ANZ AD SW mkt to grow 6.7 pc in 2010: Gartner

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: Application development (AD) software revenue in Australia and New Zealand is forecast to reach US$144.5 million, an increase of 6.7 percent from 2009 revenue of US$135.4 million according to Gartner, Inc.

This is a solid increase compared with the overall forecast for worldwide growth of 0.7 percent said a release.

"There is some pent up demand for AD products and 2010 should see the return of higher growth for Australia and New Zealand," said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner.

“One of the main reasons for solid growth is the relative insulation from the worldwide economic recession, as well as sustained domestic consumption. Many markets across the globe continue to be in decline,” he added.

As two of the more mature and stable IT markets in Asia Pacific, the main strengths of Australia and New Zealand are their long term experience in software development, as well as being advanced users of IT in various vertical markets, such as healthcare, finance and insurance.

According to Gartner, Australia is an area of spending growth and an attractive research and development centre for software vendors because of its rich demographics. Apart from growth opportunities, it also offers vendors long-term stability and the highest forecast compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for AD software for the five year period to 2013.

The ongoing need to invest in security testing is one of the top drivers for the application development market. Despite the restrictions imposed on AD spending due to the worldwide economic downturn, this segment grew fastest in 2009 as security breaches continued to highlight the need for good testing, making up for some of a lack of spending on more mature and less dynamic tools.

Worldwide, application development software revenue declined 2 percent in 2009, the first negative showing for the entire market since 2002, driven by a "wait and see" attitude which put new projects on hold and extended life for old development tools.

The release added, in 2009 AD market share results for Australia and New Zealand, IBM held the largest market share of 26.3 percent. This performance was helped by strategic acquisitions such as Watchfire 2007 and Ounce Labs 2009, which provided growth in the security testing market. In addition, IBM's 2008 acquisition of Telelogic continued to bring moderate growth in areas such as requirements management.

HP’s share of the market remained fairly constant, whereas Microsoft’s market share grew slightly given the company's preannouncement of Visual Studio 2010, which meant that many companies decided to postpone any upgrades in 2009 and wait for the new version. Some large vendors decline was due to subscription-based business model that causes a delay in revenue recognition while some smaller vendors were acquired, release added.

It further added, despite strong growth in Australia and New Zealand, vendors should not be complacent, the need remains to do more for the same cost. Open source offerings in the AD market remain attractive, frequently delivering good-enough functionality in a flexible manner. Software vendors need to ensure that they can provide value-add with flexible deployment options.