This IDC study provides an analysis of the 2011 automated software quality (ASQ) vendor market share. It discusses IDC's automated software quality assessment with specific vendor analysis for a market that continued with strong, single-digit growth of 6.6% to $2.2 billion from growth of 4.6% in 2010 (which was a significant rebound from significant declines during 2009). As organizations continued to reinvest in ASQ solutions to address increased complexity across a variety of vectors (including business, technology, software sourcing, and diverse platform deployment with mobile, social business, and cloud), most major-share ASQ solution providers experienced revenue increases. Midsize, innovative vendors in emerging technology areas like mobile, software quality analysis and measurement, and cloud testing contributed to the strong ASQ growth also in 2011. Longer term and moving into 2011–2016, the ASQ market is slated for an overall trajectory of growth with an expected CAGR of 6.2% (up from 5.3% expected in 4Q11). Consolidation in the ASQ arena was exemplified with the acquisitions of DeviceAnywhere by Keynote (to provide mobile testing) and dynaTrace by Compuware (for code analysis) and service virtualization vendor acquisitions by CA Technologies and IBM of ITKO and Green Hat, respectively. IDC expects ongoing acquisitions in the 2012–2014 time frame as enterprise providers seek to broaden their ASQ portfolios.

"In a global economy that remained volatile in 2011 but with dramatically increased complexity for multimodal software development and deployment with constrained resources, we saw ongoing investment and demand for ASQ solutions and growth for vendors overall. Market and product evolution will occur as larger vendors deliver more complete quality and life-cycle management solutions and consolidation continues," says Melinda Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management and Executive Strategies at IDC. "As a result of the earlier disruption and ongoing software quality challenges, we saw strong reemergence of investment. Smaller vendors continue to play a crucial role for market innovation, as we see from "cloud" testing, quality measurement with static and dynamic analysis and security leverage, and agile and mobile solutions; these areas are dominated by small and medium-sized companies. We expect additional acquisitions in this space in the 2012–2014 time frame and solid ASQ growth through the 2012–2016 forecast period."