Who produces the most Applications Software?

If I asked you who produces the largest amount of business applications software, you'd probably say Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM or one of many software vendors that produce and sell such software. Until recently I would have agreed with you completely. But I'm beginning to realize that the maximum amount of applications software is produced by IT groups within companies and not by large software vendors. Although companies spend millions of dollars on buying software applications to run their business, they also produce a lot of code internally for their own consumption. This could be enhancements or customizations to applications they purchased because the purchased software did not meet their business needs out-of-the-box. It could also be brand new applications they build specific to their business for which no commercial software is readily available. Most of these applications tend be simple (and interestingly short-lived) since IT groups tend to be very constrained in terms of budgets and skills to engage in full-fledged, large-scale software development. However, given the massive number of companies globally that use software for their daily operations, the total number of such applications is very large. Interestingly, it is because of this large market for simple, light-weight applications that light-weight frameworks such as Spring have gained a lot of popularity.

So who produces the most applications software? Combined IT groups of companies do.