Ovum forecasts modest yet solid recovery for the ANZ software market

Melbourne, 15th February 2010. Ovum, the global advisory and consulting firm, predicted an ongoing recovery within the Australia/New Zealand (ANZ) software market. According to a model titled “ANZ Market Trends 2009: IT software forecast”, the ANZ market will show growth of above 4.8% in 2010. Even with such a relatively positive forecast, the market will not see pre-recessionary growth levels until the end of 2012 at the earliest. By the end of the forecast period in 2013, the market will grow to over $5.6 billion.

“The ANZ software market did not suffer a huge drop off in growth during the financial crisis period and these ongoing revenue streams have enabled the major players to be well-positioned for the predicted upturn”, said Jens Butler, Principal Analyst based in Sydney.

Even though the ANZ market tends to only contribute 2% to 5% of most global software organisations’ revenues, there is still substantial interest in the region, often as a test-bed for enhancements to products, offerings as well as their partner eco-systems.

“ANZ is currently leading the pack in terms of economic performance and will see further influx of investment going forward, but not reaching pre-recession growth levels before 2012,” commented Butler.

The recession did impact the IT software market in ANZ to some extent, but with a large proportion of revenues locked into multi-year deals, this area was less impacted than others. Even with such annuities, the market’s growth rate did take a slight hit, but has rebounded on the back of the pent-up demand being released within a number of the key verticals and, as such, this is leading the investment charge into 2010. “Systems Infrastructure software will see growth on the back of hardware refresh and windows 7 uptick/replacement programmes and information management demand will continue to grow exponentially,” he adds.

Jens Butler expects healthy outlooks for one of the region’s largest IT software markets, but expect some shifts in this arena in the next 3 to 5 years.