2023 SD Times 100

SD Times 100 vs ChatGPT 100

BY J E N N A BA R R O N

It’s June, which means it’s that time of year for us at SD Times to share our list of the top 100 c o m p a n i e s i n t h e s o f t w a r e d e v e l o p m e n t industry. We’ve been doing this since 2003, and for the first time in the list’s 20-year history, we now have something that we didn’t have in previous years: ChatGPT. Given its impressive search capabilities, we thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT to come up with a list and see how it compares to ours.

Well, it turns out it is not so easy to get ChatGPT to share this information The first prompt I gave was to ask what the top 100 software development companies were Its response was essentially that it couldn’t provide me with a list because it doesn’t have access to “real-time data or access to current rankings ” (Remember, ChatGPT was trained on data that only goes up to 2021 )

It also said that company rankings are constantly changing due to factors like “ revenue, market share, and customer satisfaction ” It then told me the best place to find this information would be to look for lists from technology publications, so I guess I’m not out of a job just yet! *phew*

ChatGPT told me: “These sources often provide comprehensive lists based on criteria like revenue, growth, client base, and industry reputation Additionally, market research companies such as Gartner and Forrester Research also publish reports and evaluations of software development companies. I recommend conducting an online search for the most recent rankings or referring to trusted technology publications for the most up-to-date information on the top software development companies.”

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BY M A R A L EO N A R D I , A RT D I R EC TO R

This year’s approach to creating the art for the SD Times 100 takes a look at the impact of AI If AI is able to replace developers’ tasks, could it be used to replace my task of creating art for this feature? Using Adobe Firefly’s text to image feature, I used the following prompt: a robot presenting an award to a man in casual attire, futuristic interior.

Sourcing imagery from Adobe Stock, Adobe Firefly quickly created variations I fully expected to have to retouch the image, but the results I got were compelling, if not entertaining The image above is a result of an interpretation of the prompt and who is supposed to be wearing the casual attire

Firefly also created many oddities On the cover, the man has a third arm with a robot wrist There were many distorted faces and hands and broken, asymmetrical trophies (right, top) Right, bottom is an example of the AI’s constant confusion about whose hand was whose Here, the robot’s hand is nightmarishly composed of human fingertips

No need for me to retouch these images because they illustrate that at least for now, our jobs are intact

Low Code/Digital Transformation

Appian

Caspio

Creatio

Infragistics

Mendix

OutSystems

Quickbase

Unqork

Data and Database Management

Cockroach Labs

Confluent

Databricks

DataStax

Dremio

InfluxDB

Melissa

MongoDB

Neo4j

Oracle

Redis Labs

SAP

Snowflake

Tableau Software

Veeam

Development Tools

ActiveState

Flexera

GitHub

JetBrains

APIs and Integration

Boomi

CData Software

Humanitec

Jitterbit

Kong

Netlify

Postman

Puppet SmartBear

SnapLogic

Solo.io

WSO2

LaunchDarkly

Perforce

Progress

Vercel

Value Stream Management

Checkmarx

Contrast

Veracode

Applause

Applitools

Keysight

Kobiton

Mabl

Micro

Parasoft

Leaders GitLab Harness HashiCorp IBM / Red Hat JFrog Komodor

Testing DevOps Buildkite CircleCI CloudBees Digital.ai DigitalOcean Docker

Octopus Deploy Opsera ServiceNow SUSE Weaveworks

B a s e d o n i t s f i r s t r e s p o n s e i t seemed like its main hangup was that it couldn’t provide me data past 2021, so next I asked if it could give me a list based on what the top 100 in September 2021 were, figuring I could at least compare it to our 2021 SD Times 100 Still no luck

The next thing I tried was to go category-by-category, and voila! It gave me answers So, I ran through the SD Times 100 categories and asked for the top in each category, with the exact number I asked for corresponding to the number per category in our own list

Not surprisingly, several companies made their way onto the list multiple times, with IBM and Microsoft both appearing five times, GitLab appearing

ChatGPT 100

APIs and Integration

MuleSoft (Salesforce)

Apigee (Google Cloud)

Microsoft Azure API Management

IBM API Connect

Amazon API Gateway (AWS)

Dell Boomi

SnapLogic

Postman

TIBCO Software Inc

WSO2

Red Hat (3scale API Management)

Software AG (webMethods)

Data and Database Management

Oracle Corporation

Microsoft Corporation

IBM Corporation

SAP SE

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Google LLC

Teradata Corporation

Snowflake Inc

MongoDB Inc

Cloudera Inc.

Couchbase Inc

Informatica LLC

SAS Institute Inc

Talend SA

Redis Labs Inc

Innovation Leaders

JetBrains

GitLab

Twilio

Elastic

Docker

HashiCorp

four times, and AWS and Google appearing three times. Twelve companies appeared twice: Atlassian, CircleCI, Datadog, Docker, Elastic, HashiCorp, Jenkins (which is not even a company), JetBrains, New Relic, Red Hat, Salesf o r c e , a n d S p l u n k W h e n p u t t i n g together our list, for some companies we have to decide where they fit best so we don’t have any duplicates, even though some of these companies could fit in multiple categories

Throughout the whole list, counting on a category-by-category basis, there was an overlap of just 30 companies between its list and ours Some of the companies it suggested we had used in a different category, some have gone out of business or been acquired in the past two years, and some weren’t even

Development Tools

JetBrains

Atlassian

Microsoft GitHub

GitLab

SonarSource

Jenkins (now part of the Jenkins X project)

CircleCI

Security

Veracode

Checkmarx

Synopsys

WhiteSource

Rapid7

Sonatype

Fortify (Micro Focus)

Qualys

Acunetix

Contrast Security

DevOps

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft Azure

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Atlassian

GitLab

Jenkins (now part of the Jenkins X project)

CircleCI

HashiCorp

Docker Puppet

Chef

Ansible (Red Hat)

New Relic

Datadog

Splunk

JFrog

Prometheus (part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation)

companies at all (for example it sugg

Prometheus, in the DevOps category).

The category with the most similarity was Security, with 6 out of the 10 (60%) companies being the same on both our lists The next most similar category was Low-Code/Digital Transformation with 42% similarity, followed by DevOps with 35% in common, and following that at 33% were APIs and Integration and Data and Database Management All other categories had 30% similarity or less, and there was zero overlap in both the Testing and Innovation Leaders categories

Those trends aside, here is the full list it suggested Keep in mind that these rankings are likely out of date by two years z

Value Stream Management

Tasktop

Plutora

CollabNet VersionOne

Digital.ai

IBM

GitLab

ConnectALL

Testing

Cognizant

Capgemini

Accenture

Infosys

Wipro

Tata Consultancy Services

IBM

HCL Technologies

Performance Monitoring

Dynatrace

New Relic

AppDynamics (Cisco)

Datadog

Elastic Splunk

SolarWinds

Instana (IBM)

Microsoft Azure Monitor

BMC Software

Low-Code/Digital Transformation

Microsoft Power Platform

Mendix

OutSystems

Appian

Salesforce Lightning

Google AppSheet

Zoho Creator