“This is the biggest annual growth we’ve seen for this market since 2008,” said Colleen Graham, research director at Gartner. “Pressures to optimize costs and efficiencies in a heterogeneous IT environment are driving organizations to turn to MDM as a more efficient way to manage and maintain data across multiple sources. In addition, the increasing governance, risk and compliance regulations are forcing organizations to focus on MDM to support these initiatives.”

From a regional perspective, North America and Europe will drive the demand for MDM, and both regions will grow at a steady pace to reach the billion-dollar mark, in 2013 for North America and in 2015 for Europe. In 2013, MDM software revenue will see faster growth in Asia/Pacific, where revenue will increase by 30 percent from 2012 to reach $209 million. “MDM has become a critical discipline required for dealing with the challenges of social data, ‘big data’ and data in the cloud,” Graham said.

Within the overall MDM market, more than half the revenue is driven by products from small and best-of-breed vendors, as the market continues to favor specialized solutions over "generic" offerings. However, the overall MDM market is dominated by three major players - IBM, Oracle and SAP.  “In the next four years we expect larger vendors will continue to acquire for this specialization while smaller vendors will acquire each other to build market share and increase the functionality within their portfolios,” said Chad Eschinger, research director at Gartner.

However, the variety of technologies that can be applied to an MDM initiative leaves the door open for the entrance of data integration and data quality providers, in particular. As more midsize organizations adopt MDM in the course of the next four years, they are demanding lower prices and more flexibility from vendors. As a result, many new MDM vendors and offerings capturing this market will be focused on areas such as open source, as well as cloud computing/software as a service.

The largest domains are MDM of customer data and MDM of product data, each of which is predicted to more than double in size over the next four years. MDM of customer data helps an organization cross-sell and cross-market, as well as retain customers and provide a consistent high-quality customer experience. The market for MDM of customer data is expected to reach $644 million in 2012 and to exceed $1 billion in 2015. The market for MDM of product data, which helps an organization store product-related master data, metadata, or both, is projected to reach $688 million in 2012 and to surpass $1.1 billion in 2015.

“The increased demand for more effective decision-making and a focus on improving the timeliness and accuracy of business decisions makes MDM paramount for organizations,” said Graham. “MDM supports these goals by ensuring the high quality of key data needed at the point of decision, removing uncertainty and increasing confidence.”

“All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue except for Western Europe which posted a 4.9 percent decline in revenue for the period. Asia/Pacific grew the most significantly in shipments with a 23.9 percent increase. Eastern Europe posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 27.4 percent for the period.”

All of the top five global vendors had revenue increases for the third quarter of 2011, except HP and Oracle. HP declined 3.6 percent year-on-year and Oracle achieved only flat growth. IBM took the lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue, posting just over $3.8 billion in server vendor revenue for a total market share of 29.7 percent for the third quarter of 2011. This share was down 0.5 percent year-on-year. Most of IBM’s revenue growth came from its Power Systems line with some contribution by System X as well.

“x86 servers forged ahead and grew 7.6 percent in units and 9.3 percent in revenue. Some regions like Western Europe and the United States did not produce as much relative x86-based server growth because of comparatively stronger third quarter results in 2010. RISC/Itanium Worldwide Unix server shipments declined 6.8 percent, but vendor revenue increased 3.5 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The ‘other’ CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a decline of 6.9 percent,” Hewitt said.

Despite lower sales numbers, HP remained the worldwide leader in the third quarter of 2011 with 693,265 units shipped in the third quarter. HP managed to maintain a market share of 29.2 percent. Dell followed ahead of IBM with a market share of 21.8 and 12.1 respectivly.

In terms of server form factors, blade servers rose 3.3 percent in shipments and 7.6 percent in revenue for the quarter. The rack-optimized form factor climbed 8.2 percent in shipments and 6.3 percent in revenue for the third quarter of 2011.

Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

"The first quarter continued a quarterly trend of year-on-year growth in both shipments and vendor revenue," said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. "All regions showed growth in both shipments and vendor revenue, with the exception of Japan.”

All the top five global vendors except Fujitsu had revenue increases for the first quarter of 2011. HP was the market leader, based on worldwide server revenue. The company posted just over $3.8 billion in worldwide server vendor revenue for a total share of 30.2 percent for the first quarter of 2011. This share was down 1.2 percent year-on-year.

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader in the first quarter of 2011 with a year-on-year shipment increase of 2.3 percent for the quarter. This growth was driven by increases produced from HP's ProLiant brand. HP's worldwide server shipment share was 29.8 percent, representing a 1.8 percent drop in share from the same quarter in 2010.

