Global enterprise software revenue increased 8.5% to $245 billion in 2010 according to Gartner. Enterprise software sales declined 2.5% in 2009, so this is encouraging growth for enterprise software vendors.
The growth beat Gartner’s forecast from last September, which put enterprise software revenue at $232 billion for an increase of 4.5%.
Microsoft held on to its position as the largest enterprise software company, largely by virtue of its Windows 7 sales, but according to the announcement IBM “would be the No. 1 enterprise software vendor if Gartner did not count consumer sales of Microsoft’s office and operating systems.”
Oracle showed the strongest growth among the top five vendors “with faster growth emerging from its business intelligence, security, IT operations, and data integration and quality tools offerings.”
Among the top 25 vendors, VMware had the strongest growth with 41%. Adobe and Salesforce.com had 29% and 28% growth respectively.