Worldwide application deployment software market grew 2.2% to $14.9bn in 2009, compared to growth rate of 9.7% in 2008 and 16.5% in 2007, according to a new study by IDC.
However, the research firm said that the market growth was counter-cyclical, given the severe impact on IT spending caused by the economic crisis through 2009.
The study showed that the top three vendors in 2009 accounted for 52.5% of market revenue, with IBM being the largest middleware vendor, followed by Oracle and Microsoft.
According to IDC, the fastest-growing larger vendor (over $100m in revenue) was business process management software provider Pegasystems. Appian and Lombardi Software, acquired by IBM in January 2009, also grew in the middle double digits. The SpringSource middleware portfolio grew 100% to $18m in 2009.
Geographically, Asia/Pacific market recorded the fastest growth rate at 8.2%, accounting for 14.5% market share. The largest region was the Americas, which posted 3.9% growth with $7.7bn revenue.
Maureen Fleming, program director of Business Process Management and Middleware, said: "Several factors will lead to accelerating growth in middleware over the next couple of years. Those include increasing investments to improve near-real-time business responsiveness, improve process efficiency, and improve levels of integration, particularly to connect and exchange external data from business partners and cloud services with datacenter-based applications."