“x86 servers forged ahead and grew 8.6 percent in units for the year and 17.5 percent in revenue,” Hewitt said. “Following earlier trends, the x86-based server market provided an increase in average selling prices that pushed revenue higher than shipments, and this was the case in the first quarter for all regions. RISC/Itanium Unix servers finally exited their slump and grew 5.2 percent in shipments and 20.7 percent in vendor revenue, compared with the same quarter last year. The "other" CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a growth in vendor revenue of 19.6 percent."

Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, HP and IBM posted year-on-year increases in units for the first quarter. In terms of server form factors, x86 blade servers rose 6.1 percent in shipments and 24.6 percent in revenue for the quarter of 2011. The rack-optimized form factor had the highest shipment growth at 11.2 percent and climbed 19.6 percent in revenue for the first quarter.

Worldwide server shipments are up in the first quarter of 2011, with the exception of Japan. Eastern Europe also posted the highest vendor revenue growth at 36.0 percent for the period. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

"In 2010, major software vendors expanded their product portfolios, acquired companies where appropriate to their plans, and reached deeper into emerging markets," said Joanne Correia, managing vice president at Gartner. "The year represented a return to solid footing as the market recovered and expanded in terms of revenue and geographies. However, some regions did not recover as rapidly as others. Japan and Western Europe saw relatively modest dollar-denominated growth, while Latin America and Asia/Pacific saw growth in the mid-to-high teens, nearly double the market average."

Three of the top five vendors experienced revenue gains above the industry average. Microsoft maintained the number one position as it increased its worldwide enterprise software revenue market share to 22.4 percent in 2010. Growth results were enhanced by the broader adoption of new releases of the Windows 7 operating system and Microsoft Office 2010 productivity software. Microsoft's total software revenue results have been improved by new strategies aimed not only at individuals, but also at organizations and multiple delivery models. The company placed more emphasis on enterprise application and infrastructure software programming platforms.

IBM maintained its second position in 2010. It would be the number one enterprise software vendor if consumer sales of Microsoft's office and operating systems would not have been counted, Gartner says. IBM sells only to enterprises and partners. The company's software revenue grew more than 5.7 percent in 2010. The company expanded with a focus on e-commerce, marketing and sales with more than 20 industry solution frameworks as its "smarter planet" go-to-market strategy evolved.

Oracle showed the strongest growth among the top five vendors, as it increased its revenue 19.4 percent. Growth was achieved across all software markets, with faster growth emerging from its business intelligence, security, IT operations, and data integration and quality tools offerings. Oracle has kept most acquired technologies intact while integrating the infrastructure and middleware into Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g with some integration across the application portfolio. Oracle expects continued market momentum in its industry offerings, middleware, data quality and integration tools, master data management, database CRM and SCM solutions.

Among the top 25 vendors, VMware led the group with more than 41 percent growth in 2010, followed by Adobe with more than 29 percent and salesforce.com with more than 28 percent growth. The top 25 vendors, ranked by total 2010 software revenue, grew on average more than 11.5 percent. These vendors accounted for nearly 68 percent share, or more than $165 billion, of the overall software market.

"The enterprise software vendor landscape continues to change," said Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner. "Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are expected to continue as vendors and service providers look to expand their customer bases, add unique features aligned to a vertical-market or technology function, and improve overall market presence."

IBM’s software revenue grew more than 5.7 percent in 2010, thanks to its focus on e-commerce, marketing and sales. The picture shows the IBM 704 electronic data processing machine, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware. The IBM 704 was introduced in April 1954 and used for aeronautical research. Photo: NASA/Public Domain

"We are excited to welcome Apple as a significant contributor in the growing OpenJDK community," said Hasan Rizvi, Oracle’s senior vice president of Development. "The availability of Java on Mac OS X plays a key role in the cross-platform promise of the Java platform. The Java developer community can rest assured that the leading edge Java environment will continue to be available on Mac OS X in the future. Combined with last month’s announcement of IBM joining the OpenJDK, the project now has the backing of three of the biggest names in software."

Apple also confirmed that Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. Java SE 7 and future versions of Java for Mac OS X will be available from Oracle.

"We’re delighted to be working with Oracle to insure that there continues to be a great version of Java on the Mac," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. "The best way for our users to always have the most up to date and secure version of Java will be to get it directly from Oracle."

Java is a general purpose software development platform that is specifically designed to be open and enable application developers to "write once, run anywhere." The Java platform is most widely used in business software, web and mobile applications.

Apple will contribute several Java components to the OpenJDK project and work with Oracle on the Java SE7 release. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com