Conclusions

1. The Reason
2. The goals
3. Workload
4. The money
5. Profitability
6. Why you've won
7. Why you've lost
8. Enterprise readiness
9. Who Buys PHP Solutions?
10. The PHP company profile
11. PHP Market Overview
12. Conclusions

Conclusions

We'll try to summarize what we've learned from this survey and to offer a practical guide to companies who  sell PHP solutions. This guide is not complete and we'll surely offer more information in the near future. We are trying to correlate the information from this survey to better identify the steps to success.

Numbers

There are 75.000 PHP development companies in the world, totalling 150.000 professional developers. Each company creates 12 websites per year on average, and one website takes approximately 32 work days to be completed.

The average price of a PHP dynamic website is USD 6.000, and a regular company receives USD 75.000 income from PHP development per year. By multiplying this with the number of companies in the world, we can estimate the size of the PHP software development market - USD 5.6 billions.

Rules

In order to win a pitch with a PHP solution, a company should offer a good price and should have a very good proposal.

To get a profitable PHP business, you have to sell either CMS's or Intranets.

The obstacles to be surpassed are the fear of unknown technology, the compatibility between PHP solutions and existing ASP or Java applications. One should focus on the solution offered not on the technology when bidding for a project.

Future

To get large companies to accept PHP, the community should focus on starting off with internal PHP websites - that should offer a "live" demonstration of the solution to decision makers, and continue by allying with large companies (like Sun, Macromedia or IBM)

To make sure your company is ready for enterprise-level development, set up a Quality Assurance department and a Technical Support department and start using tools to become productive.

By the time the recession ends, PHP will have gained a significant market segment, only if it proves to be a mature solution that satisfies a large pool of clients.

The future looks bright for the PHP software developers.

You are welcome to discuss your opinions about the survey in our Forum.