B2B Projects Surge by More Than 40%, B2C Projects Increase by 20%

SANTA CRUZ, CA, December 1, 2003 - In what may be a sign that the long downturn for technology is coming to an end, e-commerce projects lead plans for next year in enterprise development project planning. The new Enterprise Development Management Issues survey from Evans Data has seen business-to-business e-commerce increase 40% in the last six months for planned projects and a move from 11th place to the 1st place ranking. Business-to-Consumer projects also showed strong gains with developers planning 20% more B2C projects for next year than they were six months ago.

"We're seeing a resurgence in e-commerce deployments, but this isn't a revival of the so-called 'dot-com' frenzy by any means," said Joe McKendrick, Evans' enterprise analyst. "Rather, many companies are extending relevant portions of their applications and data to supply-chain partners. With growing adoption of Web services and other standards, such connectivity is now possible with little additional investment. In fact, we’re finding that developers are getting more comfortable with Web services, and therefore directing more efforts beyond their firewalls, to business-to-business interaction."

Other findings from the November 2003 survey of 400 IT and development managers in companies with more than 1,000 employees:

• Sixteen percent of enterprise companies plan to use grid computing instead of a clustering environment and another 24% are considering the technology.
• Outsourcing has decreased by more than 20% in the last year with 56% of enterprises outsourcing some of their development, down from 71% a year ago. Only 7% of companies are outsourcing a majority of their projects, down from 12% a year ago. The most cited reason for outsourcing was to tap special expertise not available in-house.
• Computer viruses/worms led the most common types of security breaches on enterprise data followed by internal human errors and internal software or system errors. One in ten respondents reported no security breaches at all in the last year.

Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. Evans' syndicated research includes surveys focused on developers in a wide variety of subjects.

Copyright 2007 Evans Data Corporation. All other company names, products and services mentioned in this document are the trademarks and property of their respective owners.

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