Worldwide IT operations management (ITOM) software revenue totaled $18 billion in 2012, up 4.8 percent from $17 billion in 2011, according to final results from Gartner, Inc.

However, Gartner said that the "Big Four" ITOM vendors — IBM, CA Technologies, BMC Software and HP — surrendered market share in 2012, while a new generation of ITOM vendors grew significantly faster than the market.

"Vendor revenue in the 2012 ITOM software market demonstrated moderate single-digit growth, after two consecutive years of nearly double-digit growth, due in part to slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition (M&A) activity," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. "Nevertheless, the ITOM market did manage to grow slightly above the average growth rate of the infrastructure software market, and by doing so it gained share of IT budgets."

Pushing the growth of the ITOM market, although at a less-frantic pace, were continued investments in virtualization management tools and promising cloud computing technologies, which are the key drivers behind the growth in the configuration management and availability and performance segments, and also in the other ITOM category, in which cloud management platform pure-play vendors are represented.

Continued strong growth in workload automation and IT process automation demonstrates that IT organizations are still investing heavily in technology that is more traditional and process improvement initiatives; there is also an increased effort to automate private cloud services.

The evolution of IT service desk tools into IT service support management tools contributed to growth in the market as vendors are supplementing foundational technologies with the addition of features such as mobility, collaboration, IT service visualization, and more advanced analytics and reporting.

The top five ITOM vendors, ranked by revenue, grew 0.6 percent in 2012, compared with 7 percent growth in 2011, and accounted for 55 percent share, or $9.9 billion, of the overall ITOM software market in terms of revenue.

The ranking of the top five vendors did not change from 2010 through 2012. Among the top five vendors, Microsoft led the group in year-over-year growth at 16 percent, while the rest of the top five remained flat or saw declining growth.

CA Technologies and BMC Software are tracking neck and neck, with less than $200 million between them. After displacing HP from the No. 4 position in 2010, Microsoft continues to rapidly gain on BMC and CA Technologies, with Microsoft just less than $650 million behind CA Technologies.

"The most interesting vendors to watch in terms of dynamics will be those with revenue ranging from $100 million to $500 million," says Wurster. "Strategies on business models (software as a service [SaaS], subscription and cloud-based), as well as partnering programs to obtain reach into regions outside North America, Western Europe and mature Asia/Pacific, will be key to growth."

Many ITOM subcategories are commoditizing, as end users replace high-cost tools from the Big Four vendors with lower-cost tools at a 10th of the cost overall, thereby contracting the market and providing high growth for many low-cost providers.