Revenues from worldwide application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software market, which is are becoming the cornerstone of the digital business, rose 5.6 percent to $21.5 billion in 2013 over the previous year, said Gartner.
The use of multiple delivery models, increased reliance on governance technologies, and the convergence of application and data integration requirements are the growth drivers.
Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner, said: “While spending in traditional AIM products continues and remains sizeable, we are seeing a growing interest toward newer offerings, such as platform as a service (PaaS), low-latency messaging, complex event processing and in-memory data grids.”
Cloud computing, Internet of Things, mobile enablement, intelligent business operations and in-memory computing are some of the areas in which AIM providers continue to play an active role as innovators.
IBM retained the No 1 position with a 1.6 percent growth in 2013.
The rankings of the top five vendors — IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Software AG, and Tibco — have not changed over the last three years; however, they are showing mixed performance under pressure from specialized vendors, in particular PaaS providers and open source software suppliers.
North America and Western Europe are the largest regional markets (44.3 percent and 24.9 percent, respectively), followed by mature Asia/Pacific countries (14.0 percent). Middle East & Africa, Asia/Pacific and North America have grown the fastest at 13.5 percent, 9.2 percent and 8.0 percent, respectively.
