The enterprise applications (EA) software market in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region registered a 13.4% growth in 2H 2010 compared to 2H 2009, according to the latest IDC Asia/Pacific Semiannual Enterprise Applications Tracker.Figure 1. below shows IDC's forecast on the APEJ EA market till 2015. With strong support from financial accounting applications, and human capital management, enterprise resource management is expected to reach US$4.5 billion by 2015.

This was, primarily due to the emphasis organizations had on productivity, optimization, and business integration. IDC expects this positive impetus to continue and drive the market to grow at a CAGR of 13.74% till 2015 and reach US$8.7 billion.

"Newer delivery models (e.g. SaaS and appliances), together with "socialytic" applications - a convergence of EA, unified communications (UC), collaboration tools, social media, analytics - and enterprise applications mobility, will start gaining traction and would graduate to mainstream adoption owing to the need for optimized business processes, better marketing, customer relationship, and executive decision making," said Sabharinath Bala, Research Manager of IDC's Asia/Pacific Enterprise Application Software.

Key points from the study include:

• Although core application modules were the primary focus for companies, enterprise asset management, financial performance and strategy management applications, and other supply chain modules like manufacturing and other back-office applications are expected to grow significantly in 2011 as these are not substantially covered in traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

• Focus will be on the integration of analytic appliances into enterprise applications to help streamline business processes and thereby improving customer relationships, reducing time-to-market, and enhancing collaborative decision making.

• With the evolution of multiple technology areas (e.g. smartphones, cloud computing, and hosting services), the EA market will see an augmented stimulus on true enterprise mobility services, not just to improve productivity, but to access mission critical information and make real-time informative decisions.

• Despite the potential risk of being tied to a single vendor, companies will start embracing vertical-specific frameworks, combining software and services to enable faster return on investment (ROI), as enterprise transformation takes front stage.

Among the197 vendors covered in the tracker report in 2H 2010, six of which achieved more than US$100 million in revenue. Apart from the traditional global vendors like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, even specialized vendors like Salesforce.com, and local vendors like Kingdee registered strong YoY growth.