Australian enterprise software sales will top $A5.5 billion in 2011 according to Gartner, with collaboration, content management, social software, business intelligence (BI) and supply chain management leading the way.

Worldwide enterprise software revenue is forecast to surpass $US253.7 billion in 2011, a 7.5 percent increase from 2010 revenue of $US235.9 billion. In Australia, enterprise software revenue is expected to grow 10.9 percent to reach $A5.5 billion* ($US5.1 billion) in 2011, with the web conferencing and team collaboration segment expected to show the fastest growth, followed by enterprise content management software.

"The focus in the enterprise software industry is on upgrading of build-run-manage technologies to improve agility, establishing cloud-computing infrastructure services and results-reporting transparency," said Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner.

"For 2011 to 2015, the highest instances of software market growth will align to the business requirements of attracting and retaining customers, enhancing business processes, improving collaboration and social networking, managing content of all types, reporting of performance and results transparency, and workforce effectiveness and flexibility," Mr. Eid said.

The market-disrupting influences of SaaS, cloud-based services, open-source software, consumerisation and Web 2.0 technologies will expand, while developing countries, including Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), will prove themselves to be pivotal innovation and growth engines.

"This is a journey with no true end," Mr. Eid said. "It is the next wave of software technology — the shift toward service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based composite processes built on existing IT systems and infrastructure, and application software using rich-client and mobile access."

Gartner analysts see use of social media and networking continues to gain traction. In the trend of socialisation, which includes personalisation, collaboration and content in the context of user-defined activities, Gartner predicts that unified communications and collaboration will see increased adoption in 2012, and context-aware and presence-based computing will gain more traction in 2013.