APAC business software market to hit $46b this year: Ovum

The Asia-Pacific business software market is on target to reach $46 billion this year, according to a report by analyst group Ovum.

It said the sector rebounded strongly from last year's flat sales to grow at about 8.4 percent a year.

Although Ovum recognised Microsoft as the market leader with 15 percent of sales in the region, analysts warned innovation at the software maker was lagging and would likely see rivals IBM, Oracle and SAP nipping closer at its heels in the coming years.

Over the next four years, the Asia-Pacific business software market was expected to grow by a compound annual rate of 8.9 percent, which would equate to a $65 billion market by 2015.

Ovum said enormous repositories of data horded by organisations, the exodus to mobility in the enterprise and a shift to cloud computing would play a big role in driving the growth.

Emerging markets in China and India were key drivers, although more established markets including Japan, South Korea and Australia were expected to contribute strong, single-digit growth over the coming years.

Ovum said information management would likely be the best-performing area based on projected growth of 11 percent over the next four years as companies spend more on managing and making sense of their bulging repositories of business and customer data.

“As the global economy continues its recovery, the emphasis of IT investment is moving on from the traditional area of back-office automation and transaction processing, towards the exploitation of information to add value to the business,” Ovum analyst Tim Jennings said.

“The volume of information within enterprises continues to grow at an astonishing rate and investment is needed to manage this information and to turn it into actionable intelligence, through technologies such as business intelligence and analytics.” 

Ovum also ranked the top software vendors in the region with Microsoft at No.1 with $6.6 billion (15 percent). IBM, Oracle and SAP were ranked second, third and fourth, respectively.

But how long they would stay in Microsoft's shadow was to be seen: “It is doing just enough to stay in the game, but is not a star performer”, said Ovum principal analyst Richard Edwards.

For instance, the area of information management, identified by Ovum as the fastest growing segment of the Asia-Pacific software market, was not Microsoft’s strong suit while rival IBM is a recognised leader.

Ovum projected strong growth across the board with security software expected to grow by compound rate of 10 percent to 2015, with applications software growing at 9.7 percent over the same period.

Organisations’ enthusiasm for mobilising their workforces would drive demand for software enabling the transition while the inexorable move towards the cloud would see more sales of software-as-a-service, Ovum added.