Worldwide AIM Market Worth $ 19.3 Bn In 2011

According to Gartner, the worldwide application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software revenue market totalled $19.3 billion in 2011, a 9.9 per cent growth over 2010. In 2010, worldwide AIM revenue grew 7.3 per cent and reached $17.6 billion.

“Application infrastructure and middleware projects increasingly span on-premises, cloud and external business partners,” said Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner. “The impacts of using multiple delivery models, increased reliance on governance technologies, and convergence of application and data integration requirements are driving organisations to sustain significant investment in AIM technologies and skills,” he added.

”Cloud computing is increasingly becoming mainstream and gaining traction in the market. Middleware vendors should leverage their expertise to offer competitive cloud services in addition to on-premises software products,” explained Biscotti. “Although the transition from on-premises to cloud computing will take an extended period of time, the demand for hybrid use of platform technologies is present now, and is projected to grow rapidly during the next two to four years. End users can judge the long-term viability of a platform as a service (PaaS) provider in part by its ability to attract independent software vendors (ISVs) and other partners into its ecosystem,” he further added.

Several segments showed a double-digit growth rate including application servers, where the performance of application PaaS vendors has been strong. Service oriented architecture (SOA) governance technologies, portal products and user interaction tools also performed well.

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Business Process Management (BPM) suites continued to grow at a sustained pace as some providers are evolving their offerings into next-generation application infrastructure platforms that Gartner defines as iBPMSs. These platforms address the growing need to account for social interactions, mobility and decision management in the process management context.

As per Gartner, despite difficult market conditions, the top five vendors showed solid growth. This growth was driven through acquisitions and organic growth. IBM retained its leadership position, increasing its market share to 32.1 percent.

Almost all AIM segments experienced growth in Asia/Pacific, but “appliances-AIM” grew fastest albeit from a lower revenue base. The primary drivers have been domestic demand, growing maturity of users and incremental enhancements in AIM technology.

“Despite the weak economy, particularly in the world’s largest economies, there are no signs that the growth we have seen in the AIM market for several years is faltering,” said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner. “On the contrary, the need for cost containment and increased efficiency are pushing organisations to adopt solutions that can solve specific business problems. This explains the market influx of specialists in areas such as low- latency messaging (LLM), managed file transfer (MFT), complex event processing (CEP) and in-memory data grids,” he added.