I wanted to alert people today that Microsoft has just collected the results from a “Mission Critical Applications” study, which was conducted by IDC, according to their high standards of quantitative research. While Microsoft sponsored this study with IDC, Microsoft in no way influenced the results. It is based on a blind methodology from IDC with a purely random sampling of developers, architects and IT Professionals involved in the development and deployment of mission-critical, server-based applications.
A preview of the data has recently been posted at:
http://www.microsoft.com/net/CaseStudies/MissionCriticalApps/Default.aspx
Besides achieving leadership status within Gartner Group's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers, this quantitative study from IDC provides further evidence of strong adoption of Microsoft Windows Server and the Microsoft .NET Framework for use in building and hosting enterprise applications within corporate data centers. Specifically, this study looks at how larger organizations (median company size 6,000 employees) are adopting a variety of application server development frameworks, hosting environments, and companion technologies (portal products, messaging technologies, SOA adoption, etc.). Even more specifically, the study focuses on the use of such technologies within custom-developed, mission critical applications.
The results show the continued growth in the use of both .NET and Java-based products for such applications, but with .NET server-based applications showing the highest growth and continuing to surpass Java-based application server technologies in the target segment for current primary projects. In most organizations surveyed, the use of both Java and .NET technologies are prevalent. The continued adoption of SOA and Web Service technologies in both .NET and Java projects suggest the use of such technologies for integrating applications running across heterogeneous platforms.
I highly encourage folks to look at the early findings posted at the link above!