The application deployment software (ADS) – more popularly known by its cognomen “middleware” – market of Singapore is likely to drop by 5.8 percent this year because of the economic downturn, according to analysts.
According to Adren Lim, an Asia-Pacific market analyst at IDC, Singapore ADS market is expecting to shrink from US$48.7 million last year to US$45.9 million this year. In 2008, it recorded a 3 percent decline from its 2007 level.
Mr. Adren Lim, who works at the Infrastructure and Middleware Software Research section of IDC Asia-Pacific, an IT research agency, noted that in 2007, the Singapore market accounted 6.2 percent for the Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan ADS market (APEJ), which was US$789.7 million worth.
“The APEJ market in 2008 was up 6.7 per cent to US$789.7 million from US$740.1 million in 2007,” he noted.
Mr. Lim noted that based on the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) calculation, the Singapore market is expecting a 4.9 percent growth per annum from 2008 to 2013, while Japan APEJ market will grow 8.6 percent per annum, pulling up by a large number of high performing markets. He also added that middleware-market is experiencing a noticeable decline during the first half of 2009. “However, we expect a pick-up in the second half,” he said.
Automation, information growth and service-oriented architecture (SOA) based implementations were the major players in the ADS market in 2007 and would remain to be so this year.
“Compliance (financial and manufacturing) and government stimulus projects to enable more ICT (infocomm technology) dependant infrastructure are expected to drive trends this year, especially in the second half of this year and beyond.”
Mr. Lim added: “The ever-increasing competition in the telco space for customer base through value-added services on their products will also drive demand.”
The analyst also pointed out that Singaporean companies are utilising ADS Market to simplify its complex IT environments and uses middleware for a SOA-type of implementation.
“ADS is also being used by Singaporean companies to better align with industry governance and to develop modern web services applications and social network concepts.”
In terms of the APEJ market, Mr. Lim explained that continuous data warehouse implementations and application deployment projects prove to be a significant source of growth as businesses undergoes tremendous budget revisions and changes during the global economic crisis.
“IDC expects this market to flourish better as the economy stabilises and demand for BPM (business process management) and SaaS (software as a service) accelerates.”
There is a much increase of investment channelled towards the extension of application deployment software as it becomes more complete and heterogeneous.
“As such, many software vendors have been working hard at differentiating themselves in terms of cost values and performance rates.”
A recent research for IDC end-user shows that 67 percent of the respondents want to continue their current plans of deploying middleware for the next 18 months; 12 percent are also planning to increase their budget for the software while only 5 percent says they will reduce their budget for IDC.
Using ADS, it will improve the services and values to the employees and customers of the banking and telco sectors through the web-based applications.