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

WINNER

Salesforce Winter 06

With the Winter 06 release of its namesake customer relationship management platform, Salesforce.com continues to raise the bar for hosted applications. Salesforce.com Winter 06 is the winner in this category as much for advancing Salesforce.com as a platform on which other applications can thrive as for the significant improvements in capability and usability it brings.

With AppExchange, Salesforce.com now provides a way for companies to find companion products and prebuilt customizations that create ready-made solutions to business problems associated with sales and customer support. AppExchange makes the process of testing and buying these complementary products and customizations much simpler than with off-the-shelf software, which can require considerable integration to achieve meaningful improvements with existing CRM systems.

In this release of Salesforce.com, custom development gets another boost through the addition of sandbox technology: Salesforce Sandbox allows companies to create customizations and to test and refine them, and it provides a way to train users before deploying these customizations en masse.

FINALISTS

Centive Compel Fall 2005

Incentive compensation management systems are notoriously complex and time-consuming to implement. But as a hosted service, and by providing a set of easy-to-learn tools for building plans, Centive Compel eliminates much of the deployment time usually associated with these products. Centive Compel doesnt take the complexity out of creating plans, but it does speed the process of building, testing and managing them, with minimal training.

Exact Software

Exact e-Synergy 360

Exact e-Synergy 360 is an easy-to-customize Web-based application that delivers sales, human resources and document management applications on top of a well-designed workflow engine. E-Synergys flexibility makes it a good choice for companies that want a unified application for managing customer, partner and employee relationships, and these functions hold up well when compared with dedicated systems.

—Michael Caton

Vulnerability Assessment & Remediation

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