Salesforce leads growth of worldwide software market

Salesforce's software efforts have led to it becoming the fastest growing vendor in Gartner's global software market share report.

The company's growth stood at 33 per cent, entering the analyst firm's Top 10 Worldwide Software Vendors rankings for the first time.

VMware, which rose up the chart to number eight from nine last year, had the second biggest growth at 14.1 per cent.

This is the first time all companies in the top 10 have business interests in cloud services, and it's had a positive impact with the worldwide software market growing by a total of 4.8 per cent last year.

"The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) movement," said Joanne Correia, research vice president at Gartner.

"A clear indicator of this is that for the first time we have a pure cloud vendor in the top 10."

Chad Eschinger, research vice president at Gartner, agreed that cloud services have had a big impact on the rankings.

"Global trends around big data and analytics with business investment in database and cloud-based applications helped to drive Oracle's top-line growth," he said.

Microsoft topped the rankings with a growth rate of six per cent, while Oracle came in second with 2013 revenues of $29.6 billion (1.8 billion) compared to 2012 revenues of $28.7 billion (1.72 million).

John Rizzuto, research vice president and invest analyst at Gartner, said these rankings have a big impact on investor interest and in many cases, a company showing technological leadership will take precedent over a company's cash value.

"The new and emerging technology markets in software, such as digital marketing and public cloud computing, are so nascent that investors are favoring those companies that are early and aggressive in grabbing both market and mind share," he explained.