Today I had the opportunity to listen to a webinar Eclipse Changes the Game for Application Development by Carl Zetie of Forrester Research. Unfortunately I think you need to be a client of Forrester to see the slides but I was lucky enough to be an invited guest.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet Carl a couple of times and he is one of the few industry analyst that really seems to get Eclipse. He has written extensively about Eclipse and understands the real value is the Eclipse plug-in infrastracture and how the strong ecosystem of Eclipse plug-ins allows the IT departments to gain control of their development tool selection. Carl has also written an article called How Developers Can Conquer Complexity which is particularly useful for describing how IT departnents can capitalize on the Eclipse plug-in infrastructure to choose the best of breed tools.
Interesting, Carl claims one of the biggest barriers to adoption of Eclipse in corporate IT departments is that the developers are afraid of admitting they are using Eclipse. His claim is that a lot of developer are using Eclipse, instead of the ‘standard’ corporate tool.
Unfortunately, you have to be a client of Forrester to see most of Carl’s content. However, if you are in the position of trying to convice you manager about Eclipse, sometimes the perspective of an industry analyst can help. In that case, I’d recommend trying to get access to some of his content.