About the report

Methodology

The PwC Global Top 100 Software Leaders lists are based on corporate financial statements (GAAP-based where applicable), other public sources and estimates for privately held companies, as complied for PwC by the Global Software Business Strategies Group at IDC.

Due to variances in fiscal years, the results were 'calendarised' for 2011, the most recent year for which complete data was available. Some companies on the lists have since been acquired, but they remain on the lists if they were still independent at the end of 2011. These companies are indicated with an asterisk (*) in the tables.

Currencies were converted to US dollars using the average historical inter-bank rate for 2011 as the rate of exchange. The historical rates used can be found at www.oanda.com.

Each table reports the company’s total revenue and revenue from software. Software revenue includes fees from licenses, maintenance, subscriptions and other software revenues, including software as a service(SaaS). Software revenue excludes custom software or service revenue derived from training, consulting and systems integration. Further, software revenues are based on enterprise software that is deployed on compute servers and with clients. The definition of software is subject to interpretation, and the application and usage of software continues to grow as the number and types of devices that run software expand. Therefore, boundaries have been drawn on what was counted and reported as software revenue. As a result, there are categories of software purposely excluded from the enterprise software estimates, including but not limited to software that is deployed on gaming consoles, software deployed with networking equipment and software deployed on chips embedded in automobiles (as another example of software to which one could potentially attribute value). Total revenue includes software plus hardware, nonrecurring IT service fees, business process services, etc.

Consumer gaming companies—Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and Nintendo, for example—are not included in this study.

On the Top 100 Global list, SaaS revenue refers to all revenue derived from the SaaS delivery model, a utility computing environment in which unrelated customers share a common application and infrastructure managed by an independent software vendor or a third-party service provider that typically owns the code or intellectual property. The model provides access to and consumption of software and application functionality built specifically for network delivery and accessed by users over the Internet.

SaaS revenues do not include software deployed internally by the customer or any packaged software for which a license fee and a maintenance fee are paid. The myriad 'as a service' (APPaaS, PaaS, IaaS) offerings—including business application services, databases, software development tools, high-level storage services (backup and archiving), testing as a service, and security as a service—are all included in the category of SaaS. A few hardware-oriented elements of IT cloud services are not included in the SaaS figures: bulk storage solutions, network services, and cloud servers.

For more on these definitions see: IDC’s Worldwide IT Cloud Services Taxonomy, 2012

In the tables, the Country HQ column refers to the operating headquarters in the country where the main corporate decisions are made. This may differ from jurisdictions listed for tax or financial reasons in corporate documents.

Besides the Global Top 100 Software Vendors list, this report includes three other “top” lists, two defined by geography and one defined by market maturity:

• North America – US and Canada
• Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) – 128 countries comprising those regions
• Emerging markets – Countries in the Americas, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East with an emerging software development industry. IDC started with the 21 countries on the MSCI emerging markets index, and added to it based on its own understanding of these markets. For more on the MSCI list, see: www.msci.com/products/indices/country_and_regional/em/

Given the geographic overlap between the EMEA and the emerging markets, there clearly are some companies that appear on both lists—from Israel and Russia, for example.

In addition to this quantitative research, PwC interviewed more than 25 executives of software companies in the US, Europe and Asia.