The 2007 Software Industry Award Winners have been announced by Software Business. 
HP Software is the winner of the Software Industry Leadership Excellence for its growth in its software business and opportunities it offers other ISVs.
“HP Software has impacted the software industry this year with its acquisitions and technology-driven initiatives,” said John Cargile, managing director of Software Business.
Other winners include, Parlano, DreamFactory, Concur, Gomez, Symantec, Maxager, GeoLearning, Cognos and Opsource
HP Software -- Software Industry Leadership Excellence
2006-2007 was the year of software at HP. As the sixth largest software company in the world, HP has doubled its software revenue. In CEO Mark Hurd’s keynote at HP Software Universe in June 2007, “software is central to HP’s IT  transformation.”
In Q2 2007, HP grew its business by 13 percent. Hurd attributes one of the reasons to its growth categories such as software. HP is leading the industry because as Hurd said at Software Universe “we're not interested in protecting our old. We're interested in driving the new.” The “new” to HP is HP Software.
HP Software has demonstrated growth and leadership through the following milestones:
Q1 2007:
- Mercury acquisition completed
- Named uncontested revenue leader in the distributed automated software quality (DASQ) market by IDC
- Formed a Business Information Optimization unit to help companies make better decisions and manage their business-critical information throughout its lifecycle
- Announced the acquisition of Bristol Technology Inc., a leading provider of technologies that monitor business transactions, to further enhance HP Software’s leadership in BTO
Q2 2007:
- Named a leader in the business service management (BSM) software market by Forrester Research
- Unveiled a next-generation data warehouse platform and new business intelligence (BI) services that give businesses better access to data
Q3 2007:
- Announced a significant expansion of its BTO capabilities to help IT organizations improve efficiencies and deliver better business outcomes
- Released BTO for SOA is an integrated set of software and services designed to help customers address some of the biggest challenges in SOA adoption
- Announced the acquisition of SPI Dynamics, a provider of web application security assessment software and services, to further strengthen its leadership in the IT application quality management market
HP Software is focused on solving the toughest challenges of CIOs: cutting IT costs, speeding the delivery of new services, and driving profitable growth and business outcomes.
Contact www.hp.com
Parlano -- Best Partnering Initiative With a Large Company
The Microsoft / Parlano Inc. strategic partnership is unique because the combination of the companies’ technologies is truly and demonstrably greater than the sum of its parts.
Consider: Parlano makes software for persistent group chat (chat on steroids), which improves enterprise communication and collaboration by organizing cross-functional teams in business-class chatrooms around important topics or projects. For many companies, group chat is dramatically reducing reliance on email.
Called MindAlign, the software operates on Microsoft’s Live Communications Server, the leading platform for unified communications, which seeks to centralize and simplify organizations’ use of disparate communications modalities, including traditional phone, VoIP, email, chat, video, web conferencing, etc.
From a simplistic perspective, persistent group chat is simply another modality operating on Microsoft’s LCS platform. But because Parlano’s persistent group chat application uniquely organizes users around important business initiatives, it is the natural starting point for branching to interactions in any communications modality. In this way, Parlano’s software puts an important layer of unity into Microsoft’s unified communications vision. And Microsoft’s LCS transforms Parlano’s MindAlign group chat application into the bedrock of efficient unified communications.
The partnering relationship between Parlano and Microsoft has been a critical factor in advancing the products and building market share.
** Editors Note: Microsoft recently acquired Parlano
Contact www.Parlano.com
DreamFactory -- Best Partnering Program
DreamFactory delivers blended internet applications that combine the agility of on-demand delivery with the custom fit of traditional enterprise software. These highly functional solutions are quick to deploy, inexpensive to maintain, and continuously improving through customer driven innovation. DreamFactory's suite of applications include DreamTeam, a project management solution ; OrgView, which rapidly builds, views, and drills down on highly graphical organization charts; SnapShot, a release management and compliance application; Carousel for rich reporting, dashboards and meeting automation; and FormFactory for rich active business forms. DreamFactory also provides a development platform to allow organizations to rapidly develop their own customizable on-demand solutions.
