Excellence Awards 6 Winners, Finalists Show Innovation Up and Down IT Stack

WINNER

Cognos

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence 8.1.1

IT vendor response to corporate governance mandates drove innovation in many categories this year, but nowhere was this more apparent than in the entries for Analytics & Reporting. The category winner, Cognos 8 Business Intelligence 8.1.1, addressed enterprise interest in achieving improved governance without a cumbersome and costly proliferation of systems.

"Cognos has integrated its diverse product offering into a flexible Web services architecture," said eWeek Corporate Partner judge Tom Miller, senior director of IT at FoxHollow Technologies, in Redwood City, Calif. "The use of a single metadata layer and query engine provides for a cohesive view of business information."

With the deep-dyed awareness of compliance concerns that comes from FoxHollows work in medical device development and support, Miller has a sharply focused shopping list: "The need to aggregate, classify and report information in a timely manner has become critical," he said in his comments during the final stages of evaluation. "These products must be business-flexible, scalable, secure and cost-effective." The judges found Cognos entry a match for this high standard.

FINALISTS

Attenex

Attenex Patterns

Vast compilations of digital records create overwhelming discovery workloads during litigation—a burden that Attenex Patterns ably eases. Attenexs Patterns is "the best e-discovery tool that I have used," said Stanley Gibson, partner at Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro, in Los Angeles, and a Patterns customer the judges interviewed for real-world perspective. "There is no other tool Im aware of," Gibson said, with comparable aids for visualizing clusters of conceptually related documents.

Fujitsu Software

Interstage XWand 7

As business processes become ever more "born digital," enterprise architects face both opportunity and challenge in achieving cross-process integration. Emerging standards such as Extensible Business Reporting Language offer leverage toward that end, and Fujitsu Softwares Interstage XWand 7 gives developers a capable platform for XBRL adoption.

—Peter Coffee

Vulnerability Assessment & Remediation

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