European End-User Survey: 2005 Spending Priorities, Outsourcing, Open Source, and Impact of Compliance

IDC's 2005 Western European Software End-User Survey was carried out in March 2005 and covered 625 companies across Western Europe. The survey dealt with a number of general software issues, such as importance of software to end users, software-spending priorities for 2005, spending impact of regulatory compliance, business process outsourcing, and adoption of open source software. Furthermore, the survey covers questions specific to different software areas that will be analyzed in upcoming studies.

"This survey yielded many interesting, and surprising, results," said Program Manager Bo Lykkegaard from IDC's European Software Group. "We knew from previous surveys that end users consider software important to business success. That was more than confirmed, since more than half of the respondents consider software as "very important" to business success. Furthermore, CRM applications and financial management applications have moved to the top of the current spending priorities, surpassing both network management software and security solutions. Also, regulatory compliance issues are quite visible in Europe. This survey clearly displayed the heterogeneous nature as well as the mixed impact of regulations and standards on organizations in Western Europe. And finally, open source has a higher adoption in certain software markets than previously thought. One-third of the respondents reported significant live use of open source databases; that was surprisingly high."