Convergence, Cloud drives software market

June 6, 2011 Off By David
Object Storage
Grazed from IT Wire.  Author:  Peter Dinham.

In its latest market analysis and forecasts for the Australian software market, IDC says that the appetite for software in Australia is being driven by cloud delivery models and software solution convergence, with CIOs and IT managers now having a “myriad” of delivery options – on-premise, private and public clouds.

This will see the market grow from $5.8 billion in 2010 to $9 billion by 2015, according to IDC, with the research firm predicting that the middleware and integration layers underpinning the application environment are set to remain a critical focus through to 2015.

“The market in Australia has seen projects to simplify IT environments on both the application and infrastructure side for some time and the last lever to enable a consistent user experience is almost always middleware and integration.”

IDC Australia’s software analyst, Vanessa Thompson, says that the more “disparate and distributed existing IT environments” are, the more focused IT departments will be on streamlining application delivery. “Maintaining mission-critical applications and supporting everyday business processes is now increasingly complex but essential.

"End users just need access to the applications they need to do their job, they don’t care how IT make it happen. IT managers need to ‘keep the lights on’ and following the period of simplification, challenges around integration and middleware are much more visible."