The key to DreamFactory's success is its strategic partnerships with industry- leading organizations. This program was designed to provide customers with a cutting edge solution to lower costs, increase productivity and increase revenues by extending the integration process all the way to the desktop.
Technology Partners are leading organizations that have products that are complementary to the DreamFactory suite of products. They share a similar vision and strategy to provide customers with the necessary tools and recourses to build and deploy effective, real-time, enterprise web service applications. Salesforce Integration Partners play a key role in integrating, customizing, and promoting various DreamFactory solutions.
Contact www.dreamfactory.com
Concur -- Best SaaS Company (Large Company) 
Concur is the world’s leading provider of on-demand Employee Spend Management services and is ranked among the world’s Top 10 providers of on-demand services by IDC. Concur enables organizations to globally control costs by automating the processes they use to manage employee spending. Concur’s end-to-end, on-demand solutions seamlessly unite online travel booking with automated expense reporting, streamline meeting management and optimize the process of managing vendor payments, employee check requests and direct reimbursements.
In the traditional travel and expense reporting model, corporate travel managers have handled the actual procurement of travel services such as air, car, and hotel, while corporate finance departments have been responsible for managing employee expense reporting and reimbursement. For years, companies have treated these two processes as separate entities, never unifying them into one seamless process. The result is an inefficient system full of unnecessary costs, a lack of policy adherence, and reporting difficulties business travelers and back-office financiers.
Concur has seen its software platform provide business of all sizes with on-demand enterprise-level functionality at a fraction of the cost of traditional software. Simply put, every business, no matter the size, has access to powerful technology that will automate T&E reporting, saving travelers time, and increasing the bottom line.
Organizations of all sizes trust Concur to help them control spend before it occurs while eliminating paper and optimizing supplier relations. Concur has nearly 5,000 customers of all sizes, meaning more than 4 million individual employees access Concur’s services, resulting in more than 20 million transactions processed by Concur annually. This represents more than $17 billion. Concur’s services are trusted by 148 of the Fortune 1,000, 81 of the Global 500 and 7 of the 10 largest companies in the world. More than 50 percent of the 100 largest corporate travel spenders use Concur to manage travel bookings.
As it continues to add clients of all sizes, Concur is defining what on-demand services will be in the future.
www.concur.com
Gomez -- Best SaaS Company (Mid-sized Company) 
Gomez is the leading provider of web application experience management solutions. Used by more than 850 companies worldwide, including eight of the top 10 most visited sites, six of the top 10 retailers, nine of the top 10 financial services firms, and four of the top 10 industrial companies, Gomez's services, delivered in a software as a service (SaaS) subscription model, help companies ensure superior online experiences that satisfy customers, enhance brands and drive profits. Founded in 1997, Gomez provides the industry's only complete solution for managing web application experience throughout the entire application life cycle, featuring active monitoring, competitive benchmarking, and more than 15,000 data sources worldwide.
"Gomez' sequential growth in revenue and its customer base is further evidence that more customers are looking to us for services that enable them to ensure high-quality web experiences from application design testing all the way to 24x7 production," said Jaime Ellertson, Gomez chief executive officer. "During the quarter, we added major brands to our customer portfolio, including a global shipping firm, several major financial services firms, and one of the largest online travel services. And with major investments in our ExperienceFirst network, now comprising more than 15,000 locations, Gomez can easily meet the needs of the largest online brands in the world."
Contact www.gomez.com
Symantec -- Best SaaS Migration By a Traditional Software Product (Large Company)
Software as a service is an industry term used to describe the ability for vendors and solutions providers to offer software on demand through a Web-based portal. The Symantec Protection Network is Symantec’s version of a Software as a Service platform and creates the ability for customers to access Symantec’s wide array of data protection and security management offerings through a web browser. The platform is designed specifically for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs, 11-1000 employees). It will provide SMB customers with trusted, proven technology at an affordable price.
Symantec is going beyond what the industry has seen today for SaaS, and is in a unique position to excel in this market for three main reasons:
• Trust: Symantec has been invested in providing a variety of technology via online services for some time providing customers with automated content updates, hosted services, and managed services. We are experienced with the requirements for type of offering and have the operations and infrastructure in place to ensure success for our customers.
• Economics: This solution will allow SMB customers to have access to Symantec proven and trusted technologies.
