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Executive Summary: The Best of TechEd Awards—produced and presented by Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine—recognize the most innovative products and services offered by Microsoft partners that exhibited at TechEd 2009, held in June 2009 at the Los Angeles Convention center. Here are our winners! |
The Best of TechEd Awards—produced and presented by Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine—recognize the most innovative products and services offered by Microsoft partners that exhibited at TechEd 2009, held in June 2009 at the Los Angeles Convention center.
Our judging panel consisted of Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine editors who narrowed an impressive field of more than 170 submissions down to 35 finalists in 13 categories. Onsite in Los Angeles, Technical Director Michael Otey, Editor in Chief Jeff James, and Executive Editor Sheila Molnar interviewed the finalists and evaluated the products to determine a final list of winners.
Our judges evaluated the entries based on three criteria: strategic importance, competitive advantage, and value to customers. We also selected a Best Microsoft Product, and show attendees cast their own votes to determine the winner of the prestigious Attendees' Pick Award.
Breakthrough Product: Data Robotics—DroboPro
DroboPro is a new storage array that employs an innovative storage-virtualization platform to provide a scalable, easy-to-use storage option for SMBs. No need to remember annoying details like the differences between RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5—DroboPro figures that out for you.
Best Microsoft Product: Microsoft—Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Few products are as integral to a modern business IT infrastructure as SQL Server 2008. It serves as the foundation for many other Microsoft applications and is rapidly adding features that make it a top-notch business intelligence platform, as well.
Business Intelligence: DevExpress—DevExpress Analytics
DevExpress Analytics provides Pivot Grids and Charts for Winforms and ASP.NET AJAX. It has comprehensive data mining and analytics, and provides an elegant charting and graphing library.
Database Administration: xkoto—GRIDSCALE for SQL Server
xkoto’s GRIDSCALE for SQL Server emulates SQL Server and sits between applications and SQL Server systems. It’s an active-active system with no downtime, so there’s continuous availability, and no single point of failure. It’s several times faster than the competing Oracle RAC, which could make it compelling to enterprises considering a switch.
Database Development: Quest Software—Quest Toad for SQL Server
A fully featured development tool for managing SQL Server, Quest Toad for SQL Server is particularly useful for businesses running multiple versions of SQL Server. It connects to SQL Server 2000 or later and provides advanced T-SQL performance tuning and transaction log recovery.
Developer Tools: AVIcode—Avicode Intercept Studio
AVICode Intercept Studio is a .NET application monitoring product that you use to detect and troubleshoot .NET applications. Intercept Studio also employs a low-overhead approach that makes it ideal for tracking application performance throughout the development lifecycle.
Hardware, Networking, and Storage: HP— StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array
A virtualized midrange storage array, the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) offers an impressive amount of performance and flexibility at a competitive price point. Products in the EVA range can support from 96 to 324 individual drives and storage capacities ranging from 96TB to 324TB.
Messaging: Sherpa Software—Mail Attender for Exchange
Sherpa Software's Mail Attender for Exchange provides Exchange administrators with a flexible toolbox of useful Exchange utilities, ranging from automated scheduling of common policies to flexible transfer/migration rules.
Productivity and Collaboration: Axceler—ControlPoint
Axceler ControlPoint helps IT pros get better control of their SharePoint environment through permissions management, content management, in-depth usage analysis, policy enforcement, and flexible alerts and scheduled analyses.
Security: Specops Software—Specops Password Reset
Dealing with users who've forgotten their passwords can consume a lot of time for IT administrators, and it's a problem that Specops Password Reset provides an elegant solution for. This product gives users the power to recover and change their passwords themselves, all while maintaining overall system security.
Software Components and Middleware: JNBridge—JNBridge Pro
JNBridge Pro is an essential tool for businesses using both .NET and Java applications. JNBridgePro lets you join .NET and Java applications at the object, class, and component level. If your development work has you straddling the worlds of .NET and Java, JNBridge Pro should be in your software toolbox.
Systems Management and Operations: Double-Take Software—Double-Take Move
Double-Take Move can streamline the most onerous migration tasks, thanks to smart technology that can perform migrations and move workloads seamlessly between physical-to-physical (P2P), physical-to-virtual (P2V), and virtual-to-physical (V2P) environments across disparate hardware platforms.
Virtualization: VMware—Virtual Infrastructure 3.5
VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 sets the virtualization standard for enterprises today. It combines a rock-solid, highly scalable virtualization platform with a host of high-availability and dynamic VM-management features.
Attendees' Pick: DevExpress Analytics
Developer Express also won in the Attendees' Pick category, with DevExpress Analytics emerging as the most popular product as voted by hundreds of TechEd show attendees.
