India software market to grow at 11.9% to reach $5.1 bn by 2018

India Software Market is expected to grow with a year-on-year (y-o-y) growth rate of 11.9 per cent and touch $5.1 billion by the end of 2018, according to a study by market research firm IDC.

The Indian Software market continues to be one of the fastest growing and dynamic markets within the APeJ (Asia Pacific excluding Japan) region.

Digital Transformation initiatives and the drive for application modernisation have led the growth story for the software market over the last 12 months, and are expected to attract sustained investments by Indian enterprises in 2018 as well, IDC's latest Asia / Pacific Semiannual Software Tracker, 1H 2017, said.

"Organisations across all industry verticals and segments have jumped on the digital bandwagon, resulting in spend on software such as Collaborative Applications, Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to optimise their business processes and enhance customer engagement,'' said Sandeep Kumar Sharma, Associate Research Manager (Software & IT Services) at IDC India.

''In fact, Collaborative and CRM applications were amongst the top three fastest growing software categories in 2017, primarily led by adoption via a cloud model (consumed as Software-as-a-Service),'' Sharma added.

IDC classifies the Software market into three primary categories: Applications, Application Development and Deployment (AD&D), and System Infrastructure (SI) Software.

Applications contributed the bulk of the spending with a 57.3 per cent share, followed by AD&D and SI software with shares of 24.0 percent and 18.7 percent, respectively, in 1H 2017.

Intense market competition and the rise of digital native companies have influenced Indian firms to adopt Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery / Deployment (CD) and DevOps practices increasingly in their application development lifecycle.

According to the IDC Asia Pacific Software Survey, 2017, already a quarter of Indian organisations have implemented CI / CD and DevOps practices, with another 44 percent planning to do so in the next 12-18 months.

In the first half of 2017, there was an increasing thrust on security software as well (second fastest growing software market in the country) as organisations had to contend with the evolving threat landscape (especially with attacks such as WannaCry and Petya) and a rise in awareness of the criticality of security to allay business risk.

"Security software investments are being contemplated with an increasing level of intensity by a large section of Indian enterprises. This was indicated by sustained investments in several security software categories such as End Point Security, Identity & Access Management, and Messaging Security," added Sharma.

IDC estimates that the IT Software market will advance at an annual growth rate of 13.8 per cent (for the period 2016-2021) to reach $7.7 billion by the end of 2021.