Novalys 2004 Worldwide Survey Results
Again, Novalys carried out a survey on the use of PowerBuilder last year.
The final results are out!
About 3000 people from all over the world participated.
(100 countries are represented) Thank you to all of you.
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You will find below the analysis of the answers to the following questions:
- How long will PowerBuilder be used in your company ?
- In 2004, will PowerBuilder be used to develop or maintain applications?
- How many developers will use PB in your company in 2004 ? (approximately)
- Which PB version do you currently use?
- In 2004, do you plan to migrate toward a more recent PB version?
- Do you use PB to develop your Web Applications?
- Which other technologies is (or will be) used in your company?
- If you use a framework, what type do you use?
- As a developer, what is your opinion about PowerBuilder?
- Countries
1) How long will PowerBuilder be used in your company ?
1- Few users declare not to use PowerBuilder anymore: the developers who answered this survey are those who go on using PowerBuilder...
2- Most of the people who answered plan on using PowerBuilder : 86% assess to use it for more than 3 years! This statistic has increased by 4 points from last year's survey (86% in 2004 vs 82% in 2003).
3- The USA often have the lead concerning technical choices. In this precise case, the forecasts on the of use of PowerBuilder are almost the same in the USA as in the other countries.
2) In 2004, will PowerBuilder be used to develop or maintain applications?
In 2002, developers all mentioned they were working on existing applications.
In 2003, the results were very different : 6% of the users work on new applications.
In 2004, this trend strengthens. Indeed, we register an increase of 5 points on the number of new projects.
It is important to notice that 56% of the respondants use
PB for both existing and new applications, which means they
will continue to rely on PowerBuilder.
3) How many developers will use PB in your company in 2004 ? (approximately)
As before, PowerBuilder is still being employed for "large" projects; department projects or company projects.
The average PB project has increased by 9%: over 50% of the teams contain an average of 9 developers in 2004 vs 8,3 in 2003.
4) Which PB version do you currently use?
In 2003, the PB9 version was quoted by 8% of the users. It was the most frequently used version.
In 2004, this version is used by 1/3 of the participants, another 1/3 are still working with PB8 (35%).
Nevertheless, 31% of the polled assess they are working with
an older version than PB7, which isn't supported by Sybase
anymore.
5) In 2004, do you plan to migrate toward a more recent PB version?
Half of the teams (47%) plan to migrate to a more recent version of PowerBuilder in 2004, which confirms their investment in Sybase's developmetn tool.
6) Do you use PB to develop your Web Applications?
The use of PowerBuider so as to develop Web applications seems to be very stable :
1/5 of the users work in PB to develop their Web applications (same as in 2004 and in 2003).
Half of the users plan to develop some of their web applications, if not all of them, with PowerBuilder!
7) Which other technologies is (or will be) used in your company?
Microsoft and Java are the most frequently used by the participants.
Microsoft made a significant advance in this ranking this year : its technologies represent now more than half of the responses (52%) against 1/3 in 2002 (30%) and hardly an half in 2003 (47%).
These results clearly illustrate Microsoft's investment in
the .NET technology.
Java is still very often used with 51% of the participants
this year.
It is important to notice that there are many more answers
to this question this year; companies have a better assessment
of their technical tendencies. They plan to use several tools
simultaneously.
8) If you use a framework, what type do you use?
Sybase is still the framework most quoted by the users: more than 2/3 of the participants use it!
Powertools is still used by 1/10 of the polled although the diffusion of this tool has been interrupted since 1997.
EAF (Entreprise Application Framework) is for the first time mentioned in this ranking. We can probably explain its success by its technical positioning (Applications n-tiers) and its price positioning (Open source by Cynergy System).
9) What is your opinion about PowerBuilder?
Generally speaking, the satisfaction rate of the developers has increased drastically:
- 39% gave PowerBuilder the highest mark (between 9/10 and
10/10) vs 23% in 2003 and 18% in 2002.
- only 13% marked the product under 6/10 (18% in 2003 and
17% in 2002).
10) Countries
