Outstanding Partnering Program - VMware

Outstanding Product - Zimbra

Software Industry Leadership Excellence (Large Company)- ILOG

Software Industry Leadership Excellence (Mid-Size Company)- Apriso Corp.

Innovative SaaS Company (Large Company) – Trend Micro

Innovative SaaS Company (Mid-Size Company) - Vovici

Outstanding Partnering Program
This award goes to the company whose partnering will have the biggest impact on the industry.

VMware owes much of its success to its global partner ecosystem, which includes more than 700 technology partners and nearly 18,000 channel partners. Their customers benefit by being able to access VMware products and solutions through several channels. VMware is committed to offering world class partner programs to meet the needs of every member of its partner ecosystem. They make it easy to do business with them and become more profitable by incorporating proven virtualization solutions into their partners’ models.

• Technology Alliance Program (TAP) – This program is designed for commercial software, hardware and storage vendors to leverage the VMware resources needed to deliver enhanced, value-added products to joint customers.
• VMware VIP Partner Program – VMware offers an opportunity for resellers to experience greater profitability with its virtualization portfolio and reap additional benefits through the enhanced VIP Partner Program. A comprehensive, worldwide program, the VMware VIP Partner Program provides partners with benefits and resources suited to their unique business requirements.
• The Alliance Affiliate Initiative is a co-marketing initiative designed to promote joint solution selling. VMware’s technology partners from a broad range of technology sectors including storage, business continuity and disaster recovery, networking and security, have created VMware-oriented virtualization training and tools for channel partners as well as financial incentives on the sale of their products combined with VMware solutions. VMware is committed to supporting and promoting Alliance Partners who have created specific benefits within their reseller programs to reward resellers for activities that drive incremental revenue for VMware and Alliance Partner solutions.
• The VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) Partner Program allows partners to expand their customer base and services offerings. As an authorized consultant, partners have the opportunity to gain access to a broad base of qualified customers who have an active interest in establishing and expanding their investment in virtualization solutions; connect and develop opportunities with an established base of premier hardware and software vendors who provide complementary services, develop skills and leverage VMware virtualization to deliver high-value services and solutions.
• The VMware Academic Program (VMAP) is a comprehensive program designed specifically for the academic community. The program enables qualifying academic institutions worldwide to gain easy access to cutting-edge virtualization technology and resources at no charge.

Outstanding Product
This award goes to the product that has the most promise of impacting/improving the software industry.

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is a Web-based collaboration suite complete with email, calendar, contact, document and Web 2.0 technologies. It offers business users and consumers alike multi-Gigabyte mailboxes, advanced search and tagging capabilities, conversation view, and a slick AJAX interface, with the functionality necessary for enterprises including mobile support, iPhone, Blackberry, Java-enabled phones, tasks, advanced calendaring and more. The browser-based client delivers a richer experience than traditional email by allowing the integration of 3rd party applications as “mash-ups” via Web services so you can view CRM data, maps, or anything else without leaving the context of a message. Hover your mouse over an address written in an email, and a mash-up will appear with the address located on Yahoo! Maps. Using open source technology, the kinds of “mash-ups” applications are limitless.

Features unique to Zimbra include:
• Zimbra Desktop: The addition of Zimbra Desktop offers the same experience when you are offline. Now, when users out of the office without an internet connection (on planes, trains, or automobiles), they can keep working without missing a beat. Any changes made while working offline are automatically synced to the Zimbra Server, and users are immune to hiccups and interruptions caused by server latency.
• Web 2.0 technology: Web 2.0 technology with enterprise mash-ups, allowing users to customize third party applications within their e-mail platform. ZCS comes pre-loaded with a few, such as  direct phone dial with Skype within e-mail messages. ZCS enables customers to develop their own customized mash-up. For instance, a retailer could synch e-mail with its inventory tracking system so that any time an inventory number appeared in an e-mail, a user could hover over it and automatically pull up information about that item.
• Consolidate emails: The ability to integrate and exchange email, calendar, and contact information between Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Apple, AOL or Zimbra through internet protocol support called Post Office Protocol (POP) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
• Mobile support: Mobile support synchronizing multiple calendars and address books, on a wide range of smartphones including Microsoft Window Mobile devices (PocketPCs and Smartphones), Palm Treo series, Nokia E series, BlackBerry, iPhone, and other devises running third party clients.
• Next-generation messaging: A next-generation messaging server includes integrated search, spam, archiving and anti-virus/security features. Additionally, ZCS has fast search function, a tagging function for emails, automatic conversation consolidations by subject, and saved search for easy retrieval.  
• Open Source: And because Zimbra is built on an open source platform, developers can build whatever features they see fit. The possibilities are endless.

