IT Dev Spending Still Flows to Big Players

Microsoft is slated to garner the majority of IT development spending over the next six months, according to a survey of more than 300 developers by Evans Data.

The reason is more complex than Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop or in corporate IT. Rather, developers are gravitating to Microsoft and other leading tech and software providers because of their focus on key enterprise priorities of applications integration, security, cost-cutting, business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and Web-based applications development, the survey found.

Other leading vendors ranked in this survey: SAP, Apple, IBM, Sun, Adobe, BEA, Oracle, AMD, Intel, Cisco, HP, Computer Associates, Compuware and Borland.

“While many new vendors are taking advantage of the emergence of virtualization, SOA (service-orientation architecture), Software as a Service and Enterprise 2.0, it is still those incumbents who continue to enhance their product road maps — and, in some cases, their pricing models — who are forecast to benefit the greatest in IT spending,” according to John Andrews, president of Evans Data.

Granular and More Granular

This particular survey is conducted every six months. The latest results illustrate what is becoming a recurring theme among vendors: developing tools to help companies gain an even deeper granular view of their data.

“With the addition of such tech platforms as SOA, or BI (business intelligence), companies are getting more and better information from different areas in the business than they have in the past,” Andrews told CRM Buyer.

“There are now so many different technology focuses as companies attack the Web,” he continued. “We are seeing the importance of Ajax grow, as well as rich Internet application development.”

The firms that best translate these technologies into workable solutions are finding their way onto companies’ short lists, he concluded.

Seamless Integration

Application integration is another bugaboo that continues to plague software users. Vendors developing tighter integration among product lines will also be popular.

Microsoft fits many of these criteria, according to the report.

The next release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for instance, will use the same multitenant code base for both the on-premise and Software as a Service (SaaS) deployments. Code-named “Titan,” this release will also converge SharePoint and Exchange services and allow such processes as executive dashboard-like information from CRM to appear in SharePoint.

Also, according to the survey:

• In the next year, survey respondents expect to increase spending on application development with SAP (54 percent), Microsoft (50 percent) and BEA (44 percent) more than with any other firms.
• In the next year, they expect to increase SOA spending with SAP (41 percent), BEA (40 percent) and IBM (34 percent) more than with any other firms.