I'm a new hire at a small company in a small town and am having difficulties getting new technology in the door. I've incorporated Spring and want to get Hibernate in as well. The argument presented against me is that ORMs are not widely used in today's market anymore. I need stats, numbers to discredit this assumption. Does anyone know where I can find stats, or does anyone have credible stats about how many companies across the US and the world, currently use an ORM product. Or how many members this particular forum has, etc? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

i don't have any of those concrete national numbers you are asking for, but since you mention you could get another technology in without having to go through a similar experience let me present you with this taken from the 2 techs forums:

Spring: Threads: 12,485, Posts: 49,721, Members: 8,364
Hibernate: Threads: 31,107 Posts: 119,455, Members: 20,008

so if we use numbers alone hibernate is 250% bigger than spring...
and mind you the growth has only been rising since the forum started.
ORM's like Hibernate/EJB3 have probably never been bigger as it is now and in the future (and the same can be said about technologies like spring)

But as with any technology, evaluate if it is a good use for the problem you need to solve; don't just look on trends/numbers etc. take an educated decision. Read the docs, try it and understand it in your application context.

Note that hibernate.org got > 5 million pageviews in January (>16 million hits).