Awards programs seem like theyre a dime a dozen. The sheer quantity of awards—and Im not just talking about computing technology awards—often dilutes the importance of legitimate awards programs and leaves readers and viewers feeling that nothing was accomplished.
Fortunately, in my unbiased opinion, we have the eWeek eXcellence Awards. This is perhaps the only contest judged by analysts who study their respective beats and by top-level professionals who happen to be eWeek Corporate Partners. In other words, there was far more rigorous judging than at any Olympic skating event, and as of today, no nation has threatened to walk out of the ceremony.
If nothing else, the eWeek eXcellence Awards reaffirm my belief that computing technology is just as necessary as ever before—maybe more so. Its clear that were not reaching that feared level of maturity in the industry. Maturity indicates that technology has solved the most pressing computing issues. Maturity indicates that mainline technologies have become commodities. Maturity indicates boredom in an industry, a place where unionization kicks in and professionals flee to other areas.
Fortunately, the industry is still growing. In fact, to hear some high-profile industry CEOs talk, youd be convinced that weve reached a new level of immaturity.
This infancy shows itself in the areas that really drive businesses, including application integration, analytics and reporting, storage, management, and security. These five categories have been the lifeblood of computing for several years, and yet its apparent that its still extremely difficult to get applications to work together, that companies dont know their customers and that theyve found it difficult to manage IT.
The products that best help companies solve these issues garnered the highest awards. Ionas Orbix E2A Web Services platform, winner of the Application & Web Services Development eXcellence Awards category, is designed to assist companies grappling with decisions over the differing Web services standards to comfortably move ahead, whatever their choice.
Likewise, Informaticas and e.Piphanys analytics helped them win their respective categories (Analytics & Reporting and Customer Relationship Management). The products help companies manage the tremendous amounts of data entered into their systems to better interact with their customers.
IBMs WebSphere, the winner of the E-business Foundations division, is fast becoming the core building block around which all IBM software and services are built.
These products arent near the end of their life cycles. They are just getting started.
Are there any technologies that we missed? Write to me at john_taschek@ziffdavis.com.
