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Evans Data Reports on SMB Development Projects

The top three development projects planned for the next year for small and medium businesses are: B2B e-commerce, Customer Relationship Management and Work Flow Management, according to Evans Data's new Summer 2005 Small and Medium Business Development Survey. Almost half of SMB developers expect to work on B2B e-commerce projects in the next year; 41 percent have CRM projects on drawing boards; and 39 percent plan to be working on work flow management projects within the next 12 months.

In a companion study, Evans found large corporations put work flow management, enterprise integration and security enhancements at the top of their lists of planned projects. Other findings from the July 2005 survey of more than 500 SMB developers include:

-- Nineteen percent of SMB developers are more likely to be running Linux on their servers a majority of the time, compared to 7 percent of large enterprises. The developers expect to have 27 percent of their servers running Linux a majority of the time next year, compared to 10 percent in larger enterprises.

-- Forty percent of SMB developers are currently using PHP; and 21 percent plan to use PHP, nearly the same numbers as Evans Data found a year ago in the companion enterprise study.

-- Nineteen percent of SMB developers are more than twice as likely to develop all of their code in-house, compared to 9 percent of their counterparts in larger enterprises.