• Expertise: Customers benefit from market leading technologies in the areas of data protection, endpoint security, message archiving, and remote control and access, as well as our operations expertise in delivering online, managed services.
While providing direct online sales via Symantec’s Web site, Symantec has also worked with our channel partner network to deliver a portfolio of online services. At the launch of our partner beta program we had more than 25 partners committed to the program, and that number continues to grow.
· Symantec collaborated with our partner community for nearly a year before the development and launch of SPN.
· Because SPN is the platform through which, Symantec will continue to offer a number of availability and security-related offerings, committed partners will have an ongoing opportunity to grow their businesses downstream.
· We offer partners the flexibility to sell a solution that we are part of rather than dictating how they will go to market. This allows them to sell in a unique manner.
· Partners are able to bundle our SPN services in with their own service offerings – allowing them to offer added services for a custom offering.
· Finally, resellers have flexibility in managing how they actually price the SPN service offerings.
Symantec’s innovative approach to the SaaS industry has been a well-received migration from the traditional software offering to a new, on-demand offering.
Contact www.symantec.com
Maxager -- Best SaaS Migration By a Traditional Software Product (Mid-sized Company)
Maxager was founded in 1996 as a classic enterprise software firm. The company produced a profit optimization BI application that combined margin and production rate to create a profit-per-time metric that, unlike a margin-only approach, yields a truly accurate view of profitability. Maxager grew and acquired Fortune 50 customers. However, approximately five years ago, Maxager decided to migrate to a SaaS model. The company has successfully moved to SaaS and built a customer base of industry-leading companies including Dow Chemical, AK Steel and Owens-Illinois.
Maxager successfully made the transition to SaaS without compromising on functionality. The Maxager solution is designed to be used by business users, such as product managers and financial analysts, rather than solely by BI or IT experts. Furthermore Maxager offers broad flexibility for business users to create or modify the reports they wish to see. This flexibility includes the ability to look at revenue, profit, cash and costs at a granular level – by individual product, customer, market, sales region, salesperson or production facility. The same information can easily be “rolled up” for an aggregated view. Maxager also offers powerful charting options to make the identification of high- or low-performing dimensions easy to spot, a he challenge for manufactures with thousands of products, hundreds of customers and multiple plants. The visibility at a detailed level and the unique graphical views of data are often cited by customers as major reasons for subscribing to the Maxager service. Maxager also offers dashboard functionality for executives to monitor performance based on the “right” metric – profit-per-minute.
Maxager not only offers detailed Historical Analysis of data but also offers powerful What-if Planning to model the impact on profit of changes in product quantities, prices, costs and production rates. Additionally, after changes have been implemented based on the more accurate profit-per-minute metric, Maxager enables Variance Analysis to compare actual results to plan or multiple time periods.
In moving to the SaaS model, Maxager has also overcome concerns about data security and uptime. Many customers have initially thought that they would move to implementing Maxager internally after completing Maxager’s 90-day Fast Track program. However, their confidence in Maxager’s SAS 70-compliant data security center and experience with Maxager’s 99.5% guaranteed uptime have led them to continue with the SaaS model. In two cases outside the US where customers had a policy of not letting data outside their firewalls, Maxager has also successfully implemented a self-hosting option for customers.
Maxager has dramatically decreased implementation times using the SaaS model. In the aforementioned Fast Track program, data is generally loaded within 30 days and could be done more quickly if customers have the data readily available. Either way, Maxager is able to have users trained and identifying specific opportunities to improve profits within 60 to 90 days.
In summary, Maxager has transitioned from a successful client-server software vendor to a SaaS provider used by industry leaders to increase profits typically 3-5% worth of revenue.
Contact www.maxager.com
GeoLearning -- Best Marketing Initiative 
GeoLearning exhibits at 7-8 major industry tradeshows each year within the corporate learning industry. The conversion of registered attendees from the pre-show list converted to complete contacts regularly approach 80%. The company regularly sponsors a Cocktail Receptions at each event that have been called “the highlight of the show” even by competitors. Two recent tradeshow campaigns include:
GeoPoker
Pre-show mailing included cocktail invitation and two random playing cards with instructions on how to play GeoPoker to win a big screen TV. Mailing also included instructions on how to get two more “virtual cards” by registering online at GeoLearning’s web site (driving traffic and contact information collection). In each registration package that tradeshow conference attendees receive included a cocktail invitation and instructions on how to obtain more cards to “build their GeoPoker hand.” Attendees are encouraged to collect more cards by viewing a demo/presentation at the GeoLearning booth, attend GeoLearning education sessions, and attend the cocktail reception.
