IBM Dominates The Application Integration Market

(Via Infoworld)A gartner report released last week shows,IBM continued to extend its lead in the overall AIM (application integration and middleware) market capturing a little more than 37 percent of the worldwide market in 2004.Finishing second was BEA Systems with 7.2 percent; Oracle was third with 4.4 percent, and Microsoft fourth with 4.3 percent. Gartner pegged the overall application integration and middleware market to be worth $6.7 billion last year, which is up 5.8 percent over 2003, predicting it will continue to grow at a "slow but positive pace for most segments." The widespread need to bundle this kind of software into other products including mobile and wireless applications, integration suites, and other applications where message-oriented technologies are well-suited will continue to propel the growth. IBM leads in the appserver and integration server marketapce. It is another indication that the market is maturing when midtier companies can start absorbing technologies like composite applications which would help volumes climb higher and prices go lower.
My Take :Recently,IBM announced acquisition of Ascential, a provider of data integration software.This is quite positive for IBM and needs to be seen as a natural fit as the deal will significantly broaden IBM's integration offerings, giving WebSphere Information Integrator needed extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) and data quality functionality and also enhancing and complementing WebSphere's process integration offerings. These capabilities will give IBM all the components of a very broad integration platform, adding ETL to the list of software infrastructure areas in which it has a strong presence and squeezing smaller, more narrowly focused integration vendors. The acquisition can also be seen to be leapfrogging IBM to head-on compettion with application-oriented providers of data integration, such as SAP and Oracle. No doubt we are seeing more and more product deals from IBM in the marketplace - IBM is definitely muscling in aggressively in the enteprise middleware and application integration market .