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ColdFusion Evangelism Kit

September 15, 2008 11:54 PM

A while back I posted that I was working on a ColdFusion Evangelism Kit. It took a while but it's now in shape to share with you.

Here's a recap of the intentions of this kit:

I am often contacted with people requesting information around the future of CF, Adobe's commitment to it, stats around the product and customer references - by people looking to bring that information back to their departments and organizations to champion CF. For those who never reach me, Adam, Ben, Josh or the account managers (Tim/Derek/Dominick) etc, I'd like to provide a kit that can be used as an evangelism tool for customers to bring back to your organizations or share with your customers.

The Kit includes:

- C-level Exec quote

- Key stats

- Customers by vertical

- Recent Awards

- Press highlights

- Product Roadmap

- CF / other Adobe product integration messaging

- CF Integation HUB

- Measured results of CF usage

DOWNLOAD THE COLDFUSION EVANGELISM KIT HERE

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	Awesome... this will be a great tool. Did I miss the download link?
	Posted By Chris Dawes \| 9/16/08 12:20 AM

	The above posting is supposed to have an option to download the kit.. I am having an issue getting it posted. Please be patient for the blog-challenged. ;) The PDF of the kit should link directly from this post shortly, for you to download.
	Posted By Kristen Schofield \| 9/16/08 12:22 AM

	Hi Chris.. you beat me to the punch.. I was just posting about that. If you want to email me.. I can send it to you in the meantime. kwebb at adobe dot com.
	Posted By Kristen Schofield \| 9/16/08 12:25 AM

	Great news!!!
	Posted By Jim Priest \| 9/16/08 6:47 AM

	This sounds awesome. Looking forward to downloading it.
	Posted By Daniel Short \| 9/16/08 6:56 AM

	Here is the link to the PDF: http://www.webbschofield.com/enclosures/Adobe%20Co... Found it in your RSS feed. Looks like whoever designed your skin forgot to include the link for enclosures?
	Posted By todd sharp \| 9/16/08 8:33 AM

	Kristen: The kit looks pretty good - nice work! Question - on slide 7 could you put a label on the X axis that defines the unit of measurement? For example - the Time to Proficiency Comparison - am I looking at days, months, years? It would be really cool if you posted this to SlideSix.com - and maybe recorded a video intro to the kit! Thanks for your hard work. Todd
	Posted By todd sharp \| 9/16/08 8:38 AM

	Hi all.. the kit is now downloadable from the blog entry above.. see the link. I'll have to get the enclosure bug fixed.
	Posted By Kristen Schofield \| 9/16/08 9:04 AM

	Enclosure bug? I blame your fancy design! It's what you get for having a decent looking blog. ;)
	Posted By Raymond Camden \| 9/16/08 9:23 AM

I'm always intrigued by the developer numbers.
how does Adobe work out these numbers
500,000 developers / 10,000 companies
is 50 developers per company
or a lot of unemployed developers
I've worked for about 12 or so diff CF places and avg staff numbers would be around 5
most is 25
I'm yet to even hear of 1 company with 50 cf devs
not saying there isn't any there probably is.
I'm not even saying your figures are wrong, I'd just like to know how Adobe get the 500,000 figure.
I'm sure there would be a lot of hobbyist devs who don't work etc

cheers
Matt

Posted By m@ | 9/16/08 9:54 AM

	@Matt: Look at some of the companies - AT&T, Sprint, Etc... You may have worked in small shops - but I'd be willing to bet that some of the big name companies are what are balancing out that number.
	Posted By todd sharp \| 9/16/08 10:35 AM

	@Todd but how many 10's of thousends of CF developers does AT&T have ? Europes largest telco (for which I worked) had less then 20CF devs.
	Posted By m@ \| 9/16/08 10:40 AM

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! We need more of this... Please keep it coming. I have been begging for this for the past two years.

In your "Compared to Alternatives" can you provide supporting references and/or research. (i.e. Lowest total cost of ownership) This is a serious statement but without supporting research our execs will discount all the data as propaganda.

I would be happy to put together an "End Notes" page supporting the statements if you can point me to the references and research you used.

Love it!

