Best In Show: Three Companies That Took CRN's Top Honors At NexGen Cloud

And The Awards Go To...

In Tech Tank 2014,15 companies vied for recognition at NexGen Cloud Conference, which took place in San Diego last week. Five winners of CRN's Tech Innovator Awards competed for the coveted CRN Editors' Choice award for 2014. Six Enterprise App Award winners duked it out to be called Best of Show. And an additional four conference exhibitors paid extra for the privilege of facing off against one another in front of the Tech Tank audience for a separate "Best of Show" honor. Here's a brief description of the Tech Tank judging process, followed by the results.

The Judges

The 2014 Tech Tank panel of "sharks" consisted at various times of CRN Senior Editor Joe Kovar, whose coverage areas include storage and servers; Senior Editor Joseph Tsidulko, who owns the cloud beat on CRN; and Senior Editor Kevin McLaughlin on the virtualization beat (shown, middle). Judging all presentations was CRN Test Center Managing Editor Edward J. Correia (near left), who manages the CRN test labs and performs product testing and reviews. He also served as moderator for the event. Serving as judges were members of the XChange Advisory Board. These judges were Jason Lambiers, CEO of Apex Digital; Sam Coyl, president of Netrepid (far left); and Cumulus Global CEO Allen Falcon. After all presentations were completed, the judges convened to discuss the presentations and select winners. Click "Next" to see the winners.

Intellect MobileApps

A big risk paid off in spades for Interneer. On one side was a live demonstration of Intellect MobileApps, a code-free way to build apps for iOS. On the other side was a 10-minute timer. Undaunted, Interneer Solutions Analyst Scott Smith (center) and Channel Development Manager Todd Lushinsky (r) were confident that the drag-and-drop solution could be shown to work live on stage. Judges were impressed with the resulting application, which was deployed in realtime to an iPhone and even made use of the device's camera. This year's Tech Innovator Award winner for Productivity also is the recipient of the 2014 CRN Editors' Choice award: Interneer Intellect MobileApps.

Imperva Skyfence

Imperva was one of the four companies that paid to compete. Director of Channel Sales Mark McDaniel (second from left) presented a series of slides describing Skyfence, which Imperva acquired in February for $60 million. Skyfence is designed to detect, assess risk and apply context-aware security policies to apps being executed by enterprise workers in the cloud. Judges were impressed with the tool's detection capabilities, its ability to lock certain types of end-user content and SaaS apps, and the fact that admins can apply end-point control transparently to the user, if desired. Imperva took one of two Best of Show awards at NexGen Cloud.

Ruckus Wireless Hot Spot

In which areas of a mall do shoppers most accumulate? Where are the shortest lines in the department store? How many protesters are at the gates? Steve Wimsatt, director of business development at Ruckus Wireless, was on hand to describe the Smart Positioning Technology (SPot), the company's latest access point software, which can programmatically -- and passively-- get answers to all three questions just by reading the Wi-Fi beacons of mobile devices. This year's Editors' Choice for Enterprise Applications, SPoT also was awarded Best of Show for this far-reaching technology and the myriad revenue opportunities it affords creative solution providers, retailers and others.

Visit CRN's NexGen Cloud Conference coverage page for more of the 2014 Tech Tank Tech Innovator and Appy competitions.