'Global AIM software revenue rises marginally to $23.9 billion'

New Delhi: Global application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software revenue rose marginally to USD 23.9 billion in 2015 as a considerable jump in the dollar masked growth in the market, Gartner said on Friday.

The AIM software revenue stood at USD 23.92 billion in 2014.

However, in constant currency terms, the market grew 7.8 percent, driven by rapid growth in the platform as a service (PaaS) segment.

"The PaaS segment showed the most impressive growth, not just in the AIM market, but across the entire enterprise software market," said Fabrizio Biscotti, Research Director at Gartner.

The research firm said integration PaaS (iPaaS) grew 55 per cent while application PaaS (aPaaS) grew 40 per cent despite headwinds from the appreciating US dollar.

Gartner said that in 2015, the largest vendors retained their market positions, but market leader IBM suffered a revenue decline of nearly 13 percent, falling to 25 percent of the total AIM software market.

Oracle's revenue dropped by nearly 4 percent, accounting for 13 percent of the total market.

Revenue of IBM for 2015 stood at USD 6,043.2 million compared with USD 6,926.5 million in 2014 whereas Oracle's declined to USD 3,173.1 million from the earlier USD 3,298.2 million.

Microsoft's 5 per cent revenue growth to USD 1,114.8 million from USD 1,058.8 million in 2014 meant it was the only one of the top three players to grow its revenue.

Salesforce retained the fourth spot while Software AG dropped out of the top five -- switching places with TIBCO Software.

"Market concentration among the largest vendors is diminishing under pressure from specialists, and open source and cloud providers," said Biscotti.

Gartner said Salesforce continues to disrupt the AIM market, with its revenue growing more than 36 per cent to USD 1,010.2 million in 2015 from USD 740.4 million in 2014.

"Salesforce's strong performance as well as steady growth in the 'Others' category underlines the trend of cloud-only firms and smaller specialists picking up market share at the expense of traditional vendors in this space," Biscotti added.