Application development market to grow 22.6% in 2012

The Indian application development maintenance (ADM) software market is expected to be worth more than $227 million in 2012, an increase of 22.6 per cent over 2011, according to research firm Gartner. Growth will be driven by new software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development and open source software. As more users switch from laptops to tablets and smartphones, the shift will hasten change in applications development as well.

"Application modernisation and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for applications development (AD) spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility and social computing," said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner. "These emerging trends are directing AD demand towards newer architectures, programming languages, business model and user skills."

According to a Gartner report, 'Market Trends: Application Development Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016', cloud is changing the way applications are designed, tested and deployed, resulting in a significant shift in AD priorities. Cost is a major driver, but also agility, flexibility and speed to deploy new applications. Almost 90 per cent of large, mainstream enterprises and government agencies will use some aspect of cloud computing by 2015.

"The trend is compelling enough to force traditional AD vendors to 'cloud-enable' their existing offerings and position them as a service to be delivered through the cloud," said Raina. "AD for cloud demands rapid deployment, a high focus on user experience and access to highly elastic resources for software testing, while requiring comparatively less underlying infrastructure for developing applications."

Gartner predicts that mobile AD projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects 4:1 by 2015. Emerging mobile applications, systems and devices are transforming the AD space rapidly, and are one of the top three CIO priorities at the enterprise level. Gartner research found that CIOs expect more than 20% of their employees to use tablets instead of laptops by 2013, hastening the process of change as AD tools and applications evolve to address the requirements of these new devices.

Also driving the AD shift, Gartner expects open source software to continue to broaden its presence and create pressure on market leaders during the next three to five years, especially as open source becomes a key element of the software quality landscape beyond the developer level. It predicts that at least 70 per cent of new enterprise Java applications will be deployed on an open source Java application server by the end of 2017.