SANTA CRUZ, USA: Evans Data Corp today announced that IBM's Rational tool suite had taken first place in its annual Software Development Platform User Satisfaction survey, being ranked higher than development tool offerings by Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and four others in the 2009 Evans Data Corp. Software Development Platform Users' Choice survey conducted in Spring of this year.

In the worldwide survey of over 1200 developers, only users of each tool suite rated the corresponding products on eighteen different attributes including basic tools supplied, support for remote development, visual tools and declarative support, quality of tech support, documentation, application modeling tools, test tools, and support for parallel programming.

In addition the developers rated the importance of each attribute to provide relative weighting. IBM's Rational tool suite took top scores in multiple categories as well as in combined overall score for the third time in four years.

"IBM continues to refine their end to end software development platform with the focus being that software delivery is a core business process that must be continuously made more effective," said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data Corp.

"The robust development environment and the rich assortment of tools that are provided sets a standard of excellence in development tools as evidenced by its users overall satisfaction," added Andrews.

The Software Development Platform User's Choice survey presents both the category rankings for each suite of tools but also the relative rankings of each within attribute categories to form a profile.

Evans Data provides its Users' Choice reports to the IT community free of charge as a public service. Users' Choice reports cover several areas of satisfaction and interest to developers and IT managers, such as software development platforms, developer programs, scripting languages and others.