Global AIM Market Revenue Increased 7.3% In 2010

The worldwide application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software revenue market totaled $17.6 billion in 2010, a 7.3 percent increase from 2009, according to Gartner, Inc. In 2009, worldwide AIM revenue grew 3.4 percent and reached $16.4 billion.

“Organisations have moved away from a cost containment focus toward preparing for growth. AIM technologies are the key liaison between modernisation of infrastructure and innovative applications, both well suited to serving any move to future growth,” said Fabrizio Biscotti, Research Director, Gartner. “Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) continue to be the central piece of attention while cloud is rapidly moving up in the scale of priority. Cloud is driving only modest spending in the AIM space, but this will change as organisations become more acquainted with the benefits delivered by cloud technologies such as platform as a service.”

The market witnessed a number of acquisitions with more than $1.2 billion worth of AIM revenue in 2010 moving from independent companies to suite vendors. This has driven further market concentration with the top five vendors accounting for 61 percent of the AIM market, up from 57 percent in 2009.

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IBM retained its market share lead and accounted for 32.6 percent of total AIM software revenue in 2010 (see Table 1). The top five vendors managed above market average performances fuelled by acquisitions and organic growth. Due to recent acquisitions and new strategic decisions Software AG exhibited the highest year-on-year growth among the top five AIM software vendors.

On the technology side, the fastest-growing segments include SOA governance technologies, application servers, portal products and appliances. Open-source is also increasingly a part of deployment plans with a focus on open-source application servers, enterprise service bus and a few other AIM functionalities, such as orchestration and embedded firmware for integration appliances.

“The business process management suites market continued to exhibit solid growth (9.2 percent), indicating that BPM continues to provide value as organisations return to growth and innovation,” said Teresa Jones, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner.

North America and Western Europe are the largest regional markets, followed by Japan and Asia/Pacific. Emerging regions have been the fastest-growing, with good performances in Latin America. Asia/pacific continued to remain the fastest growing region worldwide for AIM technologies.

“The growing computing requirements of emerging economies such as China, India and Vietnam contributed to the overall growth of AIM technologies, such as application servers,” said Asheesh Raina, Principal Analyst, Gartner.

“We continue to see a creative turmoil where, on one hand, large vendors continue to consolidate, and on the other hand several up-and-coming players are shaping new markets such as low- latency messaging (LLM), managed file transfer (MFT), and business process analysis (BPA),” said Biscotti. “In addition, there is an embryonic but yet vibrant activity around cloud with growing attention toward platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.”