Measuring The Impact of Qt on Your Business

Today, I wanted to talk to you about a recently conducted Total Economic Study for commercial customers of Qt by Forrester Consulting. Please find the report here.

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In many ways, Qt has been ahead of its time. Its ability to work on basically anything now truly shines as the Internet of Things (or “Internet of Thinking”, as we move into the future) matures. And with the number of devices developed still exponentially outgrowing the number of developers, tools like Qt become a necessity to keep up with the market.

We all ask ourselves, as we should: “Are we doing the right thing?”

A lot of our customers have done so before they adopted Qt. Understandably so: You expect your software to be around for years, even decades, and committing to a development framework is a high-risk decision that will directly impact your organization, its bottom line, and competitiveness for years to come.

The questions will take various shapes as different considerations become relevant throughout the project life-cycle:

Short-term considerations: “What will my return on investment be?” “Will it help me meet the market requirements and customer expectations?” “Does our workforce have the right skillset to adopt the tool into a unified development process?”

Mid-term considerations: “How will a framework impact development and (for embedded devices) hardware cost?” “Will it help me go to market faster?” “What other competitive advantages can it incur?”

Long-term considerations: “Will the framework still be supported in ten years?” Does it help me minimize the maintenance of toolchains and the associated costs?” “What are the costs if I want to expand my software to other platforms in the future?”

At the Qt Company, we too constantly ask ourselves: “Are we doing the right thing?” And because we all have some degree of bias towards what is ours, we have to look outside for answers.

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Our annual customer survey, for example, shows encouraging results: In 2017, Qt has met or exceeded 95.3% of our customer’s ROI expectations and made 78.2% of developers more productive. That is fantastic, but I was curious to see how someone from the outside would quantify the value of our product.

Forrester conducted a Total Economic Impact study to examine the potential return on investment businesses may realize with Qt and evaluate its potential financial impact on organizations.

To do that, Forrester interviewed four commercial Qt customers and used the data to construct a composite organization. The key findings on how Qt affected the organization's business exceeded even the expectations set by our own survey:

  •  The payback period for Qt’s licensing and operational costs was three months
  • The ROI after three years was 289%.
  • The net present value measured over a three-year period was $422’833

Further findings from the interviews that apply to any organization were:

  • Customers saved (on average) 30% of their software development costs by using Qt.
  • Customers could reduce hardware costs by 10% coming from a native and up to 80% from an HTML toolchain.
  • Device innovations and improvements released to market sooner because the development process was simpler and faster.
  • The fact that Qt is mature, stable and well supported gave customers a sense of confidence for the future.

Forrester was so kind to share with us their algorithm used to estimate the ROI for Qt embedded customers. Please feel free to try it to find out how Qt would affect your company.

While these results reassure us that we’re doing the right thing in enabling you to create better products faster and at a lower cost, we do not want to sit on our laurels. Instead, we want to take this feedback as encouragement to keep questioning and improving ourselves.

So, to all of you that brought us this far by challenging us to achieve greater heights every day, the customers and the competitors, the developers and the business people, the thinkers and the dreamers.

Thank you!

Juha Varelius, CEO, The Qt Company

 


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