IT ops mgmt software mkt grew 9 p.c. in 2011

MUMBAI, INDIA: Worldwide IT operations management (ITOM) software revenue totalled $18.3 billion in 2011, an increase of 8.7 per cent from 2010, according to Gartner, Inc.

"The market showed growth for the second consecutive year, after a sharp decline in 2009, despite slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition activity," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. "We saw consistent resilience in 2011, with the ITOM software market expanding both in terms of revenue and worldwide markets."

In 2011 the top five vendors continued to dominate the ITOM software market and accounted for 53.5 per cent of its revenue

IBM maintained its overall No. 1 position, with a lead of nearly $1 billion over its closest competitor. IBM was also the market share leader in the combined mainframe management segments, which accounted for 28 per cent of its total ITOM software revenue of $3.3 billion. Much of IBM's value proposition for ITOM software continued to focus on products that enable midsize and large organisations to take an end-to-end approach to IT infrastructure and operations management.

CA Technologies held the No. 2 position. For the third consecutive year its revenue grew by more than the overall market. CA Technologies spread its growth across all 14 segments, with application performance monitoring and asset and network management showing the strongest growth (more than 20 per cent).

BMC demonstrated further strong revenue growth. Thirty-one per cent of its ITOM software revenue came from the five mainframe segments, where BMC achieved growth of 6.4 per cent.

Microsoft's revenue growth was stronger than that of the market. It widened the gap with HP, so there was no repeat of 2010's neck-and-neck result. Unlike BMC, CA, HP and IBM, Microsoft does not have a broad scope of management functionality in the ITOM software market and concentrates on products based on its Windows operating system and its own applications. Microsoft has revenue concentrated in three ITOM software market segments, with the vast majority of its revenue coming from configuration management (where it is the market leader) and availability and performance management (distributed) (where it is No. 3 for market share).

HP's slow but steady revenue growth reversed the decline of 2010. HP is targeting services, cloud computing and analytics to expand its historical focus on devices, infrastructure, security and management. "However, this transformation has been challenging for HP to execute. With a focus on broad ITOM functionality in a heterogeneous environment, HP suffered from a management transition and loss of sales focus on ITOM in 2011," said Ms. Wurster.

At the regional level, North America, Western Europe and mature Asia/Pacific countries remained the leading consumers of ITOM software in terms of dollars spent, collectively accounting for 88 per cent of the global ITOM market.