Abstract
This IDC study examines the maturing software market. The software broker is a new player in the
software industry that has emerged in response to the exponentially increasing complexity crisis.
Software brokers will become the point of customer contact for an increasing number of enterprise
business process solutions. Software brokers already play a leading role in many industry domains.
This study shows how the software industry will segment into software publishers and software
brokers for each of three distinctly different customer types. Software brokering will be more
profitable than outsourcing or system integration by virtue of the deeper customer relationships and
the use of standards-based integration platforms. Three examples of industry consolidation are
discussed and modeled with the Dynamic Market Map. From these maps, it is apparent that as the
industry consolidates, size will not confer automatic broker status because software brokering is
more about business model and customer bonding strategy than market share.
Recommendations are given for both software vendors and software customers. Increasingly,
software vendors must steer for the future success models in the industry and not assume that the
same competitive practices that worked in the last 20 years will continue to be effective as the
complexity crisis gets resolved. For software customers, the time is now to get on board with the
leaders among your peers and obtain complexity reduction from your vendors.
"We expect software brokering to continue to accelerate from its base among traditional
software vendors with software as a service offerings and services companies with software
assets," said Tony Picardi, senior VP of Global Software. "As more software brokers roll
out more complexity-reducing solutions, the effect will be like an inundation of killer applications
from all directions." | 
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