IBM Leads App Dev Market Sales

IBM continues to lead in application development software market share, doubling the revenue of its closest competitor, according to a market research report.

According to the market research firm Gartner, of Stamford, Conn., IBM is the worldwide market share leader in the application development and project and portfolio management software marketplace based on total software revenue for 2005. IBM officials said this marks the fifth consecutive year that the company has led the application development software market.

Gartner said IBM held a 25.4 percent share of the market, which was more than twice the share of its nearest competitor.

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"IBM remains the leader with a 15-point lead with respect to the next vendor in the rankings," said Danny Sabbah, general manager of IBMs Rational division, the application development tools portions of IBM Software Group. "We had two times the sales of the No. 2 company, Microsoft, and three times No. 3, which was CA."

IBMs Rational Software Development Platform helps teams of developers build, extend, modernize, integrate and deploy software in business applications, embedded systems and software products, the company said.

Gartner said that of the top 10 vendors in the project and portfolio management market space, IBM grew faster than any of its competition. The worldwide application development and project and portfolio management software market grew 6.7 percent in 2005 to more than $7 billion.

The Gartner study—titled "Market Share: Application Development and Project and Portfolio Management, Worldwide, 2005" authored by Gartner analysts Laurie Wurster and Fabrizio Biscotti—also rated IBM highly in the areas of software change and configuration management, Java development tools, language-oriented development environments, and object-oriented analysis and design, among other areas.

Microsoft is a more recent entry into the ALM (application lifecycle management) space with its Visual Studio 2005 Team System and the more recent Team Foundation Server. S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of Microsofts developer tools business, in a previous interview with eWEEK said of the companys life cycle tools: "We think this is clearly going to be the growth engine for developer tools."

Also in an earlier interview with eWEEK, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Visual Studio Team System delivers ALM software that is easy to use and at less expensive than competing products. "I think with Visual Studio Team System we have that," Ballmer said. "And I would expect to see our share of high-end software life cycle seats to really climb quite dramatically for the next year."

Indeed, said Ballmer, "Ill be shocked if we dont have super-high market share within a year. Ill just be shocked. If you take a look at the total number of customers that these high-end development suites have, its tiny."

Click here to read the full Ballmer interview.

Yet, while Microsoft is a relative new kid on the ALM block, Sabbah said IBMs history is long and rich in the space.

"IBMs track record of innovation is required in this dynamic application development market place," Sabbah said in a statement. "We consider Rationals continued ranking as the No. 1 application development vendor by Gartner as a testament to our market-leading software development platform."

The Gartner market statistics report is titled "Market Share: Application Development and Project and Portfolio Management, Worldwide, 2005" authored by Gartner analysts Laurie Wurster and Fabrizio Biscotti.

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