GeoMaestro 5 Series—The Next Frontier
Pre-show mailing included a cocktail reception invitation RSVP card and a registration card to entrants to win a HoMedics antigravity massage chair. Prepackaged space ice cream and foam rocket ships with the GeoMaestro 5 Series logo and taglines of “The Next Frontier” and “Ready to Launch” were given away to compliment an advertising campaign introducing GeoLearning’s new GeoMaestro 5 Series learning management system to the e-learning space. Space ice cream packets with directions pointing attendees to the booth to enter the drawing for the massage chair were included in all conference registration packets. By entering the drawing, attendees supplied all of their contact information. And to enhance the already wildly successful GeoLearning cocktail reception, GeoLearning added a free concert to the cocktail event featuring Roger McGuinn, founder of The Byrds.
§ GeoLearning’s pre-show activities (Website traffic, cocktail reception RSVPs, etc.) have resulted in list-to-lead conversion rates of 46%, 55% and 62%. This means that 62% of attendees contacted GeoLearning with full contact information PRIOR to the actual tradeshow, enabling sales people to schedule demos, meetings and presentations.
§ After-show responses rates (Website traffic, visited booth, attended cocktail reception, listened to the presentation, etc.) have been 68%, 77% and 79% over the last 3 shows. This means that ~80% of all show attendees contacted GeoLearning in some way with contact information.
§ Most importantly, GeoLearning’s sales associates have filled schedules at all shows with meetings and demonstrations. Rather than spending time trying to attract people and introducing themselves and the company, GeoLearning sales people are busy SELLING at the show. In essence, the results of the tradeshow are known BEFORE the booth is even set up. One consequence of this has been the need to send more marketing associates to tradeshows just to man the booth.
Contact www.geolearning.com
Cognos 8 Go! Mobile -- Best Market Changing Product (Large Company)
Cognos is a $979 million software company that helps companies better plan, monitor, and understand their business through business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) software. Since the introduction of Cognos PowerPlay over 17 years ago, the company has sought to provide customers with the easiest and most efficient way to access, analyze, and operationalize data, most recently manifested in their flagship product, Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI).
To enable users to easily view and interact with highly relevant BI information from Cognos 8 BI, Cognos developed the Cognos 8 Go! access modes, most recently launching Cognos 8 Go! Mobile. Working with Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of the Blackberry, Cognos developed Cognos 8 Go! Mobile to deliver on its vision of “bringing BI to the masses.” The first-ever mobile BI solution for enterprise customers, Cognos 8 Go! Mobile allows users to increase their productivity and improve their decision-making when working remotely by accessing operational and strategic information about customer orders, product performance, and other important elements of BI – all from their wireless device.
Contact www.cognos.com
OpSource On-Demand -- Best Market Changing Product (Mid-sized Company) 
Large enterprise software companies, such as BMC and Business Objects, and start-up Web 2.0 companies, such as Coghead and Ribbit, have chosen OpSource as their SaaS delivery partner. OpSource currently supports hundreds of applications, millions of users and billions of transactions.
Essentially, OpSource has re-invented SaaS delivery and has been recognized by some of the major players: OpSource was the first SaaS delivery provider to be certified by salesforce.com to deliver the on-demand solutions of its AppExchange ISV solution partners, Microsoft has partnered with OpSource to help ISVs leverage the power of On Demand delivery and OpSource is the only certified service delivery partner for WebEx Connect.
OpSource On-Demand eliminates the need for software companies to invest in the infrastructure and services necessary to deliver their solutions. And now, with its analytic and billing capabilities, OpSource On-Demand further eliminates the need to invest time and resources in building non-core functionality into SaaS and Web applications. OpSource delivers all this using on-demand pricing.
Contact www.opsource.net |
