Calendar Year 2008 Q1 numbers still show profitability for most vendors
Recession concerns for the enterprise software industry may prove to be a bit pre-mature. Recent earnings report over the past 2 months lean towards mild caution. While most vendors showed profitability, guidance numbers were down. The leading indicator is new software license sales for on-premise companies and recurring revenue for SaaS companies. Here's the break down of year over year quarterly new license sales numbers/recurring revenue include:

• CDC Software - Down 15% to $12M
• Epicor Software - Down 16% to$18.5M
• JDA Software - Up 18.8% to $20M
• Lawson Software - Up 21% to $32M
• NetSuite - Up 47% to $34.1M
• Oracle - Up 7% to $451M
• QAD - Up 14% to $22.4M
• Right Now - Up 27% to $24.4M
• SAP - Up 11% to 622Mm

The bottom line
Overall, the enterprise software market looks good for the next 2 quarters despite some cautionary guidance among the mega software vendors. Key drivers come from integration and upgrade projects for the core ERP and packaged apps landscape. Interestingly, the CRM market also shows continuous growth in new deployments as customers enter the next phase of CRM adoption.