Asia-Pacific biz software market to hit US$$46b this yr

KUALA LUMPUR: The Asia-Pacific (AP) business software market is expected to grow by 8.4% to hit US$46 billion this year, according to Australia-based to Ovum.

In a latest report entitled AP Market Trends 2010 Business Software Forecasts, Ovum said recovery from the global economic downturn would begin in earnest this year for the sector, which did not grow at all in 2010.

The Ovum software forecasts include software solutions for business, covering systems infrastructure, enterprise applications, office applications, information management, and security.

Ovum said the business software sector would grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.9% over the next four years, reaching revenues of US$65 billion in 2015.

“The strong growth is driven by exploding volumes of data, increased enterprise mobility, the transition to cloud computing models and the emerging markets, such as huge demand in China and India, although the markets in Japan, South Korea and Australia are expected to show strong single digit growths as well,” it said in a statement Friday, June 24.

Ovum said the information management software sector would experience the biggest increase in revenues of all the business software areas, at a CAGR of almost 11% from 2010 to 2015, as businesses grapple with spiralling volumes of data and try to extract business value from them.

Ovum chief analyst Tim Jennings said as the global economy continued its recovery, the emphasis of IT investment was moving on from the traditional area of back-office automation and transaction processing, towards the exploitation of information to add value to the business.

“The volume of information within enterprises continues to grow at an astonishing rate and investment is needed both to manage this information, and to turn it into actionable intelligence, through technologies such as business intelligence and analytics,” said Jennings.

Ovum also said that although information management software would experience the strongest growth, all the sectors will enjoy a healthy outlook.

The security software market will grow by a CAGR of 10% from 2010 to 2015, while applications software will grow by a CAGR of 9.7% for the same period, it said.

Jennings said organisations were breaking away from the shackles of desktop IT, and providing mobile workers with access to systems from any location and any device.

The mobile revolution will generate strong demand for mobile applications, as well as for the development and management platforms to support this shift, he said.

“Although it is still relatively early days for cloud computing, growth will accelerate over the next five years, as organisations move further towards a software-as-a-service model and take their data centres towards the hybrid combination of public and private cloud infrastructure. This will generate new demand for both infrastructure and application services.”

“The emerging markets will also make a substantial contribution to the strong growth the software sector is set to experience,” he said, adding that emerging markets around the world had an insatiable appetite for TECHNOLOGY []-driven expansion, often unencumbered by the constraints of peers in mature markets.