IDC Reveals APEJ Region's Database Market Breached the US$2 Billion Dollar Mark for First Time in 2008

Singapore and Hong Kong, June 10, 2009 -- IDC's latest study on the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) software market revealed that notwithstanding the current economic climate, the Information and Data Management Software (IDMS) market continued to grow by 8.02% in 2008 over 2007 and was valued at an estimated US$2,107.99 million[1].

The market grew on the back of maintenance revenue stream, and on-going implementations and other projects that were approved pre-crisis. This includes those that were pulled through by application deployments and data warehouse implementations. Nonetheless, the region's IDMS market was not sparred from the impacts of the economic crisis and declined slightly in USD terms in 2H 2008 as cost control measures kicked in and IT initiatives deemed non-mission-critical were delayed.

Sharon Tan, Research Manager of IDC’s Asia/Pacific Software Research, commented, "The outlook for the IDMS market in 2009 in this region has been adversely impacted due to a generally strong focus on cost cutting measures, deferral of large transformational projects and a wait-and-see attitude from businesses – even from those that are comparatively financially secure during this crisis. However, data volumes generated from IT systems and the demand for better and more 'real time' information is still growing." The IDMS market includes RDBMS, and non-relational databases management systems as well as data integration and database tools.

Stronger growth rates are expected during the later years of IDC's 5-year forecast period, fueled by a number of factors, including more sophisticated data management needs, solution adoption to meet more stringent compliance and regulatory requirements particularly in the financial sectors, and business intelligence/ business analytics projects aimed at providing improved insights into business operations and to support the decision making process. "Increased emphasis on cost minimization is also likely to lead to stronger interest in open source alternatives and may also bring opportunities to niche / lesser-known vendors in the region's IDMS market," added Sharon.

A recent end-user research conducted by IDC further supports a cautiously optimistic outlook for the IDMS market. 29.1% of respondents in APEJ indicated that they intended to either newly deploy or will increase current deployment of Database Management Software during the next 18 months or so.

Figure 1 below provides IDC's latest market sizing and 5-year forecast for the IDMS market in the APEJ region. Emerging economies are still anticipated to provide more Greenfield-type opportunities for vendors which contributes to the higher growth expectations there. For example, India, Vietnam, the PRC, and Thailand are projected to have the highest 5-year CAGRs at 10.6%, 8.7%, 8.5% and 7.4% respectively.

[1] Software revenue includes license, maintenance and other software revenue such as subscription revenue.

Source: IDG