According to Gartner Inc, the IT operations and management software market (ITOM) increased from $17 billion in 2011 to $18 billion in 2012, a 4.8 per cent growth.
However, the leading four vendors in this space- IBM, CA Technologies, BMC Software and HP registered a decline in their market share, while relatively new players made significant progress.
According to the research firm, over the past year, vendor revenue in this space registered moderate single digit growth, after two consecutive years of nearly double digit growth. This can be attributed to slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition activity.”
Meanwhile, continued investments in virtualisation management tools and greater adoption of cloud computing technologies were the key growth drivers for this industry. Vendors are supplementing foundational technologies with the addition of features like mobility, collaboration, IT service visualisation, and more advanced analytics and reporting.
The research firm points out that continuing strong growth in workload automation and IT process automation demonstrates that IT organisations are still investing heavily in traditional technology. In 2012, the top five ITOM vendors net revenue of $9.9 billion and a market share of 55 per cent.
Region-wise, in the past year, North America, Western Europe and mature markets in Asia-Pacific region witnessed the highest demand for these services. About 90 per cent of the ITOM market is concentrated in developed markets, indicating that the older and more complex the infrastructure is, a larger number of organisations require the tools to manage the infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Sub-Saharan Africa markets registered a 1.5 per cent decline each in demand for these services.
Across the ITOM segments, workload automation and IT process automation (distributed) was the only product category which was able to maintain double-digit growth like last year. Most other segments experienced a 2-3 per cent year-over-year decline, compared to 2011. Many ITOM subcategories are commoditising, as end users replace high-cost tools from top vendors with lower-cost tools (one tenth of the overall cost), thereby contracting the market and providing high growth for many low-cost providers.
Going forward, the firm is of the opinion that vendors, with revenue ranging between $100 million and $500 million will play a larger role in this segment. In this context, strategies based on business models, such as software as a service, subscription and cloud will be deployed.
