The enterprise software market in India is projected to reach $3.96 billion (in constant currency) in 2013, a 14.5 percent growth over 2012 revenue of $3.46 billion, according to Gartner.
The market is driven by the need for enterprise customers in India to compete in the highly dynamic business environment.
“Changes in business priorities are also creating new opportunity areas for a variety of software products and services,” said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner.
The market is also driven by additional factors including the requirement of greater customer services, focus on cost savings and incorporation of emerging technologies into solutions, such as mobility, social, cloud and information management. They bring additional urgency and demand for IT investments.
However, the software market in India is still relatively small and evolving when compared to several other markets worldwide.
In 2013, India will be the fourth largest enterprise software market in Asia/Pacific, excluding Japan. The country is forecast to account for 12.2 percent of the region’s total revenue of $32.58 billion in 2013, the equivalent to 1.3 percent of the total worldwide software market of $304 billion.
The top 5 business priorities for Indian users are: increasing enterprise growth; delivering operational results; improving profitability and margins; improving IT applications, infrastructure, legacy; and consolidating business operations.
IT spending is expected to remain high with India and China user organizations being most optimistic, closely followed by Malaysia and Singapore, said Raina.
Further, several government initiatives involving public private partnerships (PPP), increased globalization, foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail, aviation, media and ongoing investment in India will create an increase in IT budgets in India.
Optimism regarding spending within Indian organizations reflects confidence in India’s regional economic performance, as well as the need to adopt better technology to effectively compete in a tougher global environment.
In the next five years, priority areas of software spending will include web conferencing; teaming platforms and social software suites; enterprise content management; customer relationship management (CRM) and security, Gartner said.