Microsoft, Oracle and IBM are the top companies benefitting from the enterprise software market. Among the top 10 providers in this sector is a new entrant, Salesforce.com, an SaaS vendor. Functioning on a subscription pricing model, Salesforce profits by charging customers money to support their software installations. At $3.8 bn in sales for 2013, Salesforce products are purely based on the cloud.
The world experienced a 4.8% increase in the global spending on software, sales from 2013 stands at $407.3 bn. Microsoft’s enterprise software unit recorded sales of $65.7 bn, beating Oracle at $29.6 bn and IBM at 29.1 bn. IBM has been experiencing shake-ups with the sale of its server business to Lenovo as the company realigns to focus more on its software business. The key areas of investment among these companies has been big data, analytics software, database and cloud computing suites.
SAP maintained fourth place in enterprise software sales at $18.5 billion. Other notable companies in the top 10 vendor lists are Symantec, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, VMware, and CA Technologies.
