PCQuest Developers' Choice Awards 2005

The Govt and BFSI segments provided the maximum business to the software development houses we approached. The focus of our respondents was largely towards developing Web technologies and products

Saturday, October 01, 2005

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We're back again this year to find out the most preferred development tools amongst the Indian software developer community. We started this category last year as a spin off from our Users' Choice Awards, owing to all the action and excitement in this category. This year we continue the trend, and have added something new to it. This time, the complete survey was done online, we sent the questionnaire to more than 6200 developers across the country. These developers belonged to all the major software development hubs in the country, which include Bangalore, Hyderabad, Trivandrum, Chennai, Cochin, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and Delhi. Around 400 developers responded to the survey, and that too in just a week. We've determined the favorite choices of developers amongst the ten different types of tools by asking the respondents two questions for each category. The first one asked about all the tools they use in a category, while the second one asked for the primary tool. In the first question, each respondent was able to choose multiple options. As expected, we found that the total number of votes for different brands of tools were higher in this question than the second one. What that means is that companies today prefer to use more than one tool in every product category. Like in Users' Choice, here also we have a club. In order for a particular software tool to be able to make it to the club, it should have attained at least 4% of the total votes in that category in the first question. Interestingly, a majority of the companies that we surveyed were either into Web/Internet/intranet technologies or software product development. Last year, a majority of them were into their own custom software development, which included software product development. Web technologies was a distant second preference. This year, the votes are nearly equal. Does this indicate the current trend of everything having a Web-based interface? The next two hot areas of development are software maintenance and migration, and development on RDBMS, data warehousing, and data mining. Once again, we have seen a lot of platform migration projects happening across companies this year, and software development houses are busy helping them do this. 

About a third of the respondents agreed to disclose their companies' annual turnover. 61% of these were from companies with a turnover of up to 10 Crores, 13% with turnover between 50 to 100 Crores, and the remaining 27% with more than 100 Crores turnover. Nearly a third of the companies also disclosed their annual IT budgets. Nearly 52% of these had IT budgets of up to 1 Crore, while 25% ranged between 1 and 10 Crores. The remaining 24% had IT budgets that went beyond 10 Crores. So basically, a majority of the respondents were from small to medium-sized organizations, and a reasonable number were from large companies. One surprise was that, most of the companies interviewed seemed to be getting a majority of their business from the government.This was followed by the BFSI segment. Let's see what tools are preferred for software development.

The User Perception Index (UPI) is number of votes received normalized to that of the winner.

Anil Chopra, Sujay V Sarma

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