Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company, has announced that the worldwide application development (AD) software market is expected to reach more than $9 billion in 2012, an increase of 1.8 percent over 2011. In Australia, spending on AD software is expected to reach A$153.4 million in 2012, up 5 percent over 2011. Growth will be driven by evolving software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development and open source software.
According to a new Gartner report, 'Market Trends: Application Development Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016', cloud is changing the way applications are designed, tested and deployed, resulting in a significant shift in AD priorities. Cost is a major driver, but also agility, flexibility and speed to deploy new applications. Ninety percent of large, mainstream enterprises and government agencies will use some aspect of cloud computing by 2015.
Gartner also predicts that mobile AD projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4:1 by 2015. Emerging mobile applications, systems and devices are transforming the AD space rapidly, and are one of the top three CIO priorities at the enterprise level. Gartner research found that CIOs expect more than 20 percent of their employees to use tablets instead of laptops by 2013, hastening the process of change as AD tools and applications evolve to address the requirements of these new devices.
Also driving the AD shift, Gartner expects open source software to continue to broaden its presence and create pressure on market leaders during the next three to five years, especially as open source becomes a key element of the software quality landscape beyond the developer level. It predicts that at least 70 percent of new enterprise Java applications will be deployed on an open source Java application server by the end of 2017.
Additional analysis is available in the Gartner report: 'Market Trends: Application Development Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016', which is available on Gartner's website at: http://www.gartner.com/resId=2098416.
