Good news for the ERP software market: Gartner (News - Alert) projects growth to increase in 2012, with revenue forecasted to reach $288 billion.

Indian industry journal Deccan Herald quoted Joanne Correia, managing vice president at Gartner, saying the market for enterprise software “continues to recover well following the 2009 downturn, with signs of ongoing growth on the horizon... Economic recovery is evident across all regions, although concerns have arisen in some countries in Europe and Asia.”

In fact, things are looking pretty good for worldwide enterprise application software spending. Across the board, it’s forecasted to total $114.4 billion in 2011, a 10.2 percent increase from 2010 spending of $103.8 billion, Gartner found.

Breaking down those figures, Gartner officials said ERP is the largest segment within the enterprise application software market -- “ERP revenue is expected to reach $23.3 billion, followed by office suites with $15.7 billion.”

Analysts are mixed on just how rosy an immediate future ERP has. TMC’s (News - Alert) Linda Dobel wrote last month that despite some consultants’ earlier predictions, it looks like 2011 will not be the year enterprises rush to invest in ERP software upgrades:

“This information was gleaned from a recent Forrester (News - Alert) research survey, ‘The State of ERP In 2011: Customers Have More Options in Spite of Market Consolidation,’ which revealed of the 900 IT decision makers in North America and Europe responding to its survey, almost 75 percent indicated they will not be investing in ERP this year.”

TMC also reported recently that Openbravo, a company invested in making open source ERP software well-known in the U.S., is optimistic about being part of an ERP increase.

With nearly two million downloads of its free software, TMCnet wrote, “Openbravo has seen great commercial success beating SAP (News - Alert) in the EMEA market, while building regional partner networks. Now, Openbravo is releasing the next-generation of its open source ERP software, Openbravo 3. Openbravo’s Agile (News - Alert) ERP approach is a departure from mainstream ERP, which forces businesses to over-pay for massive, yet inflexible systems.”

Openbravo is an ERP vendor with a 100 percent native Web-application, making it ideal for the cloud and universally accessible.