IBM Continues Middleware Leadership (And Tiger’s Master’s Opening Round Tee Time)

It’s Tuesday of Master’s week.  I caught a couple of the interviews from the media room today.  Tiger was looking very confident, but so were Phil and Rory.

I’m really digging Golf Central’s “Live from the Masters” coverage, and looking forward even more to seeing a new feature from AT&T U-Verse this year, whereby they will be following “featured” groups of golfers on individual dedicated channels.

Guess who I hope to follow?  Tiger, of course, who’s paired up with Spain’s Miguel Angel Jimenez (“The most interesting man in the world…!”) and Sang-Moon Bae, South Korea’s 25 year-old golfing wunderkind, 10:35 EST on Thursday.  Hmm, do I have any conference calls then??

Yesteday, some good news from Gartner.  They announced that based on their definition of middleware IBM has once again been named the overall marketshare leader in middleware software.

The rankings are based on total worldwide revenue for 2011 and mark the eleventh consecutive year of leadership for IBM.

According to the report, IBM was the leading software vendor with 32.1 percent market share, extending its lead to nearly double that of its closest competitor.

According to Gartner, IBM grew 12.4 percent in 2011, faster than the overall market. The worldwide application infrastructure and middleware software market grew 9.9 percent to $19.4 billion, according to Gartner.

Besides its overall lead, according to the Gartner report, IBM holds the number one market share position in key sub-markets growing faster then the overall IT market.

For example, the Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) segment grew at 11.2 percent in 2011, Gartner said. IBM was named the number one vendor in BPMS software with a 27.1 percent share; almost triple that of its closest competitor. BPMS software enables companies to develop and implement processes that help their businesses be more agile and grow.

Gartner reported that IBM continues to be number one in other growing and key areas including the Enterprise Service Bus Suites, Message Oriented Middleware Market, the Transaction Processing Monitor market and Integration Appliances.

Gartner also reported double digit growth by IBM for the Portal Products and User Interaction segment IBM’s continued market share leadership in middleware has been a key reason for the company’s strong growth.

Coming back to the Master’s, I’ll hope to add some more color before fleeing for the wilds of West Texas on Friday for my annual “gun camp” trip with some good friends.

Impressions From SXSW Interactive 2012: Gartner Fellow Mark McDonald On The Social Organization

Mark McDonald is a group vice president and head of research in Gartner Executive Programs, and also a Gartner Fellow, and recently co-authored the book The Social Organization, along with his fellow author Anthony Bradley.

During our time together at SXSW Interactive, Mark explained to Scott and I how enterprises are successfully using social media and mass collaboration to achieve new business value, and how many of them are addressing what he called “boundary spanning” issues in order to achieve the greatest success in social business.

Mark is also the co-author with Peter Keen of The eProcess Edge and the author of Architecting Enterprises — Achieving Performance and Flexibility. He has also been interviewed or published in the Wall Street Journal, Computerworld, CIO Magazine, the Financial Times and other publications. He routinely works with senior business and technology executives and is currently working on the issue of innovation in management.

TurboTech: A Humorous Look At 2011 Technology Trends In Review

It’s not many people who have the opportunity to be able to say that they’ve worked with a true broadcasting professional like Scott Laningham.

Blogger's Note: No dolphins were harmed during the making of this video. Green pigs who stole bird's eggs, well, that's a whole other story!

It’s even less people who would take the opportunity to actually come clean and admit to having done so, especially on more than one occasion.

Because I’m neither a true professional nor someone who likes to allow the skeletons in his closet to begin to accumulate, instead of facing as many of them as I can take head on like some egregious out-of-control episode of “Walking Dead,” or, worse, a full-on “Angry Birds” like assault come to life (but only if it’s the ad-supported version, as we’re too cheap to actually buy a copy), it is with great pleasure that I feature for you my readers the latest episode of “TurboTech,” another fine example supporting the postulation by Gartner and others that broadband video is here to stay…even if Scott and I are not destined to be ourselves.

The following is video documentary evidence of what happens when nature cannot simply abhor a vacuum, but instead must attempt to fill it with technology forecasting tripe at the end of another grand year of massive technological disruption.  In our case, the year 2011, which was filled with much technological wonder and wonderment, not the least of which included fabric-based computing.

It shall also not go unnoticed by somewhat regular (assuming there are any of you) viewers that Scott continues to look and sound much, much better than me in these episodes, indicating once again that Scott continues to have better technology than me.

This, too, must change.

Gartner: SaaS Clouds Growing

Gartner just issued its 2009 SaaS revenue forecast, in which it said it expected the sector to grow nearly 18 percent this year, to $7.5B.

Gartner also expects the sector to show consistent growth through 2013, when it suggests the worldwide SaaS revenue will total over $14B.

The content, communications and collaboration (CCC) market (visit LotusLive to see how IBM plays in this space) and the customer relationship management (CRM) market continue to have the largest amount of SaaS revenue across market segments.

Gartner says that the CCC market generated $2.6 billion in 2009, up from $2.14 billion in 2008, and the CRM segment generating $2.3 billion in 2009, up from $1.9 billion in 2008.

The future of SaaS seems to be so bright you gotta wear a raincoat.

Gartner: IT Spending (Mini) Rebound

The Gartner Group issued guidance on IT spending as it heads into the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando.

The bad news: The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever, with worldwide IT spending expected to decline 5.2 percent this year.

The good news: Gartner is projecting a 3.3 percent increase in IT spending in 2010, with a total forecast of $3.3 trillion.

Diving into the details a bit, the hardware market has struggled most, with a 16.5 percent decline, and with spending expected to be flat in 2010.

Worldwide IT services spending is expected to grow 4.5 percent, and worldwide software spending is expected to grow 4.8 percent.

But what’s more interesting to me were the suggested additional topics, which included more focus on business intelligence, virtualization, and, surprise surprise, social media.

Social media on the IT leaders’ agenda?  Yep.  Gartner says that organizations are starting to “scale their efforts in this space.”

Does that mean it will soon evolve into the anti-social media?