Independent research firm Ovum made the industry forecast in its “Information Management Market Trends Interactive Model,” a review of market sales by regions and vendors.
With steady growth during the past five years – including upticks during the recession – the compound annual growth rate of global information management software sales during the next four years will reach $37.4 billion. Lead analyst Nishant Singh pointed to three factors as driving spending: shrinking business cycles, increasing quality and process control and the realization of benefits from enterprise resource planning implementations.
Madan Sheina, lead analyst on information management software for Ovum, says business strategies are moving IT toward revenue streams like social networking data analysis and e-discovery that lend themselves to a wave of new spending.
“Ensuring data quality and consistency will be key. Hence, technologies like MDM, data quality and metadata management will once again come to the fore,” Sheina says.
Cloud and SaaS models have the potential to “cannibalize” core on-premise information management software initiatives and spending, Sheina says. However, virtualization also opens possibilities with new solutions for data fragmentation and increased data volumes, as well as those to address the maturity of SMBs.
Based on regions, the greatest spending jump on information management software is anticipated for Asia and the Pacific, with 11.6 percent annual growth from this year to 2015, according to the report. North American market spending is predicted to rise 10.7 percent annually during that same time frame, through the Middle East, Africa and Europe will spend below the average at about 7.7 percent annually through 2015.
Ovum ranks the top three global information management software vendors by market share as EMC, SAS and IBM. Pricing continues to drive SAS’ revenues, while presence in storage and infrastructure software markets enables EMC and IBM to make sales connections, the research firm stated.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
