India software market expanded 10 percent to $4.765 billion in 2013, a increase from 2012 revenue of $4.334 billion, according to Gartner, Inc.
The growth rate is twice the global growth rate of 4.8%, and is high despite the sharp fall in the value of the rupee against the dollar.
Oracle, which makes enterprise software products, saw the biggest growth and overtook IBM to become the second biggest software vendor in India.
Microsoft retained the top spot, growing 11% to close to a billion dollars. (see chart.)
SAP and Adobe saw declines in their revenue.
“The Indian software industry is in the middle of a multiyear cyclical transition as organizations are focusing investments on technologies to support existing system structure,” said Bhavish Sood, research director at Gartner. “Organizations are doing this in order to maintain competitiveness, while still taking advantage of cloud/subscription-based pricing where it makes sense to grow and advance the business.”
There is a shift in vendor rankings from 2013 at the top of the worldwide and India software market. This is the first time in Gartner’s India software market share research that Oracle has ranked second in terms of total software revenue with approximately $505 million in 2013, capturing 7.3 percent of the market.
“Trends around business intelligence and analytics, with increasing customer investments in database management systems, helped to drive Oracle’s top-line growth,” Mr. Sood said.
Among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the India software market experienced the highest growth rate. Besides large enterprises, the Indian market also boasts a large potential small and midsize business (SMB) segment that is playing a crucial role in changing the consumption patterns of technology.
“SMBs are on the threshold of leveraging ICT, but they currently lack the scale, and in some cases experience, which is inevitable in understanding and handling technology-related issues,” Gartner said.
“India is growing faster than other emerging countries, which can be attributed to an export-oriented focus over the last decade. However, recent advances in IT communications infrastructure in the country has opened up new avenues for local consumption of IT software and associated services,“ said Mr. Sood.
“Although there is an economic slowdown, Indian enterprises are still judiciously investing in technology that can be tied to the business objectives and impact their bottom line. Indian enterprises are generally more price-sensitive compared with enterprises in mature markets, but now they are spending on technology that offers a significant upside in terms of agility or productivity gains with diligent planning.”