Mumbai, Jun 17 (IANS): Global spending on customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6 per cent to touch $48.2 billion in 2018, a new report from Gartner said on Monday.

CRM remains both the largest and the fastest growing enterprise application software category.

Worldwide enterprise application software revenue totalled more than $193.6 billion in 2018, a 12.5 per cent increase from the 2017 revenue of $172.1 billion.

"Cloud growth has dropped slightly in 2018 but remains strong at 20 per cent and significantly above the overall growth rate of 15.6 per cent for CRM," Julian Poulter, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, said in a statement.

"As an early mover to the Cloud, CRM software is probably seeing a gradual reduction in cloud growth rates due to high adoption," the statement added.

The top five CRM software vendors accounted for more than 40 per cent of the total market in 2018.

The top five vendors had very little change in ranking compared with 2017, although Microsoft climbed into the fifth position, narrowly displacing Genesys.