The Top 100 software companies in the US

US Software industry is world-leading
The software industry is an important contributor to the United States economy and one of its most internationally oriented industries: more than half of the software produced in the US is sold abroad. The United States has a powerful presence in the worldwide software market place: 70% of the Global Top 100 software companies are headquartered in the US. Software revenues of the US Top 100 combined were 175 billion USD in 2008, half of which was earned by the Big Three: Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. This article highlights some of the trends in the US software industry.

Software industry trends
Google is expanding its activities aggressively beyond internet search; at a growth rate of 455% it was by far the fastest growing software company in the United States. Google's continued software revenue growth will probably push the company up several positions in the 2010 edition of the US Software Top 100 to be released this summer.
Unlike most traditional software vendors, Google takes a positive attitude towards opening its source code to the public, thus making it possible for the public to participate in Google's software development. Other prominent open source software vendors in the US Top 100 are: Novell (31), Red Hat (41) and SUN Microsystems, the owner of the popular MySQL database (45). When analyzing the financial developments of these companies, it can only be concluded that open source software is enjoying very favourable momentum: all four companies grow substantially faster than average, and they do so on their own, without acquiring other software companies.

The gaming industry
Video gaming companies generally experience substantial fluctuation of revenues, as each depends upon the success of a few blockbuster game releases. In general, game publishers are among the fastest growing software companies; most gaming companies showed double digit growth percentages in 2008. Activision Blizzard (+73% as a result of a merger), Take-Two Interactive (+48%), Electronic Arts (+29%) and Disney Interactive (+32%) all profited from successful releases. THQ was the only gaming company with lower revenues (-17%). Midway Games grew 25% in 2008, but this was unsufficient to avoid bankruptcy in February 2009.

Software for education
In the lower regions of the list, two educational software companies show remarkable growth. Blackboard increased software revenues with 32% in 2008 and 34% in 2007. Rosetta Stone, a provider of language learning software, was up 50%, enough to enter the list at place 97. Blackboard and Rosetta Stone continued to perform very well in 2009, software revenues of both companies grew around 20%.

Mergers and acquisitions
The software landscape is frequently affected by changes of ownership. The major take-over of 2009 in the US software industry was the Sun Microsystems acquisition by Oracle. This deal was worth $7.4 billion.
Omniture, maker of website optimization software, has consistently been among the fastest growing software companies during the last couple of years. This success has not gone unnoticed and Adobe, looking for a way to boost sagging revenue momentum, bought Omniture in 2009 for $1.8 billion.
SPSS, which has made statististical software for social sciences since 1968, was acquired by IBM for $1.2 billion.

More information
The US Software Top 100 is a free research publication made by the Top 100 Research Foundation. For the full list, click here.
The newer 2010 edition of the US Software Top 100 can be found here, and the accompanying research publication can be found here.