Organisations will slowly increase their spending on software in 2003, according to market research company IDC, with software investment rising by around 4% compared with 2002.
Between 2002 and 2006, says IDC, revenues for the worldwide software market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10-12%, generating revenues of $131 billion (EU132.8bn) by 2006.
Operating systems and customer relationship management (CRM) will remain the largest segments of the software market, explains Tony Picardi, senior vice president of software research at IDC. However, the fastest growing market will be for application development and deployment software, which will have a compound annual growth rate of 11.5%.
Picardi says that, despite the current uncertain economic climate, organisations will continue to spend on software that they believe will enable them to achieve efficiencies in their business operations. Other key drivers behind increased technology spending will be a shift towards more sophisticated mobile devices and embedded computers.
IDC concludes that rates of growth will be fairly uniform across the various world regions. IDC points out that German software giant SAP has now leapfrogged Computer Associates to be the fourth largest software vendor by revenue, behind Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.
