Worldwide software market growth is expected to decelerate in 2012 following the post-2008 boom, according to latest results from International Data Corporation (IDC).
IDC Worldwide Software Trackers director Patrick Melgarejo said 2011 delivered nearly double-digit growth in the worldwide software market, the highest annual growth rate in the years since the 2008 financial crisis.
"However, IDC expects the overall software market to return to more conservative growth in the years to come," he added.
"The major driver behind this decelerating growth is the forecast for close to flat performance in EMEA, due to the economic difficulties in that region."
In total, 35 vendors achieved revenues of more than $1bn in 2011, accounting a combined market share of 62% while the remaining market is shared among 1129 vendors and others.
Vendors that came on the $1bn revenue list for the first time are Attachmate and Cadence Design Systems and those having more than $1bn in software revenue are only three VMware, Salesforce.com, and Cadence Design Systems with a growth rate of over 20%.
Globally, Microsoft remained the top software vendor with 17.8% market share followed by IBM and Oracle and SAP were next in line.
The fastest growing software markets in 2011 are Enterprise Social Software, Virtual Machine Software, and Team Collaborative Applications that are closely related and support key cross-industry technology trends like social applications, virtualisation and collaboration, respectively.
Within the Application Development and Deployment primary market, the Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) market, which is a very large and established market, delivered the second highest growth rate in 2011, an atypical result for such a mature market, IDC noted.
Asia/Pacific and Japan (APJ) reported the highest growth rate as it has over the past 3 years, up from 15% in 2008 to 16.5% of market share in 2011, though the region is forecast to be more in sync with the other regions in 2012.
The research forecasts the Americas to maintain its stable market share of about 53% over the next several years, supported by expected gains in Latin America.
