IBM's Developer Community Achieves Record Growth in 2006

WebKnowHow
Wednesday, January 3, 2007; 08:43 AM

 IBM announced that its developer community has grown at an unprecedented rate last year, with nearly 1,700 worldwide developers joining its growing community per day. Throughout the year, developerWorks noted several trends, as illustrated by the high demand for content and community-based resources. Java, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web 2.0 community offerings, and growth in emerging markets were among the key themes this year.

In 2006, growth in emerging markets such as Russia, China, India and Brazil were key drivers for developerWorks, accounting for almost 20 percent of the site's unique visitors each month. Growing at a rate of 52 percent year-to-year and hitting an all-time peak of 450,000 unique visitors in September, developerWorks China is at the forefront of this growth and supplies the country's developer population with localized and translated content.

"Earlier this month, leading analyst firm IDC named IBM the industry leader in worldwide partner programs," said Buell Duncan, general manager, ISV & Developer Relations, IBM. "Our commitment to the developer community was a core component of this success. Throughout the years, developerWorks has built a thriving interactive network around the world, further strengthening its position as a highly regarded community for developers to collaborate with one another and build their skills."

The developerWorks Java technology zone remains the most popular area on developerWorks, with nearly a 30 percent increase in traffic this year. The developerWorks Java technology zone gives software developers -- from novice to expert -- access to hundreds of articles, tutorials, and tips to help them make the most of the Java platform and related technologies.

The developerWorks SOA and Web services zone, which adds relevant resources on a weekly basis, experienced more than a 30 percent increase in traffic this year, continuing to meet the demands of developers and architects looking for SOA focused content. developerWorks offers a wide range of free SOA and Web services focused tools and resources to help developers, architects and members of the academic community understand, implement and build their skills set for the technologies and products driving this industry-wide initiative.

developerWorks continues to fully embrace the Web 2.0 model for community participation and collaboration. Through the availability of Web 2.0 technologies such blogs, wikis, podcasts, chats and forums, developerWorks is enabling greater communication, efficiency and productivity to its members. Developers throughout the world are able to use the developerWorks model to learn the skills needed to leverage Web 2.0 technologies and understand how these tools can be applied to support and enhance a company's objectives. Additionally, through a recently unveiled Web development zone, developerWorks provides the community with a one-stop shop of educational tools designed to help them implement and develop dynamic web applications using cutting-edge development technologies such as mashups, Ajax, PHP and Ruby.

IBM offers both online and in person educational resources to help users build and deploy open standards-based applications across heterogeneous systems, creating a foundation for skills and innovation among developers, ISVs, VCs, and faculty and students involved in software development within universities. 2006 caps off a landmark year for IBM's developer community. Additional milestones include:

--  The developerWorks community has grown to 5.6 million worldwide
    developers.  In November alone, developerWorks received over 2.8 million
    unique visitors to the site.
--  1.1 million skills-building resources delivered to the developerWorks
    community.
--  Over 1 million users registered for developerWorks tutorials, with
    open source and Rational focused tutorials experiencing the highest year-to-
    year growth rates, 193 percent and 35 percent, respectively.
--  600 developerWorks Technical Briefing events were held in 58
    countries, with over 60,000 attendees.
--  developerWorks has featured nearly 50 million forum reads, nearly 1
    million blog views and over 120,000 podcast downloads.
--  Over 50 percent of the content on developerWorks was user-generated by
    the broad developer community, exemplifying the powerful collective
    intelligence of the developerWorks community.
   

For more information on developerWorks, visit: www.ibm.com/developerWorks.