Software Industry Leadership Excellence (Large Company)
This award goes to the company, with revenues exceeding $150 million, which has shown a commitment to excellence and is a leading innovator in the software industry.

ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and to manage change and complexity. For the past 20 years, ILOG has demonstrated product and market leadership in all of its core market segments while honing their products to make sophisticated capabilities easier and faster to use and accessible to broader audiences.

Upon its recent acquisition of LogicTools, ILOG now has four main platforms where they offer a slew of solutions for a comprehensive set of development environments. Those platforms are business rules management systems (BRMS), supply chain ppplications, optimization and visualization.

ILOG’s philosophy of innovation was evident with the introduction of several BRMS products this year. ILOG introduced Rules for COBOL to help companies modernize legacy COBOL applications without disruption or heavy development efforts. Rules for .NET was also launched in the past year, enhancing integration with Microsoft Office applications such as Word and Excel that business professionals are familiar with. The company also introduced ILOG Rule Studio Scorecard Modeler creating new features in scoring technology. These user friendly features allow companies to directly create and manage scorecards, predict risk and assign actionable metrics to customer behavior.

In order to support the growth of business rules and enhance best practices, ILOG released the Agile Business Rules Development Methodology (ABRD), a free, vendor agnostic, methodology as part of the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) that provides a step-by-step process for developing business rules applications. It’s the industry’s first methodology of its kind and provides a well-documented and structured approach to developing rules applications that were previously done ad-hoc. The company also offers free trials of the business rules technology.

ILOG also demonstrates leadership in the supply chain and optimization software market segments. As the provider of the CPLEX optimization engine that most supply chain applications use to create optimal schedules and to allocate resources, ILOG has a unique competitive edge in the supply chain applications space. Also new this year for supply chain applications, ILOG introduced a new Carbon Footprint extension that helps companies make environmentally-sound choices when designing and planning their supply chains. The new extension helps companies evaluate the impact of various supply chain network configurations and transportation strategies on their carbon footprint, allowing them to quickly and easily implement green supply chain initiatives.

The development of the Carbon Footprint Extension is the latest innovation resulting from the collaboration of a team from ILOG and Accenture, lead by Dr. David Simchi-Levi, ILOG chief science officer. The module combines ILOG’s latest mathematical optimization engine, CPLEX, with LogicTools’ advanced supply chain network design software along with the latest data on carbon emissions and the understanding of how to calculate a carbon footprint. The resulting technology helps companies measure corporate environmental responsibility and reduce carbon emissions while weighing the potential trade-off in cost or service.

ILOG introduced CPLEX 11 in late 2007, an optimization engine that has demonstrated superior processing times for the most complex business problems. CPLEX's performance allows businesses in the supply chain, manufacturing and logistics markets, among others, to increase the scope of their planning from one region to across regions, turn an overnight batch job into a near real-time application, or do rapid what-if analysis on a planning problem. With this optimization software, radical new applications are possible in fields as diverse as supply chain management and radiosurgery.

