JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA For Technology Leaders

JetBrains commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying IntelliJ IDEA.¹ This abstract will focus on technology leaders use of JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA and its value to their organizations, specifically from their point of view.

The following technology leaders in small-to-medium sized organizations were interviewed for this TEI:

• Global head of engineering at a $5 billion financial services organization.

• CTO at a $1.5 billion e-commerce organization.

• Head of engineering, infrastructure at a $600 million software vendor.

In addition, Forrester also interviewed the director of software engineering at a $88 billion telecommunications organization. One of the key goals that technology leaders across industries have is to drive innovation, while maintaining and improving their organization’s competitive positioning and continue satisfying demanding customers. Ensuring software development teams have the best tools — especially in a fast changing, AI-driven world — not only drives efficiency and accelerates software iteration but also improves team satisfaction while maintaining high levels of quality.

JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Java and Kotlin developers. It offers multiple integrations and supports an open approach to plug-ins, including third-party AI language models and agents, which enable developers and teams to optimize code creation and code quality workflows.

Investment Drivers For Technology Leaders

The interviewees’ organizations adopted IntelliJ IDEA to optimize development efficiency and enhance the experience of their development teams. These organizations struggled with several challenges in their legacy environments, including:

• Pressure for faster and higher-quality software development. Software is a core focus for many organizations because it enables them to innovate, improve customer experiences, streamline processes, and reduce costs. Thus, iterating software faster means core capabilities can be improved earlier, such as developing software upgrades with new features, updating commerce apps, and improving financial trading capabilities. The CTO at the e-commerce organization noted, “We use JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA for our mobile and web shopping and payments apps.” Furthermore, with the capabilities that AI advances enable, it is also important for these organizations to be able to easily evaluate and integrate new AI tools.

• Attracting and retaining developer talent. A fundamental part of being able to use software development as a competitive edge is attracting and retaining a strong development team. Providing them with high-quality tools that enable them to do their job efficiently, where they spend much of their working time, is therefore critical. The global head of engineering at the financial services organization noted, “It’s important that we retain developers, especially the more experienced ones.”

• Reduced regression risk. Technology leaders also consistently shared the importance of having a software development tool that did not break existing systems and codebases. The CTO at the e-commerce organization shared: “IntelliJ IDEA is best for large distributed code bases, even across enterprise architecture as it understands links to other parts of the business. For example, the robots in our warehouse need [to interact] with related codebases and orchestration platforms, while [alternative IDEs] struggled with this.” This reduces the likelihood that bugs and errors enter production environments, reducing unnecessary and complex code, avoiding costly outcomes and additional remediation effort.

IntelliJ IDEA Features

The interviewees’ organizations chose to invest in IntelliJ IDEA for the following reasons:

• Capabilities ensuring high-quality code. The head of engineering, infrastructure at the software organization noted: “[IntelliJ IDEA] is preferred for code review in comparison to [other IDEs] due to good navigation, symbol resolution, and contextual understanding.” IntelliJ IDEA possesses features such as code standardization, structured and integrated workflows, database tools, as well as a large ecosystem that help to reduce errors, improve quality, and avoid the need for remediation.

• Plug-ins, integrations, and openness to AI. The CTO at the e-commerce organization highlighted: “High developer satisfaction stems from integrated tooling. Engineers value having a tight integration of IDE, CI/CD, AI tools, and assistants rather than having to mix and match from best-of-breed tools.” IntelliJ IDEA works with a very broad range of plug-ins, integrations, workflows, and other development tools. As such, it offers a rich environment that can be readily customized and configured to suit different needs and requirements. Furthermore, its open approach to AI enables the use of both JetBrains and third-party AI tools within the IDE.

• Management of large, complex code bases. Many interviewees highlighted IntelliJ IDEA’s ability to manage large code bases as an important capability. They noted that it offers visibility into understanding dependencies and enables developers to identify the impact that new or changed code will have across the codebase. This capability is particularly valuable in microservices environments, where connections are distributed across loosely coupled environments. The software engineering director at the telecommunications organization explained, “IntelliJ IDEA is also very good at code modernization because it is able to understand whole context, use of APIs, connections to microservices, and so on.”

Key Results For Technology Leaders

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

Faster software iteration.

• Interviewees said IntelliJ IDEA improved developer productivity and accelerated software delivery across their organizations. Most technology leaders aim to accelerate the rate of software iterations across internal systems, customer-facing digital experiences, and commercial software products. With IntelliJ IDEA, they reported improvements in code quality, code creation efficiencies, and onboarding, which in turn enabled new software to be delivered faster. Furthermore, interviewees also noted that particularly for code modernization projects, it enabled faster completion, reducing the cost of maintaining legacy software.

Optimization of AI development tools.

• Interviewees noted that IntelliJ IDEA helped their development teams evaluate, adopt, and use AI development tools more effectively. As AI development tools continue to evolve rapidly, interviewees said it was important to evaluate new capabilities and ensure development teams could take advantage of them. They noted that IntelliJ IDEA’s open approach to AI — wherein both JetBrains and third-party tools can be used within the IDE — enabled developers to easily test and compare capabilities across tools within a single development environment. Furthermore, interviewees also reported the overlapping capabilities of some AI tools and IntelliJ IDEA, which helped reduce unnecessary AI token consumption.

Stronger developer culture.

• Interviewees reported high levels of developer satisfaction with using IntelliJ IDEA, which supported developer acquisition, retention, and productivity. Attracting and retaining developer talent and ensuring developer teams remain productive and engaged is also a key objective for technology leaders. Interviewees also shared that developers valued the capabilities of IntelliJ IDEA, as well as its ability to integrate with different tools, workflows, and plugins, as well as its ease of configurability.