Recession is almost over for the infrastructure management software market in most countries in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan region (APEJ), says IDC.

With budgets reviving the infrastructure management software market would experience a 12% year-on-year growth and return to double-digit growth rates during the forecast period up to 2014, says IDC.

Larger vendors have been leveraging their resources to bridge financial and skills gaps their clients faced in order to help their users through the tough times earlier. Now the vendor pipelines have started to look healthier as pent up demand has started to come through, though cautious spending still remains the call of the day.

Meanwhile, vendors are also gearing up with partner programs and targeted solutions aligned to businesses and industries to ensure they are ready to tap the market growth.

“Business has regained confidence now and we are seeing mission-critical projects and priority projects linked to business needs to lead the way in the infrastructure management software market in APEJ. However, the crisis has modified the manner in which projects are returning. A high focus on business value, return on investment (ROI), and shorter, modular type projects are more typical,” said Daphne Chung, a Senior Research Manager at IDC.

Vendors have also focused on themes such as virtualization, optimization and data centers during this period of time. While mergers and acquisitions have slowed in pace, more strategic partnerships and initiatives such as those created by Cisco, EMC and VMware have been implemented to target datacenters.

There are key growth opportunities for infrastructure management software in the Greater China (GCG) region, South East Asia and India. The opportunity extend to Storage Software, and Systems and Network Management Software (SNMS).

The Australia and New Zealand markets are relatively more mature, and expected to show good growth particularly in the storage software markets where growth will be driven by more advanced functionality requirements.