Global IT operations management (ITOM) software market revenue increased by 8.7% to $18.3bn in 2011, according to Gartner.

Gartner research director Laurie Wurster said the market showed growth for the second consecutive year, after a sharp decline in 2009, despite slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition activity.

"We saw consistent resilience in 2011, with the ITOM software market expanding both in terms of revenue and worldwide markets."

The key users of ITOM software were North America, Western Europe and mature Asia/Pacific countries, with a combined share of 88% of the global ITOM market.

In 2011, the top five vendors occupied 53.5% share of the ITOM software market and IBM maintained its top position, with a lead of nearly $1bn over its closest competitor.

The company was also the market share leader in the combined mainframe management segments that constituted 28% of its total ITOM software revenue of $3.3bn.

CA Technologies held the second position with growth across all 14 segments, where application performance monitoring and asset and network management reporting the strongest growth of more than 20%.

BMC Software came third with 31% of ITOM software revenue through the five mainframe segments, where the company achieved growth of 6.4%.

Gartner revealed that Microsoft’s revenue growth was stronger than that of the market as it widened the gap with HP, so there was no repeat of 2010’s neck-and-neck result.

Unlike BMC, CA, HP and IBM, Microsoft does not have a broad scope of management functionality in the ITOM software market and concentrates on products based on its Windows operating system and its own applications.

HP, which is focusing services, cloud computing and analytics to expand its historical focus on devices, infrastructure, security and management, saw slow but steady revenue growth reversing the decline of 2010, the analysis revealed.

"However, this transformation has been challenging for HP to execute. With a focus on broad ITOM functionality in a heterogeneous environment, HP suffered from a management transition and loss of sales focus on ITOM in 2011," added Wurster.