The Asia Pacific region is forecast to achieve growth valued at $US11.8 billion in the enterprise software market by 2012, with China and Australia respectively holding their place as the largest software markets in the region.

In its report titled  - “Different Hues of Growth: Enterprise Software Market and Forecast 2007-2012” – Springboard says China will experience the fastest growth at an annual rate of 17.7%, nearly double Australia’s rate of 9.1%.    Following behind China and Australia, Springboard expects India to surpass South Korea by 2011 to become the third largest enterprise software market, ultimately representing 15.6% of total APEJ market spending by 2012.

Springboard’s VP software research, Michael Barnes, says SaaS and cloud computing, virtualization, collaboration, and open source software are among the enterprise software markets that will see strong demand throughout 2009,  although he cautions that a shortage of IT skills, insufficient local vendor presence and software piracy are among the leading market inhibitors.

And, because of the ongoing financial crisis, Springboard says there will be a slowdown in ‘infrastructure’ projects involving large middleware license sales over the next two to three years, but also says it does not expect dramatic drops in IT spending, particularly ongoing enterprise software-related spending linked to multi-year transformational projects.

“Enterprise-wide SOA initiatives that are not directly linked to well-defined, measurable business imperatives will be far tougher to justify in the current economic climate,” according to Barnes.

“In contrast, we expect that supply chain management (SCM), business intelligence (BI), enterprise content management (ECM), and other ‘value-driven’ solutions will continue to see strong demand. Web conferencing and other collaboration tools will also see healthy growth as companies reduce spending on travel.”

According to Springboard’s report, Application Software as a core segment is growing faster than the system and infrastructure software (SIS) segment, though the latter still dominates the market with a share of 59.7% in 2008. Within SIS, operating system and database software are the largest individual categories, together representing 44.5% of SIS spending, and 27% of overall enterprise software spending in 2008.