IT industry analyst house IDC is firmly of the opinion that the software application development market in 2013 has been "carried" not through healthy sales from within its own quarters, but from supporting trends in relational database management systems and integration.
The firm carries out a bi-annual software industry tracker analysis in order to try and gauge the total size of the software application development market. By IDC's reckoning, 2012 closed up on a total value of around $80.6 billion, which represents a 3.7 percent increase on last year's figure.
Analyst Patrick Melgarejo predicts a brighter 2013 and expects the current 12-month to come in closer to $86.7 billion, which will represent a growth rate of nearly double at 7.5 percent.
Melgarejo and his team concoct their market prophesies with an economic model of sorts that features in relational database management systems (RDBMS) taking up 34 percent of the total "application development" marketshare.
RDBMS technologies are so fundamentally important to the programming landscape right now (argues IDC) because they necessitate the coexistence (and therefore the onward development of) data integration and access software. These application types are burgeoning because firms using RDBMS technologies need to be able to streamline the flow of data between distributed computing environments as they exist, says IDC.
The analyst house also points to software solutions that are developed in concert with these trends, such as those produced to increase application performance by managing cache data.
CRM Applications Also Strong
"The CRM applications market experienced a rebound effect in 2011 that is being carried through well into 2012. The 'century of the customer' has centered on increasing customer experience and, powered by social media, is motivating organizations to invest in their customer-handling infrastructure. The move to interact with customers when, where, and how they want is changing the go-to-market strategies of many organizations. Technology is now a requirement to be able to deliver consistency at scale," said Mary Wardley, program vice president, CRM applications and customer experience.
