Analyst firm Gartner has identified the technology industry's usual suspects as key drivers underpinning a worldwide application development (AD) software market projected to reach more than US$9 billion in 2012.
An increase of 1.8 percent over 2011's market size, Gartner says that evolving software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development, and open source software will drive IT spending.
Stating the Obvious or Valuable Insight?
According to Gartner's "Market Trends: Application Development (AD) Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016" report, cloud is changing the way applications are designed, tested, and deployed, resulting in a significant shift in development priorities.
"The trend is compelling enough to force traditional AD vendors to 'cloud-enable' their existing offerings and position them as a service to be delivered through the cloud," said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner.
More insightful perhaps are predictions that mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4:1 by 2015.
Also driving the development shift, Gartner expects open source software to continue to broaden its presence and create pressure on market leaders during the next three to five years, especially as open source becomes a key element of the software quality landscape beyond the developer level. It predicts that at least 70 percent of new enterprise Java applications will be deployed on an open source Java application server by the end of 2017.
"Open source software tools will continue to erode revenue for some AD categories in design, testing, and web development," said Mr. Raina. "This is being driven primarily by the success of Eclipse and NetBeans, as well as by overall revitalization of the market by new small software providers looking for technical and market-disruptive approaches for offering products. Limited budgets and economic conditions compelling enough to focus on cost reduction also fuel the use of open-source software in various development projects."