Posted By Aaron Gillespie | 9/16/08 10:48 AM

	Kristen, This all looks outstanding. This is the kind of data we've needed in one place for years. I'll agree with the need for links to help back up the TCO info. Looks outstanding. Thanks for this, I'm sure it will be a valuable resource.
	Posted By Steve 'Cutter' Blades \| 9/16/08 11:52 AM

	@Matt The European Commission has over 250 developers There are a few companies I know of in the uK that have teams between 5 and 50 CF Developers so they certainly do add up. The trouble is most just do 9-5 and don't really care about progressing themselves further and thus the reason you don't think there are as many as there really are ;)
	Posted By Big Mad Kev \| 9/16/08 3:57 PM

Kristen,

This is great! Been waiting for something like this for a long time! Just the other day had a potential client come back after talking to a "friend" who had told him that CF was a "dead language" and that he "hasn't met a CF developer in over 11 years". ** the "friend" just happened to own a .net shop and was also trying to persuade the potential for their business. At any rate, this would have been very beneficial to have! I may just send it anyway! :)

Posted By Chris Amaro | 9/16/08 4:09 PM

Matt -

the 500k number is refernced in the kit as sourced from Evans. The precise wording should be "over 10k companies" - this is data we have internally at Adobe via customers we work with directly and through the channel. CF has a sweet spot in large enterprise companies, at the departmental level - as well as in gov't agencies. There are some co's / agencies like this that have 15 to 200 CF developers, *worldwide*. Many of the CF developers are scattered amongst different departments within the same company. This is the most typical scenario for CF. Not too long ago, we did an analysis of the number of units of CF shipped and compared that with what we knew to be the average number of developers associated with the units and found the data similar to what Evans claims.

Kristen

Posted By Kristen Schofield | 9/17/08 12:17 AM

	Hey Kristen. Thanks for sharing. This will definitely be very useful.
	Posted By William from Lagos \| 9/17/08 9:56 AM

Kristen, Thank you.

This is a great resource and I have sent it on to several people that work at companies that moved away from Coldfusion to java.

One question that many executives will be looking to answer is, "Can it scale?". Many executives that I have met had the impression that Coldfusion was a "lite" version of java. Could you add a slide that addresses that question (with the obvious caveat that many variables effect scalability)?

Thanks, Rob

Posted By Rob Meidal | 9/17/08 6:32 PM

	@ Matt Coldfusion has allowed people like me to venture out on my own and bring awesome business tools to the non-technical crowd. So, here's a coldfusion developer freelancer. Cheers! Jennifer
	Posted By Jennifer \| 9/17/08 10:36 PM

	Hi Kristen, Would it be possible to get some localized versions of the evangalism kit? Specifically geared towards Mainland Europe (e.g. Germany )?
	Posted By Gary gilbert \| 9/18/08 9:00 AM

	Brilliant, thank you.
	Posted By Aaron Lee \| 9/18/08 10:05 AM

	Kristen, Could you send me a Portuguese version of this kit ? I want to post it on our CF-Brasil group and blog http://porqueCF.com.br (why CF?). If you do not have it, I offer myself to translate it, just send me in an editable format like Word. Thanks. Ricardo
	Posted By Ricardo Parente \| 9/18/08 3:45 PM

Great kit. Thanks for posting.

Regarding Rob's question on scalability, I work for a large investment bank
with a multi-tier architecture consisting of CF, Java middleware,
and IBM Z-series maiframe on the backend. We serve millions of pages per week
on our site, from a cluster of servers behind an F5 load balancer.

CF spends the bulk of its time waiting for the Java middleware and mainframe
systems. These are the biggest scalability bottlenecks in our applications,
and where we spend most time trying to improve performance. We've never had
a scalability issue with CF in the 10 years we've been using it.

(I'm on of those 9-5'ers mentioned earlier. My company has strict rules about disclosing
technical information for security reasons. Sorry I cant be more informative)

Posted By mistered | 9/18/08 9:11 PM

	Very, very, VERY good! Thanks Kristen.
	Posted By simon \| 9/19/08 4:10 AM

	Great slides. A really good resource. I would love to see someone from Adobe expand on this stuff. Are there any Connect recordings of someone presenting this that can be seen?
	Posted By Kevin Roche \| 9/19/08 6:46 AM

	Hi Kristen, excellent convincing tool, does the intention exist of writing in other languages? Please! : P
	Posted By Pedro Claudio \| 9/20/08 10:51 AM

Hi CFers,

Thanks for all your feedback and suggestions. You've further validated the need for such a kit which makes me feel good about the time that went into it. I love a lot of these ideas and will look into many of them (e.g. looking into getting a recording of it, linking to more info, localized versions etc). Hopefully the kit as is can keep people's palette's wet for a while since this stuff takes a longer than any of us would like to produce.

