With changing market dynamics and need for innovative solution to solve everyday business problems the global software market has seen a significant growth of 4.7% in the first year taking the software sales to $167 billion according the research firm IDC. CRM, Collaboration and virtualization are the fastest growing software segment. The tough economic condition in most part of the Western Europe had a negative impact on the overall software sales but large market like U.S., Latin America, Russia, China and some other markets saw good growth.
The Application software like Enterprise collaboration along CRM saw a combined growth of 5.1%, and in collaboration segment the growth of team collaboration and social were significant and it has been increasing over the last two years, noted IDC. The enterprise social software saw a rise of 8% from 3% in 2008 to 1% in 2012. Even team collaboration software sales rose to 15% during first half of 2012. CRM software segment has registered a double digit growth of 12% fueled by customer service, sales and marketing needs of the businesses. The annual turnover of salesforce.com is in excess of $3 billion and with strong need for cloud based CRM software, from the usual on-premise will further improve the revenue. To reduce infrastructure cost company are using virtualization techniques and as a result this segment grew by 17.8% in the first part of the year. With the rising cost of hardware infrastructure virtualization offers an affordable alternative to the businesses. Though there was some slow down but this segment is growing steadily and consistently.
Some of the important factors that are affecting virtualization software market are from competitors like Vmware, RedHat, and Microsoft. The advent of open source cloud software such as OpenStack has also had an impact on this segment. IDC adds that the market will be more cautious but will see growth in the coming years.
