This IDC study discusses the automated software quality (ASQ) forecast and vendor shares as well as ongoing growth in the ASQ market, which experienced abnormally high double-digit growth of 19.2% in 2007, beyond the levels of both 2006 and 2005. Despite a weakening economy, the ASQ market growth in 2007 resulted from a variety of factors that came together additively, including strong growth from revenue market leader HP and the solid entrance of Microsoft (which brings in a base of users largely new to testing automation); the ongoing trends of resource constraints and complex sourcing for application development projects; regulatory compliance; increased complexity of emerging development paradigms; and emerging new licensing and subscription paradigms with software as a service (SaaS). ASQ growth in 2008 is projected to be down to 8.7%, with much lower growth projections for 2009/2010. IDC forecasts continuing growth in the ASQ segment, with expected revenue approaching the $2.5 billion mark by 2012.

"In the face of a chaotic and unpredictable global economy and constrained IT staffing, demand will remain for ASQ tools throughout our forecast period, though at significantly lower growth rates than earlier expected, and further market and product evolution will occur as larger vendors deliver more complete IT life-cycle management (ITLM) solutions with attractive licensing models as consolidation continues," said Melinda Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management at IDC. "The unacquired, surviving smaller vendors will continue to play a role for market innovation, potentially in Web 2.0, composite apps, SOA, SaaS, virtualization, security, and other emerging areas, and differentiated ASQ solutions will come into play in that context. We expect ongoing acquisitions in this space, particularly in the 2009-2010 time frame."