PHP Market Overview

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

The PHP Market Seen through the Eyes of a Software Developer

We'll see next how people see the PHP market - as number of developers and number of PHP websites. We've asked the people filling our survey to tell us any information that could help us estimate the size of the PHP market.

How many professional PHP developers are there in the world today?

The estimated number of PHP professionals is relatively large. 150,000 developers represent 75,000 companies working with PHP (average of 2 programmers per company), with an estimated market size of 5.6 billions dollars (USD 75,000 average income per company). The accuracy of this estimation is not at all a certainty, but we have numbers to play with and you can express your view in our Forum.

Has the recession increased the need for PHP solutions?

Estimating how the current recession has increased the need for effective solutions, we see that most people consider PHP has become a choice against other commercial technologies because of the recession.

As for relevant market information sources, we've received a lot of feedback from the people that filled in the survey.

Large companies using PHP

• Yahoo -  http://public.yahoo.com/~radwin/talks/yahoo-phpcon2002.htm
• HP is using PHP here - http://h41120.www4.hp.com/smb_dev/index_uk.php
• Danone - Brazilian website running with PHP + DB2
• ThinkPHP / Mayflower GmbH in Munich is working right now for 5 of the German Fortune 25 companies, including Siemens, Deutsche Post, Hypovereinsbank, EON and others.
• Hungarian Government and Romanian Government - http://www.mcti.ro/
• Enterprise sites which use PHP on Windows include Nokia, Valero, Sony and Electronic Arts.

Interesting web reports

• Sun Developers Fact-sheet - http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/edge2003/factsheet.pdf
• The PHP Weblogs PHP popularity report - http://php.weblogs.com/popularity
• http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/30/php_growing_surprisingly_strongly_on_windows.html

Alternative surveys/forums

• http://www.zend.com/zend/php_survey_results.php
• http://www.sitepointforums.com/showpost.php?postid=869363&postcount=111
• http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/19/2133204

What they say about PHP

• http://php.ist.unomaha.edu/presentations/secondclass.pdf
• Microsoft - migrating PHP to ASP

Generally, we can see that PHP has already entered the large enterprise market, but the process is still in an early stage. A lot of battles must be won to be able to stand against competitive technologies, such as ASP/.NET or Java.