2006 Software Taxonomy Changes

IDC's software functional market taxonomy is updated annually to reflect the dynamic nature of the software marketplace. This section describes the significant structural changes made in 2006. For reference, the previous version of the software taxonomy is documented in IDC's Software Taxonomy, 2005 (IDC #32884, February 2005). Note that in addition to structural changes, some markets were renamed and definitions were updated to reflect the evolution of specific market categories.

The most extensive functional market taxonomy changes for 2006 are in the storage software secondary market and the database "tools" portion of the information and data management secondary market. The individual functional markets within these categories have been significantly restructured to better reflect the current state of the marketplace. With the exception of email archiving software moving from messaging applications into the storage area, all of the changes are within the respective storage and information data management secondary markets.

The scope of the network and service management market was modified for 2006. In 2005 and prior years, service management, a market consisting of solutions solely for network service providers, was included as a submarket in network and service management. For 2006 we have removed this submarket from the software taxonomy because we no longer consider it to be a software market. Industry trends are driving this segment toward complex solutions rather than commercial software, as had been the case when the category was created in the taxonomy in the late 1990s.

An appliance category was added to the list of operating environments. The initial use is to categorize security appliance revenue. A security appliance consists of hardware with an integrated, hardened operating system (OS), a limited applications set, and no user software installation. Security appliances may also include other features such as security management, policy management, quality of service, load balancing, high availability, and bandwidth management. Also, the platform-independent category was removed and the OS/400 operating environment was renamed as i5 and OS/400 for consistency with IBM's designations.

These changes are summarized in Table 4.