eWEEK Excellence Awards Honorees Reflect New IT Computing Trends, Challenges

The job of selecting and buying technology has never been easy, but it’s only getting harder as the development pace quickens, the deployment and platform options grow, and the stakes get higher.

The goal of the eWeek Excellence Awards program, now in its eighth year, is to make that job a little bit easier by pointing IT buyers to the most promising new enterprise products and technologies.

The eighth annual eWeek Excellence Awards program was open to any enterprise-focused product announced in 2007 and made available before March 31, 2008. Vendors could enter as many products and services as they wished, and were charged $50 per entry. (Proceeds from the entry fees are being donated to Boys & Girls Clubs of America clubhouses.)

eWEEK editors judged the entries on:

• Innovation
• Practical integration of emerging technologies
• Suitability to task
• Cost effectiveness
• Potential for helping companies create business efficiencies
• Manageability
• Potential for helping companies develop competitive advantage
• Securability

When the Excellence Awards program started eight years ago, internal servers—l;often with one application per server—predominated, Web services were mostly uncharted territory and open platforms were pretty much unheard of in the enterprise.

Of course, eight years is several generations in IT time, and the products that were entered in this year's program show how much things have changed: Many of the products enable and/or support server virtualization, and many are delivered via the Web and in the open-source model.

The finalists and winners in the eighth annual eWeek Excellence Awards program are leading in these new directions, as well as meeting the new management and security challenges cropping up along the way.

Next: And the winners are ... >>