At EDB, the health and safety of our employees, partners, customers, and the global community are our highest priorities. In light of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic we're all living through, we find it important to understand how PostgreSQL users are being affected.
As the effects of the virus ripple, information technology spending is now projected to decline by 5% this year. We surveyed 2,190 people who downloaded PostgreSQL in early April. It included 527 organizations with more than 100 employees. Here's what we learned, and thoughts on where to focus next steps.
Results: Economic Impact on PostgreSQL Users
Which best describes your industry?
The top three industries affected are Information Technology, Banking/Finance, and Government.
Which best describes your job responsibilities?
The majority of users surveyed were developers.
How long do you expect it will be for your organization's IT spend to return to levels before this pandemic?
The majority of users surveyed projected an unchanged spend, or only a few months of spend affected.
Change in Spend by Area
The top areas of spend change are Postgres, Replatforming, and OS contracts.
Change in Spend by Job Type
Most spend is unchanged across job types, with some areas like Business management to require more spend.
Observations
Major findings and takeaways from this data were:
- The pandemic is having minimal impact on these PostgreSQL downloaders. Disclaimer: The audience set was skewed towards application developers who may not have budget control or broad visibility.
- Some areas of spend are less affected by the economic situation - Postgres, Replatforming, OS contracts.
- Some areas of spend are seeing greater reductions - Overall IT budget, IT staffing, new application development.
So what does this mean? These results bring up some questions for businesses to consider, in an effort to work smarter to overcome what's ahead. These include:
- Why are certain areas more important than others when it comes to spending?
- Are there good opportunities now to cut vendor costs and accelerate projects on deck?
- Are open source technologies like Postgres doing better because of the weakening economy?
Arriving at Promising Solutions
During these uncertain and trying times, it's necessary to start rethinking spend—while maintaining effectiveness. Maybe you've been overspending on Oracle databases and considering breaking free by replatforming. According to the results, many are considering Postgres as an alternative to legacy databases. EDB is making this easier through migration services that offer remote, assisted, automated, and managed Oracle migration.
What about the stress of finding staff to support Postgres deployments, redefining "business as usual," and maintaining business stability in an unstable economy? The team here works to remain customer-obsessed and solve this need through offerings like our Remote DBA services.
We will continue our disciplined commitment to our customers so we can help you endure, just as Postgres will, through this time.