ILOG also develops visualization tools that allow users to instantly grasp data through realistic graphics of actionable information, bringing complex data to life. ILOG visualization products sharpen the big picture, translating raw data into usable information. ILOG’s visualization products support a wide range of development environments including Java, .NET, and C++. This year ILOG published a Java to C# converter for the open-source community and announced the company will spearhead the Eclipse Albireo project, which will leverage ILOG’s visualization expertise to improve the native integration of Java and Eclipse user interfaces. Also new for this year, ILOG introduced Elixir, a visualization product for Adobe’s cutting-edge Rich Internet Applications (RIA) development platform Flex.

Software Industry Leadership Excellence (Mid-Size Company)
This award goes to the company, with revenues of $10 to $150 million, which has shown a commitment to excellence and is a leading innovator in the software industry.

Apriso Corp. is dedicated to providing a competitive advantage for its customers.  It does so by enabling manufacturing organizations to adapt their operations quickly and easily to market changes and unexpected events. Apriso's flagship software platform, FlexNet, delivers applications that enable collaboration across operations at every plant and warehouse location by integrating manufacturing processes across operations (production floor, warehouse, quality, maintenance, time and labor applications). This integration provides real time visibility, control and synchronization of manufacturing operations across the enterprise and supply chain network, by filling the gap that exists between Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and automation equipment systems on the shop floor.

The plant automation and enterprise applications industries are at an interesting crossroads, each vying to extend their reach and importance within the manufacturing IT landscape. This evolution started with traditional Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), which work at a plant to help manage the day-to-day operations and collect data for periodic reporting.

As globalization became an accepted business standard in the late 1990s, firms such as Apriso recognized that the ‘single-plant’ production model was no longer a sustainable, competitive strategy. The ‘multi-plant’ or distributed business model has quickly become a necessity, but the IT systems running operations were unable to keep pace supporting such a strategic shift.

In response, Apriso re-designed its entire product line to be based on a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) to support integration across multiple operations systems, and leverage a Business Process Management (BPM) approach to enable its software platform to support the development of global manufacturing operations process, integrated across multiple operations applications within a single solution.

The end result is now apparent: Apriso now leads the industry in multi-site, globally integrated Operations Execution Systems (OES). Many of Apriso’s customers have chosen to integrate planning, execution and control of processes to increase operational efficiency and eliminate errors in their production process. Apriso now serves more than 170 customers in 41 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and is forecasting a growth rate of 50 percent for 2008.  A partial listing of customers includes General Motors, Lear, Honeywell, L'Oreal, Lockheed Martin, Becton Dickinson, Rubbermaid, Saint-Gobain, Novelis and Essilor.

Trend Micro has foreseen the transition from security at the gateway or network edge toward the Internet cloud. While application and storage servers still require resident security, the end point now needs a thin security agent which can be achieved with in-the-cloud updates. Trend Micro is enabling its partners to provide a complete range of Software-as-a-Service security applications either as point solutions or as a combination of services managed through a single web console. Trend Micro is unique within the service industry being able to leverage its own technology with a focus on unifying security applications from the edge to the end point.

The Trend Micro SecureCloud platform is a complete Software as a Service (SaaS) security platform delivering industry leading threat protection solutions for small, medium, and enterprise businesses. The platform, which was announced on July 30, 2007, is the foundation for Trend Micro’s services which provide security across all elements of the infrastructure; from gateway to desktop.

SecureCloud security services detect threats in the cloud, and stop them before they can reach your network and compromise your IT infrastructure; protecting against spam, viruses and malware whether email-borne or web-based threats.

SecureCloud.com is the portal that offers single sign-on access to an integrated, management console for Trend Micro's security services. Customers or channel partners manage these services through a centralized Web console for easy administration and coordinated risk management.

SecureCloud offers a range of solutions to meet the distinct needs of different customer sizes. Enterprise customers are increasingly outsourcing specific elements of their security such as email protection; freeing IT resources to focus on more productive projects. Small businesses are struggling to cope with the many different security point solutions and prefer a single simple-to-use Web console to manage these solutions. SecureCloud can meet these needs and has the ability to scale and add services as businesses grow and requirements change.

