russian software developing industry and software exports

Chapter 7.
Technologies
The results of the 2009 survey show that
companies have considerably reduced the number
of technologies and solutions used for software
development (operating systems, programming
languages and tools and DBMS). For example, in
the past any company used more than 3 operating
systems on average (in 2008, this figure was 3.6).
Moreover, the indicators remained the same from
year to year without major fluctuations. In 2009, this
indicator dropped to 2.3.
The main reason of the reduced number
of platforms used is evidently the crisis. The last survey
was conducted in Q1 2009 right during the most
difficult months, when there were neither new orders
nor any certainty about the future, and outsourcing
and product companies had to optimize the number
of their employees. Otherwise stated, the staff was
reduced and certain areas of technology development
were closed. Gradually excessive competencies and
reserve of staff required at the stage of the boosting
growth in order to quickly launch new projects were
also cut down.
Simultaneously with the «staff optimization»
there were reduced license fees for OS, DBMS and
programming tools that either dismissed employees
worked with or that were not used at full capacity,
but were maintained for marketing purposes awaiting
new orders.
Such redundancy of skills and staff became
unprofitable and unnecessary after the wave of crisis
swept over the market.
The second reason of the reduced number of tools
and platforms used by respondents is a considerable
increase in the number of companies answering the
question about technologies. As compared to the
2008 survey, the number of companies who answered
the questions about platforms and tools grew from
75 to 110. Practically all leading companies with a
wide range of competencies actively participated in
the poll in previous years, too. The increase in the
number of respondents was mainly caused by new
participants with a relatively small list of OS, DBMS
and programming tools used by them.
It is difficult to say how greatly the increase in
the number of respondents influenced the ultimate
results. However, it can me stated that in this case
the role of the crisis was much greater. The list
of technologies was mainly shortened by companies
with a turnover less than 4 MUSD. It was this group
that mostly influenced the frequency of records by
each technology.
According to the calculation methodology, any
record of a single technology submitted by a major
company with thousands employees and a small firm
with several people working have similar weight. The
requirement to provide more detailed information
on the number of employees using each and every
technology would overload respondents and put at
risk the representativeness of the survey.
To more accurately reflect the real popularity of
this or that system we separately provide data on the
largest and the smallest companies. All other groups
of companies get interim results.
The larger the company, the higher its indicator of
frequency of records for each technology. The same
dependence exists concerning the share of export in
total revenue. The bigger the export share, the higher
the above indicator.
Owing to the crisis we also managed to obtain
additional information about OS, DBMS and tools
used as a reserve (and vice versa – about technologies
companies cannot abandon despite the crisis).
OPERATING SYSTEMS
Due to the crisis Windows leadership has not
shaken and its advantage over GNU Linux ranking
second has even slightly increased. The lagging
behind of other operating systems has intensified
even more. An insignificantly smaller number of
records against the previous year was registered for
the 2 most popular families of OS (Windows and
GNU Linux) as well as Mainframe that came only last
during the previous poll.
The crisis has most negatively affected Novell
Netware, DOS, Mac OS and Open/Free/NetBSD.
However, this influence was reinforced by other
factors, too. Most likely, the popularity of some
systems already tended to decline.
GNU Linux family still fails to approach Windows,
despite some experts have been expecting this
MS Windows
GNU Linux
family
MS Windows
Mobile
Major operating systems
17.1%
26%
Sun Solaris
16.2%
Symbian OS
Mac OS
HP-UX
Open/Free/
NetBSD
DOS
Novell
Netware
Mainframe
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
25%
10.9%
26%
9%
19%
7.3%
25%
7.2%
18%
6.3%
10%
3.6%
6.6%
5.4%
41%
Poll 2008
64%
53.5%
Poll 2009
97%
93.7%
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