Gartner's new report highlights a 1.8% y/y growth in the global application development (AD) software market in 2012. It is expected to cross $9 billion in 2012 riding high on evolving software delivery models, emerging mobile apps, new development methodologies and open source software.

Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner

"Application modernization and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for AD spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility, and social computing. These emerging trends are directing AD demand towards newer architectures, programming languages, and business model and user skills.."

The report titled, "Market Trends: Application Development Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016’,"highlights the changing trend in the use of cloud and its subsequent effect on the evolving application design, testing and deployment. The analyst forecast that 90% of big, mainstream organizations and government agencies would use some form of cloud computing by 2015.

Asheesh Raina:

"The trend is compelling enough to force traditional AD vendors to ‘cloud-enable’ their existing offerings and position them as a service to be delivered through the cloud. AD for cloud demands rapid deployment, a high focus on user experience and access to highly elastic resources for software testing, while requiring comparatively less underlying infrastructure for developing applications.”"

"“Open source software tools will continue to erode revenue for some AD categories in the design, testing, and Web development. This is being driven primarily by the success of Eclipse and NetBeans, as well as by the overall revitalization of the market by new small software providers looking for technical and market disruptive approaches for offering products. Limited budgets and economic conditions compelling enough to focus on cost reduction, also fuel the use of open-source software in various development projects."

Excerpted from the press release, Gartner Says Cloud, Mobility and Open Source Will Drive Application Development Market to Exceed $9 Billion in 2012, on Gartner website .