CRM tops investment priority list for Australian enterprises: Gartner
The enterprise application software market in Asia Pacific, excluding Japan, grew by 6.5 percent in 2013, reaching AU$13.5 billion, but slightly lower growth than in 2012, according to the latest worldwide software market share results from Gartner.
The market share results show that Australia was the fastest growing market among the mature Asia Pacific countries, where application software revenue totalled AU$3.5 billion and grew 7.7 percent from 2012. It was driven by growth in customer relationship management investments, business intelligence and analytics, new spending on software-as-a-service and cloud-based deployments, as well as upgrades and improvements to mission critical software.
Microsoft dominated the Asia Pacific market during 2013 with a 23.6 percent market share, a 6.6 percent increase on the previous year, said Gartner. But it was SAP, the second largest vendor in 2013 with a market share of 12.1 percent that experienced the largest growth on the previous year of 7.2 percent. Oracle and IBM market share steadily increased by 0.7 percent to 7.2 percent and 0.9 percent to 4.1 percent respectively.
In Australia, the ranking was the same except Salesforce.com sat in fifth place instead of Yonyou.
According to Gartner, the variation in the top five vendors in Australia compared to Asia Pacific overall "reflects the differences in technology priorities between mature and emerging markets".
"The software industry is in the middle of a multiyear cyclical transition as organisations are focusing investment on technologies to support existing systems, in order to maintain competitiveness, while still taking advantage of cloud subscription-based pricing where it makes sense to grow and advance the business," said Gartner research director Yanna Dharmasthira.
The results also showed China continued to face moderating growth due to slowing domestic and export market demand. Application software revenue reached AU$3.3 billion, an increase of 5.9 percent over 2012.