Enterprise software market booming

The worldwide enterprise software market is set to grow by 7.5 per cent year on year to reach $253.7bn in 2011, driven by huge demand for business intelligence, collaboration, content management and social software, according to the latest Gartner report.

The analyst firm highlighted five interdependent trends set to affect the market this year which it said represented the next wave of software technology: globalisation, implementation, modernisation, socialisation and verticalisation.

"The focus in the enterprise software industry is on upgrading of build-run-manage technologies to improve agility, establishing cloud computing infrastructure services and results-reporting transparency," said Tom Eid, a research vice president at Gartner.

"For 2011 through 2015, the highest instances of software market growth will align to the business requirements of attracting and retaining customers, enhancing business processes, improving collaboration and social networking, managing content of all types, reporting of performance and results transparency, and workforce effectiveness and flexibility."

Gartner described the use of the cloud, software-as-a-service, Web 2.0 technologies and open source software as "market disrupting".

However, Nathan Marke, chief technology officer at IT services firm 2e2, believes that the real challenge facing enterprises is not in adopting these technologies, but understanding what they mean in the first place.

"The challenge for most organisations now is to cut though a lot of the vendor hype and firmly establish which cloud delivery model best meets their needs, so that they can take advantage of the increased globalisation, modernisation and socialisation of today's enterprise software," he explained.

Eid added that, in order to be successful, vendors must "continually refine domain expertise in their target markets", with a focus on innovation and growing the business.