Salesforce leaps into global software top 10

Microsoft keeps lead in expanding market with Oracle moving up behind

Pure-play cloud vendor Salesforce moved into the top 10 worldwide software vendors by revenue last year, according to Gartner.

Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner, said the world business software market totalled $407.3bn (£244.6bn) in 2013, up 4.8 per cent on 2012 revenues. Microsoft was still in the lead, with Oracle taking second place during the year.

And in a first for the market, a pure cloud vendor – Salesforce.com – is rubbing shoulders with the traditional top 10, due to its impressive 33.3 per cent expansion in revenue terms last year.

"The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT)," Correia said.

Developed countries were the main drivers of growth, with the emerging markets relatively sluggish.

Organisations are buying into technologies that support the structure of their existing systems and maintain competitiveness, but still want cloud or subscription services "where it makes sense", she said.

The top 10 vendors for 2013 in the global business software market, by revenue, were:
Microsoft – up six per cent to $65.7bn
Oracle – up 3.4 per cent to $29.6bn
IBM – up 1.4 per cent to $29.1bn
SAP – up 9.5 per cent to $18.5bn
Symantec – down 0.8 per cent to $6.4bn
EMC – up 4.9 per cent to $5.6bn
HP – down 2.7 per cent to $4.9bn
VMware – up 14.1 per cent to $4.8bn
CA – down 2.6 per cent to $4.2bn
Salesforce – up 33.3 per cent to $3.8bn

The figures are from Gartner's Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2013 report.