.
This market was also led by Microsoft with 30.1% of share, followed by IBM, Symantec, EMC, and VMware.
