Salesforce Becomes First Cloud-Only Software Vendor In Gartner Top 10

Gartner’s 2013 software vendor market share ratings have indicated the importance of the shift to the cloud to enterprises with the first ever top ten placing by a pure cloud vendor, Salesforce.com.

According to the figures, Microsoft retained the No. 1 spot in worldwide software revenues for 2013, with $65.7 billion (£41.3bn) in software revenues, representing growth of six percent from 2012, but the rest of the list showed significant changes that underscored the magnitude of the shifts currently being experienced in the software market.

Software shifts

“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,” stated Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner. “A clear indicator of this is that for the first time we have a pure cloud vendor in the top 10.”

Trends around big data and large-scale analytics and investment in database and cloud-based applications helped push Oracle into the No. 2 spot behind Microsoft for the first time, with software revenues of $29.6bn and 7.3 percent of the global market, growing 3.4 percent over 2012.

Salesforce.com had more than $3.8bn in revenues in 2013, and rose two positions to No. 10, experiencing the highest growth among the top 10 vendors with 33.3 percent. Salesforce.com has also entered the top 5 for overall application revenue.

The overall market saw revenues totalling $407.3bn for the year, 4.8 percent up from 2012’s $388.5bn, with growth led by developed markets, which helped to offset a relative sluggishness in emerging regions, Gartner said.

Emerging sectors

IBM fell from No. 2 to No. 3, with $29.1bn in revenues, growing 3.4 percent; the list was rounded out by SAP at No. 4, Symantec at No. 5, EMC at No. 6, HP at No. 7, VMware at No. 8 and CA Technologies at No. 9.

The company found that investors in nascent areas such as digital marketing and public cloud computing paid attention mainly to factors such as aggressive growth over revenues.

“At this point, the new and emerging technology markets in software, such as digital marketing and public cloud computing, are so nascent that investors are favouring those companies that are early and aggressive in grabbing both market and mind share — in many cases dismissing progress on earnings and cash flow in hopes that they will one day follow,” stated John Rizzuto, Gartner research vice president and Invest analyst.

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