In its continued commitment to the channel community, Trend Micro has designed SecureCloud to be fully channel enabled. The recently announced Trend Micro Worry-Free Remote Manager, provides resellers and partners quick access to sell SecureCloud Services and enables them to remotely manage desktop, server and messaging security for multiple customers from a single, hosted location. In the future, functionality to manage customer’s gateway and other services will be added; allowing resellers the deliver additional value and helping them build stronger relationships with their customers.

Services on the SecureCloud Platform include: Email Reputation Services, InterScan Messaging Hosted Security, Worry-Free SecureSite, and Worry-Free Remote Manager. 

Email Reputation Services is a highly effective first line of defense for messaging gateway security that stops up to 80 percent of spam at its source, before it can hit the gateway and flood the messaging infrastructure. The Service’s administration portal provides customers with a unique policy in-the-cloud capability to decide how aggressive they wish to be with abusive email senders. The Service has 6,000 active customers and over 100 million mailboxes protected on a global basis.

InterScan Messaging Hosted Security is a comprehensive hosted email security service. Businesses are experiencing a dramatic increase in spam and email-based attacks. These assaults not only hurt employee productivity, they consume valuable IT staff time and infrastructure resources. Trend Micro’s hosted email security solution blocks spam, viruses, phishing and other email threats before they reach the network. As a hosted solution, it requires no hardware or software to install and maintain, and helps you reclaim IT staff time, end-user productivity, bandwidth, and mail server storage and cpu capacity.

Worry-Free SecureSite is a hosted solution that enables online retailers to easily monitor their websites for existing and emerging vulnerabilities. If vulnerabilities are found, online retailers may engage in-house IT or Trend Micro channel partners to remediate them with guidance provided by TrendLabs worldwide network of security experts.  Worry-Free SecureSite helps safeguard ecommerce websites from hackers and malicious threats, helps to assure business reputation, customer trust, and revenue, and identifies vulnerabilities and provides expert remediation guidance.

Worry-Free Remote Manager is a secure, hosted Web console that helps small business resellers manage multiple Worry-Free Security customers from anywhere.  This secure, hosted Web console helps small business resellers increase profitability by reducing the costs of servicing customers as business grows: centrally manage multiple Worry-Free customers from a single Web console, maintain full customer touch and complete configuration control of customer installations, and begin immediately by taking advantage of Trend Micro's hosted datacenter.

Working all together within the SecureCloud platform, the more customers who join Trend Micro SecureCloud Services, the better the security intelligence becomes for each individual user and organization.

Outstanding Product (Mid-Size Company)
This award goes to the product, from a company with revenues from $10 to $150 million, which has the most promise of impacting/improving the software industry.

Businesses use the Gomez ExperienceFirst platform to test their Web applications throughout the complete application lifecycle. Their services help organizations improve the quality of the web experience, in order to increase their revenue from web applications, reduce operating costs and extend brand reputations. The platform comprises:
• Reality View XF, a visual testing service that enables a company to visualize how its Web application will appear and perform on multiple combinations of browsers, operating systems and devices.
• Reality Check XF, an automated functional testing service used to confirm that each function, transaction and third-party aspect of an application works as intended and displays properly in a user’s browser.
• Reality Load XF, an external load testing service designed to mirror the characteristics, demographics, actions and volumes of a company’s actual user population. A company can test its web applications at varying usage levels and geographical locations to ensure that, when deployed, the applications will perform correctly for real-world customers.
• Active Network XF, a monitoring service that measures page-level and transaction-based Web application performance from over 150 backbone nodes in more than 30 countries.
• Active Last Mile XF, measures Web application performance from our network of 40,000 last mile measurement points - personal computers operated by individuals located in more than 100 countries and connected through various broadband and dial-up ISPs.
• Actual Experience XF, a real-user monitoring service that measures users’ Web experiences, directly from the users’ browsers while they are accessing Web applications.
• Business Pulse XF, an executive dashboard that links Web application performance data from ExperienceFirst services with key business performance indicators to reveal mission-critical business intelligence like revenue risked and user satisfaction. 

