Software spending will remain flat this year market-watchers have confirmed today, but the enterprise software market will then start out on growth clip that will average 5.4% a year and near $300 billion by 2013.
According to figures released earlier by Gartner, revenue is forecast to total $222.6 billion in 2009, reflecting a flat, 0.3% change from 2008 when total sales tallied $221.9 billion.
“The fourth quarter of 2008 was the turning point in creating an uneasy selling environment that may usher in several difficult quarters for the enterprise software markets,” said Tom Eid, VP at Gartner. Any spending upturn will start no earlier than the first half of 2010.
Software as a service and open source have the strongest options for continued growth, the analyst group has suggested, whereas operating systems, office suites, middleware, storage and digital content creation are forecast to have negative growth rates.
Software that helps drive help cost optimisation initiatives are ear-marked for growth, with special mention going to vendors offering software as a service, IT asset management, virtualisation capabilities and an ability to leverage open-source software.
Gartner managed to pick out one other market bright spot last week, when it announced that worldwide cloud services revenue will exeed $56.3 billion this year and surge to just more than $150 billion come 2013.
