Tim Jennings, Ovum chief analyst, said, “As the global economy continues its recovery, the emphasis of IT investment is 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.”
Although information management software will experience the strongest growth, Ovum’s figures show all the sectors will enjoy a healthy outlook. The security software market will grow by a CAGR of 10 per cent from 2010 to 2015, while applications software will grow by a CAGR of 9.7 per cent for the same period.
Jennings continued, “Organisations are 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.”
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, he said.
The emerging markets will also make a substantial contribution to the strong growth the software sector is set to experience. Jennings added: “Emerging markets around the world have an insatiable appetite for technology-driven expansion, often unencumbered by the constraints of peers in mature markets.”