Types of PowerBuilder projects in 2014
As always, the survey respondents are loyal users of PowerBuilder and do not foresee to change their habits any time soon. Practically all of them have the intention to use it at least for 2 more years.
While it may seem paradoxical, despite the fact that it took 3 years for SAP to release a new version of PowerBuilder and that they have not yet made the contents of the next version public, the number of participants planning to use PowerBuilder for more than 2 years has been steadily increasing since 2010. This year, 90% of respondents will be using PB at least until 2017.
This is not even due to a smaller number of participants, in which case only the biggest fans of PowerBuilder would have responded to the survey. On the contrary, the number of participants is greater this year than it was last year.
Small and medium size projects (1 – 20 developers) remain the most popular among companies developing with PowerBuilder, with these making up 95% of the figures. The number of large projects using PowerBuilder has remained the same since 2011, with 5% of PB Projects using 20 or more developers.
The productivity of PowerBuilder is unbeatable. We no longer count the projects rewritten from PowerBuilder to Java or .NET which were aborted due to higher development costs than foreseen in the initial budget. This feature increases with the size of the application: the more important it is, the more complicated it will be to rewrite in another technology. A lot of mission critical applications of PowerBuilder have been in production for 10 or 20 years and have a long life ahead of them.
The challenges involved with PowerBuilder apps are more related to how to upgrade them in order to meet the evolving needs of end users (modernizing the user interface, deploying to web and mobile clients, supporting new architectures and new security standards etc.)
Unfortunately PB classic doesn’t alone cover all the needs itself. Luckily, PowerBuilder has a dynamic ecosystem where developers can find from other vendors, such as Appeon, Enable, WerySoft, Novalys etc., features that are missing in PB.
In 2014, there’s an increase in the number of developers who plan both maintain and develop new applications by 6%. This equates to the 6% decrease in companies who plan to solely maintain their PowerBuilder applications without adding additional developments. Projects concentrated on the development of new applications remains the same as 2013 at 5%.
Half of PowerBuilder developers are very experienced, with over 15 years of experience in the field: nearly 80% of developers have over 10 years of experience. PowerBuilder has attracted some new developers in the past few years, with 6% having 1-5 years of experience.