The global business process management (BPM) and middleware market grew 3.6% during 2012 to $18.8bn compared to 2011, while underperforming compared to that of the previous two years, according to a new report from IDC.
The report reveals that the sluggish growth in 2012 was mainly due to poor macroeconomic conditions such as vendors failing to supply products that met the growing demands for public cloud.
IDC BPM and Middleware research programmes VP, Maureen Fleming, said a large factor in slow growth across BPM and middleware was the failure of large vendors to deliver PaaS offerings that met the growing appetite for cloud-based automation.
"Cloud was the single biggest factor separating market share gainers from share losers," Fleming said.
During the period, the top tier of growth among the four tiers reported 58.7% rise to $992.4m, with 80% of revenue being generated by public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.
Additionally, the top tier, which account for 5.3% of the total market, generated more net-new revenue compared to combined revenues generated by the three additional tiers.
The slowest-growing tier generated $12.7bn during the year, capturing 67.5% of the overall market, while about 8% of revenue was credited to cloud.
According to the research firm, 2012 also indicated increasing demand for latest high-performance messaging centred in the Internet of Things and for mobile and partner integration through APIs, requiring API management.
