This IDC study discusses the worldwide application life-cycle management (ALM) services market forecast as well as acceleration of the market, which experienced growth in 2006 and is targeted for growth throughout the forecast period. This market growth resulted from a variety of factors that came together additively, including complex sourcing for application development projects, regulatory compliance, increased complexity of emerging development paradigms, and emerging services ALM hosting support for areas such as testing (coinciding with new software licensing and subscription paradigms). This is the first time that IDC has combined analyst resources to forecast this hybrid market.

IDC forecasts continuing growth in the ALM services segment, with expected revenue approaching the $61 billion mark by 2011.

"Demand for ALM services will remain strong throughout our forecast period, and further market and product evolution will occur as service providers deliver more complete ALM practices and as consolidation continues," said Melinda Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management and principal analyst for the IT Management Service at IDC. "Smaller service providers will continue to play a role in product and market innovation, particularly in SOA, Web 2.0, virtualization, hosting, and other emerging areas, and differentiated ALM services solutions and programs will come into play in that context."