VARBusiness Honors Vendors At Technology Innovators Awards

But at VARBusiness' second annual Tech Innovators Awards show last month in San Diego, it was apparent that more than just a few household names are doing plenty of groundbreaking R&D. That includes Cisco, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, Sony and Symantec.

In all, VARBusiness recognized three companies—one winner and two runners-up—in each of nine different categories. The winners were chosen from a pool of more than 460 submissions by a panel that included VARBusiness editors and 11 solution providers, many of whom serve on the magazine's advisory board.

One surprising thing was that one of the most mature categories—enterprise software—was dominated by less prominent companies. Maximizer Software's Enterprise 8 CRM software platform won the group, followed by Fast Search and Transfer's FAST ESP information-retrieval solution and Version 8 of Actuate's enterprise reporting platform.

"We've been at this since 1987, meeting customer demand for faster deployments and a need for lower expertise during implementation," said Will Anderson, product manager for Maximizer.

IBM showed off its versatility by winning the applications category with its WebSphere Business Integration Server Express and finishing as a finalist in client devices with its ThinkPad X40. The two awards combined to make Big Blue this year's Overall Technology Innovator.

"The surprising thing we've found about the enterprise and SMB is that their needs are the same, but the difference is the extent of their needs," said Chandra Venkatapathy, IBM's marketing manager for SMB business integration and solutions.

The application category runners-up were VeriSign's Anti-Phishing Solution and Novell's exteNd 5.2 SOA-based suite of infrastructure support software. Open-source software developer JBoss also received an honorable mention for JBoss 4.0.

In the client device category, IBM was joined by Motion Computing, whose M1400 Tablet PC won, thanks in part to the device's View Anywhere display, and AMD's Athlon 64 processor, which also took home the Editors' Choice Award. For its part, Sony garnered two finalist finishes, one for its SAIT-1 drive in the storage category (in which CA won with its BrightStor ARCServe Backup; Hitachi's Ultrastar 10k300 hard disk drive was the other runner-up) and the second for its SuperLite Series Mobile Projector VPL-CX75 in peripherals (in which Sharp won with it LL-151-3D LCD monitor; Xerox was the other runner-up with its Phaser 8400 solid ink printer).

3Com won the mobility category with its Wireless LAN Access Point 7250 and finished as a finalist in the telephony and networking category with its SuperStack 3 Switch 3200. Cisco won the latter category with its Power over Ethernet standard across its Catalyst switching portfolio, and Avaya's IP Office, Small Office Edition was the other finalist. D-Link's Air Premier DWL-2700AP Ruggedized outdoor wireless access point and Airespace's Wireless Location Server rounded out the mobility category.

Finally, Enterasys took security innovation honors with its NetSight Atlas Automated Security Manager, followed by Symantec's Gateway Security 5400 Series and HP's ProCurve Identity Driven Manager. Novell won the Linux category with its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. Runners-up were Wyse Technology's Linux V6 O/S for Thin Clients and Net Integration Technologies' Nitix Autonomic Server Operating System.