India's software market to touch USD 5.1 bln by 2018: International Data Centre

India’s software market is expected to grow at 11.9 per cent year-on-year to touch USD  5.1billion by the end of 2018, research firm IDC said today.

The Indian software market continues to be one of the fastest growing and dynamic markets within the APeJ (Asia Pacific excluding Japan) region, IDC said in a report.

“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,” it added.

According to IDC, applications contributed to the bulk of the spending with a 57.3 per cent share in the first half of 2017.

This was followed by Application Development and Deployment and System Infrastructure (SI) software with shares of 24 per cent and 18.7 per cent, respectively, in the said time period.

IDC India Associate Research Manager (Software and IT Services) Sandeep Kumar Sharma said organisations across all industry verticals and segments have jumped on the digital bandwagon, resulting in spend on software like customer relationship management (CRM) to optimise their business processes and enhance customer engagement.

The report said there was an increasing thrust on security software as well—second fastest growing software market in the country—in the first half of 2017.

This is on account of 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,” Sharma said.

This is indicated by sustained investments in several security software categories such as end-point security, identity and access management, and messaging security, he added.