Dive Brief:

• The top software vendors saw year-over-year revenue growth in Q1, even as economic uncertainty placed additional pressure on vendors and their customers, according to a recent Forrester report. 
• Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and Workday experienced double-digit revenue growth year over year, while IBM, Microsoft and SAP had single-digit revenue growth year over year.
• Vendors focused on executive and board changes, as well as sustainability and diversity, according to the report.

Dive Insight:

While enterprise spending on software is not expected to slow down, vendors have felt the pullback as executives increase scrutiny on spending and look to consolidate software. Software vendors have adjusted their strategies in response. 

Many software vendors experienced revenue growth year over year, but that growth was not evenly distributed.

“Across the board, the major software vendors in the set we analyzed announced growth — albeit lower overall growth in some cases,” the Forrester report said.

SAP had the lowest revenue growth, increasing by just 1% year over year due to “declining license and maintenance revenues as it shifts to cloud models,” according to Forrester Q1 analysis.

“At least for now, the ongoing shift to the cloud remains a key initiative — especially in laggard categories like ERP,” the Forrester report said.

There has been a lot of leadership movement in the software vendor space. 

Workday, which currently has two co-CEOs, is transitioning to have Carl Eschenbach as its sole CEO by the beginning of next year. Workday also appointed CIO Rani Johnson in March to oversee the company’s global IT organization and internal deployment of its products, applications and enterprisewide IT systems.

“Customers should see these moves as part of software vendors’ general focus on operations and efficiency,” the Forrester report said.