EPiServer Partner and Developer Community Stats 2013

See also:
EPiServer Developer Community Stats 2012

Statistics: Worthless, but fun

See also: my original rant on why ECD count is a pointless way to measure a partner.

Right, so this is fast becoming an annual tradition. EPiServer publishes updated partner info, then someone posts a slightly biased "biggest EPiServer partners list" based on ECD count, then I correct complement that list with stats on activity in the developer community.

While these posts may be amusing reading material (and add to the friendly rivalry), all this is in vain, of course. As we all know, statistics can show whatever we want them to show.

Headcount might indicate how many projects they can take on per year, but does not tell you anything about the quality they deliver. In fact, some clients actually prefer working with smaller partners for closer collaboration. Where many big partners have divisions in multiple countries, clients may have to cope with their project being done by teams with different time zones, languages and work culture. 

Nor does comparing the amount of forum posts, active bloggers or EMVPs reveal much useful. At best, you can perhaps get a sense of a partner's attitude towards contributing to the community. (And don't get me wrong, a handful of people at the biggest partners have made some VERY big contributions to the community.) 

There is no doubt there are a lot of skilled and passionate developers, my only wish would be that even more become visible and active in the community. The 3 biggest partners combined apparently have over 130 ECDs, so where are they all hiding? 

But let's stop focusing on quantity, and get back to what's important:
Making quality code, making the community great, and making customers happy.

That being said, let's move on to the tabloid section, shall we?

Activity on EPiServer World

Credit where credit's due - these are the EPiServer World top 30 contributors*  at the moment.
(Current EPiServer employees excluded - alumni included).

(Last updated: Feb 27 2013)

* I built a scraper tool to save me some time in making the list, but I still have to manually add which user profiles to scrape. Inevitably there will be some errors (as already pointed out in the comments), so please let me know if you spot a boo-boo. 
EPiServer: Please spend 2 hours building this feature on World!

Note: Magnus Rahl a.k.a The EPiBorg has been assimilated into the core and is no longer on the list. 

Most ECDs

Another worthless but interesting piece of trivia:

There's an increasing amount of partners who create divisions abroad, and outsource some of their domestic projects to those divisions. This means that ECDs involved in a project are not necessarily located in the same country as the client. (The foreign divisions have to exclusively serve the parent company's domestic market in order to count, though).
If we had counted ECDs by the country in which the developer works, the order of the "biggest partners" would not look the same.

Also, I sum up all the devs belonging to a partner worldwide, not per country. This makes my list a bit different from the one posted on World recently (but more accurate, I think.) 
This is my version of the top 10 partners by ECD count: (based on official numbers from EPiServer)

Partner-related trivia:

• Only two Premium Partners in the world have upgraded their own sites to EPiServer7 (one in Norway, one in USA)
• One of the Premium Partners is still running EPiServer4 on their own site.

What's important when choosing an EPiServer partner

Comparing the number of developers is the IT equivalent of comparing the size of.. well, you know. It's nice to be the biggest, but choosing a n EPiServer partner I'd be more concerned about:

• What's their average experience level with EPiServer? Worked with several generations of EPiServer, or just the newest?
• Can they coach and advise me on the entire process of producing a well-functioning site?
• Will I be able to meet the team often and communicate smoothly?
• Are the project teams agile enough to handle changing specs?
• Are they experienced enough to steer me away from bad tech/design decisions and help me make good ones?
• Will they still take good care of my project after the glamour of the site launch has faded, or will they rush off to new and exciting projects?
• How do other clients describe working with them?

END OF RANT