A new report from London market research firm Ovum Ltd, based on a survey of 250 suppliers worldwide, suggests the market for object-oriented systems in the US and Europe is currently worth some $865m and will rise to $4,000m by 1997. Although the market is growing by some 69% per annum now, Ovum says that that figure is already down 10 percentage points on the forecast it made in 1991, and will fall to 27% per annum by 1997. Apart from general recessionary influences, Ovum cites a slower take-up of the technology than had been predicted as a reason. Nice to see a market researcher admitting that its forecasts are not always spot on. Dividing the market into languages and programming environments, application development toolkits, object-oriented database management systems, and software engineering tools, Ovum says sales of languages and programming environments accounted for 58% of the object-oriented market last year, development toolkits 27%, software engineering tools 9.3% and databases 5.7%. By 1997 it estimates development toolkits will account for 31.7% of the market, languages 25.7%, databases 25.6% and software engineering tools 17%. The report, Object Technology: Suppliers, Products and Markets, is UKP500 but only $800.
