International Data Corporation (IDC) released the latest results from its Worldwide Semiannual System Management Software Tracker. The Tracker monitors more than 110 vendors globally in a total of 49 countries, providing biannual market size, vendor share, and forecast data for the six functional markets that comprise the system management software market in IDC's software taxonomy.
"The system management software market achieved double-digit growth during the first half of 2011; this was an improvement of almost 70% compared to the results from a year ago," said Wilvin Chee, Associate VP, Worldwide Software Trackers.
"The Change and Configuration Management (CCM) and Workload Scheduling and Automation (WSA) markets maintained the best growth among the functional, but the strongest gains were in the Event Management market, fueled significantly by the US, Japan, and CEMA region."
Among the six functional markets, three had revenues of more than $1 billion for the first half of 2011 (1H11). These were CCM, WSA, and Performance Management.
All three markets experienced very strong growth in the US, while other regions such as Western Europe and CEMA also had good year-over-year growth.
Canada and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) had somewhat lower growth in 1H11 compared to previous cycles, but maintained double-digit momentum. Japan and Latin America held steady growth in most markets.
"The first half 2011 results show continued healthy growth in worldwide system management software revenue," said Tim Grieser, Program VP, Enterprise System Management Software. "Growth was fueled by increases in IT spending due to the continuing economic recovery and associated hardware refresh and upgrade cycles, and new investments in managing virtualized and cloud infrastructures. Automation to simplify and optimize IT operational costs was a key factor."
IBM, BMC, and HP held the top 3 spots in terms of revenue share in 1H11, though none were able to generate growth exceeding the market average.
IBM and BMC had solid growth in the WSA market while HP achieved its best gains in CCM and Problem Management markets.
Meanwhile, a number of vendors, including Microsoft, Hitachi, NEC, VMWare, Symantec, and Dell, enjoyed above market average growth in 1H11. Microsoft, NEC, and VMware performed well in all the system management software markets where they compete.
IDC also observed that a total of 14 vendors achieved worldwide revenues of more than $100 million in 1H11. That was one more than a year ago; the newcomer being Citrix, which had strong growth, particularly in CCM, its primary market.
IDC's Worldwide Semiannual System Management Software Tracker provides total market size and vendor share for the following technology areas: event management; workload scheduling and automation; output management; performance management; change and configuration management; and problem management.
Measurement for this Tracker is total software revenue, which includes license plus maintenance plus SaaS and other subscription revenue. The Tracker covers up to 49 countries in total and monitors the performance of close to 120 vendors in the market.
Annual five-year market forecasts for this Tracker are updated semiannually and include five-year annual market projections. Forecasts are available at worldwide, regional, and country levels.
The Latest
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...
AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.
The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...