The worldwide application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software revenue market in 2010 totaled $17.6bn, growing 7.3% from previous year’s result, according to a study by research company Gartner.
In 2009, worldwide AIM revenue grew 3.4% and reached $16.4bn.
The study found that the market witnessed a number of acquisitions with more than $1.2bn worth of AIM revenue in 2010 moving from independent companies to suite vendors. This, gartner says, has driven further market concentration with the top five vendors accounting for 61% of the AIM market, up from 57% in 2009.
In 2010, IBM retained its market share lead and accounted for 32.6% of total AIM software revenue. Due to recent acquisitions and new strategic decisions Software AG exhibited the highest year-on-year growth among the top five AIM software vendors.
Gartner research director Fabrizio Biscotti said AIM technologies are the key liaison between modernisation of infrastructure and innovative applications, both well suited to serving any move to future growth.
Biscotti said, "Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) continue to be the central piece of attention while cloud is rapidly moving up in the scale of priority. Cloud is driving only modest spending in the AIM space, but this will change as organizations become more acquainted with the benefits delivered by cloud technologies such as platform as a service."
On the technology side, the fastest-growing segments include SOA governance technologies, application servers, portal products and appliances, said the report.
Open-source is also increasingly a part of deployment plans with a focus on open-source application servers, enterprise service bus and a few other AIM functionalities, such as orchestration and embedded firmware for integration appliances.
The report found North America and Western Europe are the largest regional markets, followed by Japan and Asia/Pacific. Emerging regions have been the fastest-growing, with good performances in Latin America. Asia/pacific continued to remain the fastest growing region worldwide for AIM technologies.
