IDC dispatches from Western Europe and Brazil

IDC released a couple of reports this week worth a little discussion in the industry blogosphere.

In analysis entitled Western European CRM Applications, Forecast and Analysis 2007-2011, IDC provides CRM applications market forecast data for Western Europe.

IDC found that the Western European customer relationship management applications market grew by 6.3 percent in 2006, topping last year’s forecast by almost one percentage point and reaching a value of €2.2 billion (approximately $2.94 billion). IDC expects this positive trend to continue, and has increased its five-year forecast.

Analyzed IDC European enterprise applications program manager Bo Lykkegaard, “Early CRM adopters, especially in the financial services and telecommunications sectors, are investing in CRM again, while the low-end segment is seeing a significant impact of software-as-a-service.”

In the report, IDC forecasts the CRM application market by deployment model. Revenue from on-demand CRM applications grew almost 40 percent during 2006 and is expected by IDC to maintain this momentum throughout the forecast period.

Meanwhile, IDC Brazil released a study on the home country’s mainframe market entitled Brazilian Mainframe Market and Migration Trends 2007. Though the Brazilian IT market represented only 1.5 percent of overall worldwide IT spending in 2006, it is sixth in new mainframe purchases, trailing Japan, United States, Germany, France and Italy.

Investment in new mainframe systems around the world has dropped to around 11 percent of worldwide server spending, but the proportion in the Brazilian market has grown to 30 percent over the last five years.

Among the study’s findings was a stat stating that 65 percent of interviewed companies were planning to perform some kind of migration process to other platforms over the next couple of years. According to the interviews, mainframe users host an average of 60 business applications per server.