Also - I have been planning on making printed kits available, will let you know when they are.

Kristen

Posted By Kristen Schofield | 9/22/08 2:41 PM

	Hi Nice one , looking forweard for this for a long time . got a suggestion so that it would be very helpful . Document should contain Cost comparison with other technology like PHP and Java (after adding all other extra software which CF dosent need) and ROI Information Looking forward for these changes :) Vishnu www.cfexpose.com
	Posted By Vishnuprasd \| 9/25/08 4:15 AM

	The kit is posted on adobe.com from the ColdFusion product page in a few loactions now. http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/ - Under EVALUATE - On the Datasheets and white papers page - On the Why Upgrade tab Direct link: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/adobecoldfusionevangelismkit.pdf If you're coming to MAX, you can get a printed version of the kit, booklet style.
	Posted By Kristen Schofield \| 10/6/08 1:03 PM

	Here are some additional evangelical <a href="http://www.odesk.com/trends/ColdFusion">; Cold Fusion Developer Trends </a>.
	Posted By Daryl \| 11/4/08 7:29 PM

Hi.. This is GREAT!!! Just what I need, hopefully it can convince my boss (non-techie) to stay with ColdFusion. (He's been getting the "we need to use all the latest technologies" bug.

One thing, although it is a great report, * because* it has Adobe branding all over it I think it has the appearance of being spun so that ColdFusion looks fantastic and kicks ass. (My boss can smell a slick marketing spin a mile away standing up wind in a cow field.)

Area there any reports that give the appearance of it not being biased? (Or versions of this that are non branded, or logos of the company that did the research.)

Posted By Joel | 1/2/09 10:40 PM

Hi folks, in case you didn't see I made a more recent post that has an update kit with comparisons to Java, .Net and PHP, along with total cost of ownership comparison. You can also order free printed versions of the kit which will be mailed to you. The info is located here:
http://www.webbschofield.com/index.cfm/2008/12/17/...

Some of you mentioned localized versions of the kit. One option towards this, is if you know of someone who would like to localize the kit, I may be able to send the source files but take out the references to Adobe since the localizations would be completed outside of corporate. I'd like to localize it but I imagine won't get to all the locales out there.

@Joel - I hear you but the kit actually is an amalgamation of 3rd party data and references. On the page with the press info, click on the link and you will see tons of 3rd party articles on CF8. The quotes are from 3rd party references. On page 3, you can see 3rd party awards CF8 won and lists of customers using CF. Page 7 is based on a Pet Store that Sun published as a reference implementation and Gartner did an independent study of it. We reproduced the same app in CF, and the number of lines of code is what’s compared there. The same exact application built in Java and CF and the difference in amount of code required is a proof point that CF is in fact the faster way to build Java applications. Page 8 has a ROI study of Sandals (we have another one of PGA coming soon) that a 3rd party completed - the link is to the study on thier site. The Total Cost of Ownership and tech comparison is based on so many sources I'd run out of room here but if publishing the method and sources used to create that is helpful, I will do so! Let me know what format would be most useful (e.g. part of the kit or a link to another page that details the info).

I did a session at MAX where I walked through the evangelism kit and other CF positioning (e.g. how and why CF is Java and how it scales and benefits from all the power that Java has. I will post that ppt on this blog. It's not the recorded version but it is annotated. Please feel free to pass the kit along, post to your blogs etc.

Thanks for the suggestions. I am plugging away at them.

Posted By Kristen Schofield | 1/6/09 10:06 PM

	If you send me the source, I'll translate it into Portuguese. It will be handy for me, since I have to do a lecture at Unversity of Valença in Rio de Janeiro next month. Thanks.
	Posted By Ricardo Parente \| 4/2/09 1:34 PM