The cloud has become so popular that all types of software have begun to feel its effects. For example, the contact center management market in Australia now prefers cloud-based deployments, according to Frost & Sullivan, while the workforce management industry has begun to leverage the advantages of hosted offerings as well.
Meanwhile, a recent report from International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert)) attributes slow growth in the business process management (BPM) and middleware market over the last year mostly to large vendors failing to respond to demand for the public cloud.
The market grew 3.6 percent year over year to hit $18.8 billion in 2012, growth below that of the previous two years.
"A large factor in slow growth across BPM and middleware was the failure of large vendors to deliver PaaS offerings that met the growing appetite for cloud-based automation," said Maureen Fleming, vice president of IDC's BPM and Middleware research programs. "Cloud was the single biggest factor separating market share gainers from share losers."
Although available excerpts of IDC's "Worldwide Business Process Management and Middleware Vendor Shares" report don't break down vendor performance, it's clear that companies offering cloud-based middleware management outperformed those that don't in 2012. This is supported by the report's breakdown of revenue.
Among four identified tiers of growth, the top tier grew 58 percent to $992.4 million in aggregate revenue last year; a whopping 80 percent of that revenue came from platform as a service (PaaS) offerings. This tier generated more net-new revenue than the other three tiers combined.
On the flipside, the slowest-growing tier accounted for $12.7 billion, or 67.5 percent of the market, in 2012, but generated negative net-new revenue. This tier, represented by the largest BPM and middleware vendors, gathered eight percent of its revenue from the cloud.
Finally, 2012 also demonstrated growing demand for high-performance messaging based in the Internet of Things, as well as for mobile and partner integration via APIs.