Software market set for modest growth this year

IDC claims worldwide growth figure for next four years will be driven by emerging markets' expansion

The worldwide software market is set for a growth spurt this year, according to IDC.

According to the analyst's Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker (WSST), the global software market grew 3.6 per cent year on year in 2012 – a figure set to jump to 5.7 per cent this year.

Despite the promise of growth, IDC claims that any expansion of the market is still modest, and said that last year's growth was less than half of that experienced in 2010 and 2011. Between 2012 and 2017, IDC reckons the software market will expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3 per cent.

Established markets in the North America, western Europe and Japan regions will grow on average by five per cent over the five-year period, with the emerging markets of Latin America, central and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa expanding by 8.8 per cent over the same period, claims IDC.

In IDC's WSST, which analyses more than 800 software vendors across 49 countries, predicts the fastest growth will come in social software due to a hike in cloud deployments.

In the report, IDC said: "The collaborative applications software category is forecast to have the highest growth in the short term [in] 2013. This category includes social software, which is growing from a lower revenue base. The collaborative applications category is also experiencing more cloud deployments than other categories and this represents new software investments.

"The structured data management software category is expected to show the strongest growth over the five-year forecast period with a 9.3 per cent CAGR from 2012 to 2017, fuelled by faster growth in the past two and three years of the forecast.

"Data management is at the core of the information-driven economy and will play a critical role in the implementation of big data and analytics."