Enterprise Java adoption growing rapidly even in small-medium businesses

While we keep hearing about how LAMP is taking over the small and mid sized segment, here’s a report that suggests something to the contrary.

The use of J2EE for development in Small-Medium Businesses (SMB) has jumped by 50% in the last six months, according to Evans Data Corporation’s new SMB Development Survey. Nearly 40% of SMB developers now use J2EE with another 13% indicating they will be using it within 2 years.

Sixty percent of SMB developers will target Java/J2SE/J2EE at least some of the time this year and 20% are spending the majority of their time developing in Java. Next year Java development is expected to grow to almost 70% of the SMB development population with 35% dedicating the majority of their time to development using Java.

“Developers in SMBs do not have as many resources or the budgets that larger development shops have, so they need to go with what works now, not what they can learn and put into use six months or a year from now. Java works, it has worked for a long time and there’s a tremendous body of knowledge and expertise surrounding the technology,” said John Andrews, president of Evans Data. “The race to market is critical for the SMB developer and, by using Java, they are able to meet their deadlines and budgetary restraints.”

Other findings from the December survey of more than 400 developers working in companies with less than 1000 employees:

— Twenty-two percent of developers indicate they spend 100% of their time working on internal Web services with more than half of developers, 51%, spending the majority of their time on internal Web services projects.

— Forty-five percent of SMB developers report an increase in corporate security budgets. Two thirds of SMBs experienced a security breach in the last year with computer viruses and spyware accounting for the vast majority of breaches.Â