The market for enterprise software fell in 2009, along with the rest of the IT marketplace. As companies scaled back their purchases and slowed implementations; the market for enterprise software declined by 2.5%. While not a huge decline, it was still substantial, following years of robust growth.

A new Enterprise Software market research study by Gartner, suggests that the enterprise software’s long winter finally appears to be ending. Gartner recently announced that in 2010 the market grew by 8.5% to $245 billion (US). The strongest growth, not surprisingly, has been in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, two regions with booming economies. In contrast, Japan and Western Europe only experienced a relatively mild growth.

A few facts that stand out of the Gartner’s report include:

– Microsoft continues to maintain the largest share of the market with 22% – boosted by the recent release of Windows 7 and Office 2010.

– IBM was in second position – seeing strong sales of its WebSphere middleware and Tivoli system management tools. (IBM would have been #1 if Microsoft’s sales to consumers had been left out of the study)

– Big Blue would take the top spot if Microsoft’s sales of Office and Windows to consumers were left out of the study, the firm added.

– Oracle grew at a blistering pace of 19%, powered by strong growth in BI and security.

– VMware had the fastest growth, at 41%, much of it driven through acquisition (e.g., Zimbraand TriCipher)

Not surprisingly, as Enterprise Software sales rise, so do sales of IT Services, to implement these complex new systems. A vivid contrast with the 5% drop seen in 2009. Last year IT services spending grew 3% to $793 billion last year.

– IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu took the top three market share berths.

– The largest share of this spending came from software support. The support sector saw the strongest growth at nearly 7%.

– Consulting, development and integration services performed slightly better than expected as organizations that held back on investments began investing again last year

– Process management and hardware support saw weaker results where both segments grew at 1 percent less than projected.

These recent enterprise software market research studies suggest that the impact of the recession are still evident in the market; overall there are still areas experiencing strong growth. The move toward cloud-based enterprise applications should continue to feed strong growth in this sector, as companies increasingly overcome their security fears and move enterprise apps to the cloud.