Open Source: Open Source Middleware Market Share Grows

Open Source continues to gain credibility and market share, particularly in the area of Middleware.  Middleware is the software glue that connects two applications together and allow them to handshake and exchange information.  A report from Gartner on the 2010 market results for the global application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) market found that the use of Open Source AIM software increased by 9.2 percent in 2010.  The areas where Open Source Middleware excels include application servers (think Tomcat, JBoss, and Geronimo), enterprise service bus (think Mule and Petals), orchestration (Alfresco Activiti, Apache ServiceMix), and embedded firmware.

The AIM market grew to $17.6 billion, a 7.3 increase over 2009 revenues of $16.4 billion.  The relatively strong growth is due to organizations that are beginning to gear up for expansion after the last couple of years of  maintenance-only activity during the recession.   Gartner noted that organizations are modernizing their infrastructure and adopting ‘innovative’ application software.

Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner, commented on the report saying that “organizations have moved away from a cost containment focus toward preparing for growth.   AIM technologies are the key liaison between modernization of infrastructure and innovative applications, both well suited to serving any move to future growth.  Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) continue to be the central piece of attention while cloud is rapidly moving up in the scale of priority. Cloud is driving only modest spending in the AIM space, but this will change as organizations become more acquainted with the benefits delivered by cloud technologies such as platform as a service.”

Biscotti said that “we continue to see a creative turmoil where, on one hand, large vendors continue to consolidate, and on the other hand several up-and-coming players are shaping new markets such as low- latency messaging (LLM), managed file transfer (MFT), and business process analysis (BPA).  In addition, there is an embryonic but yet vibrant activity around cloud with growing attention toward platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.”

BPM is one subsegment of AIM that has seen strong growth.  Teresa Jones, principal research analyst at Gartner, said that “the business process management suites market continued to exhibit solid growth (9.2 percent), indicating that BPM continues to provide value as organizations return to growth and innovation.”

We can see from this chart that IBM is the leader and has long led other vendors in the category of AIM.  IBM has held the number one position for more than a decade.  And, IBM has the strongest products currently in the subsegements of the AIM market that are currently seeing the strongest growth.

The largest AIM markets are now in North America and Western Europe.  Japan also has a sizable share.  But emerging markets are expected to see the fastest growth, particularly in Latin America and the Asia Pacific.  Asheesh Raina, principal analyst at Gartner, said that “the growing computing requirements of emerging economies such as China, India and Vietnam contributed to the overall growth of AIM technologies, such as application servers.”