Organisations respond to customer demands by boosting digital capabilities.
The A/NZ software market grew 17.5 per cent year-on-year in 2021, accelerated from 8.5 per cent growth in 2020. This was driven by investment in key technological capabilities to build digitally enabled operations that help realise value for the organisation and for the broader ecosystem. Key investment areas include customer relationship management, digital workflow and collaboration, enterprise resource management, and security.
As digital services increasingly become the default channel for customer engagement, customer-oriented metrics are given the highest priority on most organizations’ digital transformation agenda. Customers expect their interactions with organisations to be trustable, straightforward, personalised, and self-service enabled. Organisations respond to these customer demands by boosting digital capabilities across the full customer lifecycle, from the initiation of customer contact to transaction to customer care. Hence, spending on customer relationship management (CRM) applications grew by 20.3 per cent in 2021 in A/NZ, reaching $US1.23 billion.
To meet the fast-changing customer demand and market conditions, not only does CRM need to be digitally enabled, but the entire organisational operation must become more streamlined and agile, with employees supported by the right digital tools. Therefore, the A/NZ market is increasing investments into collaboration applications and content workflow and management applications, growing by 38.3 per cent and 23.9 per cent year-over-year respectively. Spending on enterprise resource management (ERM) applications also grew 17.5 per cent year-over-year in 2021, as organisations take further steps to inspect business processes through a digital lens and transform their core enterprise IT to drive productivity and efficiency, and to get ready for future product and services innovation. “The world now is in the digital-first economy, and it’s never been more important than now to have right digital tools and enterprise applications in place to empower employees and run businesses smarter, building the enterprise of the future”, says Anastasia Antonova, Senior Market Analyst for Software at IDC Australia/New Zealand.
The A/NZ market builds itself towards a more digitally driven economy, therefore digital products and services innovation is high on any organisation’s priority list. Organisations are also investing in creating an enterprise-wide data strategy and are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) technology to maximise the power of their organisational data. Reflected in spending, the market saw AI platforms spend grew by 35.6 per cent in 2021. IDC expects to see continuous investments in AI technologies across A/NZ, as AI tools are key to better decision-making, improved business outcomes, and sustainable competitive advantage and innovations. In the same year, A/NZ integration and orchestration middleware market grew by 31.6 per cent, as organisations’ demand for interconnectivity and innovation remain high.
As organisations increasingly rely on digital technology to operate and build up their software capabilities to offer products and services in a digital-first world, cybersecurity receives refreshed focus and the need to better manage the process of software development and release becomes ever important. In 2021, the A/NZ market also saw spending on security software increase 19.5 per cent, and software quality and life cycle tool increase 26.4 per cent.
“In 2021 we saw the A/NZ market continue progressing in aligning digital adoption with business objectives and organisations made investments to better deliver value to customers and build up competitive advantage as business conditions remain volatile in the coming year”, ends John Feng, Research Manager for Software Research at IDC Australia/ New Zealand.
