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Report: Worldwide Software Sales Top $407 Billion in 2013

Software shipments worldwide rose 4.8 percent year over year to hit $407.3 billion in 2013, according to a new report from market research firm Gartner. Riding a 6 percent growth rate, Microsoft continues to dominate the sector with sales of $65.7 billion, more than twice second-place company Oracle, which raked in just under $30 billion in the last year.

Oracle, with a growth rate of 3.4 percent, edged out the previous number two company, IBM, which only saw 1.4 percent growth and annual sales of $29.1 billion.

"There is a shift in vendor rankings from 2013 at the top of the worldwide software market," said Chad Eschinger, research vice president at Gartner, in a prepared statement. "This is the first time in Gartner's global software market share research that Oracle has ranked second in terms of total software revenue with $29.6 billion and capturing 7.3 percent of the global market. Global trends around big data and analytics with business investment in database and cloud-based applications helped to drive Oracle's top-line growth."

Salesforce.com moved to the 10th spot in market share, up from number 12, on the strength of a 33.3 percent growth rate in 2012-2013, the highest among the top 10.

VMware also showed impressive gains as the only other top 10 company to show double-digit growth, at a rate of 14.1 percent. VMware improved from ninth to eighth place in market share and posted $4.8 billion in shipments.

The largest decline in growth was HP, who held on to seventh place in market share at $4.9 billion despite pulling 2.7 percent less in 2013 than in 2012.

CA Technologies dropped from eighth to ninth as it saw a negative growth rate of 2.6 percent and finished 2013 with $4.2 billion in sales.

The only other company in the top 10 by market share to see software sales contract was Symantec, with a decline of .8 percent.

SAP sales grew to $18.5 billion, allowing the company to hold steady at fourth place in market share, despite posting the top 10's third-largest growth rate of 9.5 percent. EMC also maintained its market share rank, sixth, and experienced growth of 4.9 percent.

"The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the Internet of things (IoT) movement," said Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner, in a prepared statement. "A clear indicator of this is that for the first time we have a pure cloud vendor in the top 10."

The full report is available at gartner.com.

About the Author

Joshua Bolkan is contributing editor for Campus Technology, THE Journal and STEAM Universe. He can be reached at [email protected].

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