Datamation Awards Product of the Year Honors

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Last year’s Datamation Product of the Year Awards served as an enterprise
coming-out party for Linux, with Red Hat scoring a landslide win in the
Network & Systems Management category.

This year’s awards feature another Linux winner in that category, Mandrake
Linux. But the brightest stars in the enterprise firmament, according to
Datamation voters, are two industry stalwarts — business intelligence
software giant SAS and business software provider SAP, both of which won a
pair of Datamation Product of the Year awards.

The SAS Text Miner won the Data Mining & Business Intelligence group, defeating runner-up Cognos BI Series 7 and other finalists CorBusiness from CorVu, DataFlux’s dfPower Studio and digiMine’s Customer Segment Manager. Readers may have been impressed by Text Miner’s versatility, which is designed to help users locate and extract information from any number of unstructured text
documents such as patents, warranty claims, client notes and customer
emails.

SAS also topped the E-Commerce category with its SAS Marketing Automation
2.2, outpacing second-place Microsoft Commerce Server 2002. The SAS software’s ability to synthesize
customer data across multiple lines of business, as well as its data
warehousing, analytics and campaign planning tools appeared to have won over
Datamation
voters.

Other finalists in this category were VeriSign’s Shared Hosting Security Service, LaGarde’s Storefront Now and Clickjam’s eBusiness Tools.

Germany-based SAP’s CRM 3.0 edged Lotus Sametime 3 for the Enterprise Applications award. Other finalists were Spamnet from Cloudmark, xMetal 3 from Corel, Bidmaker 2002 from Bidmaker and Computer Associates’ Advantage Plex. The SAP product’s comprehensive list of features includes advanced analytics, data mining and order management.

In the Enterprise Resource Planning competition, SAP’s R/3 Enterprise
software turned back a challenge from runner-up Cognos Enterprise Planning Series.
The R/3 extends SAP’s flagship
ERP software to the enterprise and includes an open technical platform, a
valuable feature in any multiple-platform IT shop. Other finalists in this category were OpenAir Complete from OpenAir and CorVu’s CorStrategy.

Symantec’s Norton
AntiVirus Corporate Edition 7.6 ran away with the Security award, outpacing Tripwire’s Tripwire for Servers 3.0, ReefEdge Connect System 3.0 from ReefEdge, FirewallAnalyzer 3.0 from eIQnetworks, Teros-100 APS from Teros and WatchGuard Firebox V80 from WatchGuard Technologies.

By now, any corporation still in business knows how important virus
protection is. Today,
the issue is whether you spend all your time updating and confirming
workstation
protection. Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition won our readers’ votes
because it
simplifies protection chores, thanks to the NAVEX repair engine and
centralized admin
control that audits workstations, even those protected by competitive
products.

In a tight storage contest, StorageTek’s T9940B
Tape Drive just beat Brocade Communications Systems’ Silkworm 3900 Enterprise
Fabric Switch.

The exciting technology in storage is not all about faster disks. The
StorageTek T9940B is
a breakthrough in fast backup with tape, delivering 30 Mbytes/second (that’s
252
Gbytes/hour) over 2 GByte fiber channel. And this isn’t something brought in
for
occasional full data dumps. The T9940B was designed for 70% tape
motion duty
cycles — as close to 7×24 operation as you can get with tape.

Other finalists in the Storage category were the NetApp F880 series from Network Appliance, FalconStor Technologies’ IPStor 3.5 and ATAboy2 from Nexsan Technologies.

Mandrake’s Linux Distribution operating system succeeded Red Hat in the
Network & Systems Management category, topping runners-up Sun
Microsystems’ Capacity on Demand 2.0 and NetIQ’s WebTrends Reporting Service
6.0.

Mandrake Linux is billed as an operating that can run for months without a
reboot; Datamation readers seem to like that idea. The operating system is a
system
administrator’s dream, built into independent layers that provide strict
permissions protections. The result is an OS that runs trouble free.

Other finalists in this category were Warp Solutions’ WARP 2063e Edge Appliance and
ManageSoft 6.2 from ManageSoft.

In the Client Systems race, the Dell Optiplex SX260 minicomputer topped all
products. Other finalists were runner-up HP’s Compaq Tablet PC, Toshiba’s Portege 2000 and Hughes Network Systems’ DW 4020 satellite terminal.

Datamation readers may have been impressed by the SX260’s tiny
footprint, which enables installation in tight quarters, and its extensive
set of centralized management tools.

Over the next two weeks, Datamation will run stories about the winners and
some of the other nominees in each of our eight categories, starting today
with the Client Systems group.