ARMONK, N.Y., June 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that analyst firm Gartner, Inc.* has ranked IBM as the worldwide leader in the application development software space. Additionally, IBM has taken first place in the Evans Data Corp. "Users' Choice: 2009 Software Development Platform" survey.**

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Gartner named IBM the worldwide market share leader in application development based on total software revenue in 2008. This is the eighth consecutive year that IBM continues to lead in this space. According to the independent Gartner report, IBM leads the industry with 27.1 percent share in 2008, growing 7.9 percent as compared to the overall segment's growth of 4 percent. Gartner reports the total worldwide market for application development in 2008 was $7.3 billion.

IBM Rational tools also achieved "top honors" in the annual Evans Data Corp. Software Development Platform User Satisfaction survey. Rational was ranked higher than development tool offerings from several competitors, including Microsoft, Oracle and Sun. The Evans Data Corp. "Users' Choice: 2009 Software Development Platform" survey was conducted in Spring of 2009 and polled 1,200 worldwide developers. For the first time in four years, Evans Data Corp. expanded the scope of their user satisfaction survey beyond an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) study to instead rate a broader array of development tools.

In today's economic climate, businesses are realizing that building a competency in software is crucial to their long-term growth and success. As companies deploy increasingly intelligent, interconnected and instrumented solutions, they must treat the software they build or assemble as a strategic business asset. However, enabling this innovation, lowering costs and managing change is dependent on the effectiveness of their software and systems development process. IBM Rational can provide organizations with a collaborative software delivery platform, capabilities, and time-tested processes to arm development teams with the necessary tools to make software delivery a core business strength.

"In order to deliver the right solutions, on budget and on time, our customers continue to invest in offerings that improve the collaboration and automation of their software development organizations," said Dr. Daniel Sabbah, general manager, IBM Rational Software. "Additionally, IBM is building upon its leadership in the application development tools market and is now delivering the next generation collaborative, team-based IDE. We feel that the strong customer validation demonstrated in these reports further confirms that we are on the right path."

In addition to achieving the survey's top ranking for Overall Software Development Platform, Evans Data Corp. also noted IBM's leadership in seven other categories, including: Application Modeling Tools, Web Design/Development Tools, Support for Remote Development, Developer Test Tools including Code Coverage Tools, Quality of Tech Support, Support for Parallel Programming and Runtime Memory Analysis Tools. Rational tools also ranked highest among commercially available products for Ability to Integrate Tools and Availability of Third Party Tools.

"IBM is a leading example of a vendor that is moving beyond simply selling point products to customers, but rather helping meet their evolving needs by offering a complete, end-to-end application lifecycle management solution (ALM)," said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data Corp. "The robust development environment and rich assortment of tools that are provided by IBM sets a standard of excellence in development tools as evidenced by its users overall satisfaction ranking in our annual survey."

For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/rational.

*Gartner, Inc., "Market Share: Application Development Software, Worldwide, 2008" by Laurie Wurster, Teresa Jones and Asheesh Raina, May 2009.

**Survey: "Evans Data Corp. Software Development Platform User Satisfaction Survey, 2009" June 2009.

    Contact
    Faye Abloeser
    IBM Communications
    abloeser@us.ibm.com
    908-770-0762

SOURCE IBM