Gartner: Software expenditure to focus on social media and collaboration

Over the next five years, brands will focus their software expenditure on packages that help them attract and retain customers as well as boost their social media and collaboration capabilities, according to Gartner.

Reflecting this trend, the fastest growing application segments in 2011 will be business intelligence, collaboration, content management, social software and supply chain management. The entire enterprise software market is forecast to grow by 7.5% over the year ahead to hit $253.7 billion, however.

Tom Eid, a research vice president at Gartner, said: "For 2011 through 2015, the highest instances of software market growth will align to the business requirements of attracting and retaining customers, enhancing business processes, improving collaboration and social networking, managing content of all types, reporting of performance and results transparency, and workforce effectiveness and flexibility."

Ongoing trends such as the adoption of Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing-based services coupled with mobile access will likewise continue apace over the next few years.

Organisations will continue to migrate to open source software and service-oriented architectures as older applications and systems become more costly to upgrade and maintain. They will also continue to automate and streamline business processes and will invest heavily in upgrading software ranging from personal productivity tools to infrastructure software and user-driven applications.

But the deployment of newer social media technologies will likewise gain traction. The uptake of unified communications and collaboration tools will increase next year, while context-aware and presence-based software will see a growth spurt in 2013.

Applications will also become increasingly customised to suit the needs of specific vertical markets, but at the same time the impact of globalisation will result in the consolidation of software markets that are currently highly fragmented.