Innovating Winners

The winners of this year's VARBusiness 2005 Technology Innovators Awards are shining examples of what good ideas cleverly implemented can do to create new technologies and breathe new life into existing wars.

Winning products appealed to VARs selling to customers with just a handful of employees up to Fortune 1000 companies with tens of thousands of employees.

Perhaps the biggest winner was the company that has prided itself on technical innovation the longest--IBM. In addition to grabbing the overall VARBusiness Technology Innovator of the Year award, Big Blue also won in the Server-Based Computing category.

"Our company is built on technology. We pride ourselves on that, and the pSeries 505 is a good example," says Debra Thompson, IBM's vice president of channel management and marketing. "What we are proud of, too, is the VARs who voted us for this award. It is their value-add, including applications, services and integration, that delivers solutions to customers."

Standing right alongside multibillion-dollar companies that won were small startups. Pingtel, winner in the Open-Source/Linux category, was a good example. The Burlington, Mass.-based company delivered the first SIP telecom solution, called SIPxchange, that figures to give much-needed credibility to open-source vendors that are aspiring to compete in this space.

"This award is a huge validation for our open-source business model," says Al Brisard, Pingtel's vice president of marketing.

A "small" idea that should have a big impact is Toshiba's 2.2 lb. Libretto U100-S213 laptop, which took the honors in the Client Devices category. The lightweight unit's innards are populated with miniaturized features, such as a half-size 802.11 wireless card and 1.8-inch 60-GB hard drive.

AMD's efforts for getting the first dual-core chip to market paid off; the company won in the Components category for its AMD 64x2 dual-core chip. The product is largely designed to multitask multiple workloads for both 32- and 64-bit applications.

SonicWall was a multiple winner, claiming awards in two categories: the Client/Network Security category for its PRO 1260 Enhanced device, which configures each port on a firewall independently in custom-security zones; and the Wireless/Mobility category for its TZ 150 wireless security appliance.

Microsoft's laser focus on small and midsize companies paid off with the company's winning in the SMB Software category for its customizable business-management solution. The offering, Navision 4.0, integrates critical financial, manufacturing, distribution, customer-management, supply-chain, analytics and e-commerce data under one roof.

In Voice & Data Networking, 3Com won for its Switch 8800.

In the Storage category, FalconStor's IPStor Enterprise Edition won. The product helps VARs protect users' information and offer data-replication services to ensure the continuity of mission-critical applications from the desktop up to the data center.