Innovative SaaS Company (Mid-Size Company)
This award goes to the company, with revenues of $10 to $150 million, whose products/technologies are providing cutting edge services.

Vovici is a provider in Enterprise Feedback Management, offering products and services that increase customer loyalty, facilitate collaboration and innovation, influence critical business decisions, and provide voice to online communities. Organizations worldwide, including more than 58 percent of the US Fortune 500, rely on Vovici’s SaaS solutions to help effectively use feedback to identify employee satisfaction, market research, customer satisfaction, and to act on that information in order to create long-term relationships, increase profitability and facilitate time-critical actions that drive business results.

Web 2.0 is providing numerous opportunities for people to share ideas regarding their favorite product, their employer or the mystery they just solved on “Lost.” Organizations are striving to become part of these online conversations, and at the same time, they need to transform these interactions into quantifiable results. Clearly, collaboration is the present and foreseeable future of business and, Vovici’s Community Builder SaaS solution provides organizations with the capability to create a collaborative environment for promoting online conversations, while simultaneously gathering actionable, quantifiable feedback. The ability to transform these online conversations into results and measure the findings will maximize engagement, experience and collaboration, while increasing innovation by adapting to participant feedback and sentiment. Bridging the gap between this quantitative data and the qualitative characteristics of a population is essential to developing a clear picture of shareholder satisfaction.
• Simplicity - Being a SaaS solution, Community Builder is a hosted service. Therefore, minimal IT experience is necessary to build a custom online community. Users familiar with Microsoft Word or PowerPoint will be proficient in Community Builder, which can provide a company’s social guru(s) with additional time to focus on interaction and producing content rather than constantly seeking help from IT specialists. As a result, this is one less item on the IT department’s to do list.
• Complete Customization - Community Builder is an online feedback solution that promotes a corporate culture where feedback is integrated into every business process. Vovici understands that one size does not fit all and encourages its customers to take full advantage of Community Builder’s customizable features. Vovici knows that its customers are in various stages of evolution when it comes to feedback management, and works with its customers to build solutions that address their current state, implementing a plan to get the customer where they want to be in terms of integrating community feedback.
• Rapid Response - Imagine having your most important customers in a room right down the hall from your office, available and willing to answer questions at a moment’s notice. This was impossible to fathom just a few short years ago. In the past, opinion was measured over the long haul, often spanning several weeks or months. Now Community Builder is capable of delivering actionable insight in a matter of hours through an open, continuous and actionable conversation between an organization and its community. This information provides businesses with valuable, contextual insight, while producing the agility needed to respond to changing organizational dynamics by quantifying trends in participant sentiment.
• Continued Collaboration - Community Builder provides a platform for transparent interaction that will put a company in a position to collaborate with its key stakeholders. Organizations cannot take the Field of Dreams “if you build it they will come,” approach. Participants need to understand that their time spent contributing to the community is purposeful. A community can have all of the bells, whistles and applications of a top-flight social network, but if active organizational participation is not in the mix, community members will move their conversation elsewhere. Sharing opinions, ideas, and in some cases, incentives is key to maintaining community engagement. Members join an organization’s community to receive some semblance of a return. This could be the ability to contribute to the next big innovation, or even just voice a dissenting opinion. By demonstrating the ability to listen and respond to feedback from an online community, decision makers can then create a shared experience, which is beneficial for monitoring perception, boosting loyalty, increasing retention and maintaining a reputation that will attract new contributors.

Vovici Community Builder sparks innovation by assisting organizations in creating successful communities via Web 2.0 collaboration tools, effectively transforming the way businesses measure satisfaction, loyalty and engagement. According to research firm IDC, by 2012 there will be over 1.9 billion Internet users worldwide. The report cites participating in online communities as one of the fastest growing online activities. Internet users are increasingly sharing opinions and ideas across social platforms. Online communities implement several strategies for obtaining an organizational pulse, while creating a collaborative environment where participants are free to exchange information openly.