Sporting a raft of new features that are both intriguing and useful and offering a healthy embrace of industry-standard x86 and x86-64 platforms, Sun's Solaris 10 bested rival entrants to claim the top spot in the e-Business foundations category.WINNER
Sun Microsystems Inc.
Solaris 10
Sporting a raft of new features that are both intriguing and useful and offering a healthy embrace of industry-standard x86 and x86-64 platforms, Suns Solaris 10 bested rival entrants to claim the top spot in this years e-Business foundations category.
For a list of all the winners and finalists of the fifth annual eWEEK Excellence Awards, click here.
Excellence judges were impressed with the security and server consolidation applications of Solaris 10s Solaris Containers functionality, which promises to offer sites some of the benefits of products such as VMware Inc.s VMware without additional license costs.
Judges in this category also appreciated the performance and manageability of the systems Process Rights Management feature, which administrators can use to tighten system privileges—and can do so with a learning curve thats shorter than that of the Security-Enhanced Linux implementations weve seen so far.
Beyond the products new features, the judges also found impressive Suns new pricing scheme for Solaris—the operating system is freely available via download, with service sold separately. This places the onus on Sun to deliver real value with its services.
For more information, cruise to www.sun.com.
FINALISTS
IBM
DB2 Universal Database
Autonomic computing, in which complex computer systems ease management chores by taking better care of themselves, promises to make life considerably easier for administrators.
Autonomic computing materialized impressively this year in the form of IBMs DB2 Universal Database 8.2. Excellence Awards judges were particularly taken with DB2s self-optimization functionality, which, as one judge pointed out, stands to shift the balance of power in the enterprise database market unless Oracle and Microsoft move soon to develop similar functionality in their own database offerings.
You can go to www.ibm.com for more information.
Novell Inc.
Open Enterprise Server
Novells Open Enterprise Server, in which a mature and thoughtfully implemented stack of network services can run on top of either Linux or NetWare, caught Excellence judges eyes for the migration options it offers for enterprises.
Open Enterprise Server promises to provide Novell shops with a path to the growing, actively developed and flexible Linux platform that preserves eDirectory.
In addition, Open Enterprise Server offers sites running the expiring Windows NT platform an alternative to Windows Ser- ver 2003 and Active Directory thats considerably more polished than the Linux-default OpenLDAP.
Additional information can be found at www.novell.com.
Excellence Awards Winners and Finalists:
Analytics & Reporting
Application Development
Business Integration Systems
Business Relationship Management
Desktop & Mobile Hardware
E-Business Foundations
E-Mail Management & Security
Enterprise Collaboration & Messaging
Enterprise Storage Hardware
Enterprise Storage Software
IT Quality Assurance Tools
Productivity Applications
Server Hardware
Networking & Management Tools
Networking Infrastructure
System & Application Management
Authentication & User Management
Network Data-Stream Protection
Vulnerability Assessment & Remediation
Linux & Open Source 
