Datamation.com Announces Product of the Year Winners

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There were no horse races this year. Datamation.com readers voted for 10 clear winners in the Datamation.com Product of the Year 2006 Awards.

For the second year in a row, business software giant SAS won a pair of awards, while two other companies also repeated in their respective categories.

This year’s awards featured a new category, Corporate Blogging Platform, which included five finalists.

The winners by category are as follows:

Topping the ballot in the Anti-Spam category for the second year in a row was SpamAssassin, an extensible email filter that identifies spam. SpamAssassin is a product of the Apache Software Foundation, a supporter of open source software projects. SpamAssassin won by an even larger margin this year, earning three times as many votes as runner-up Cloudmark Inc.’s Cloudmark Server Edition. Other finalists were PureMessage 5.1 from Sophos Plc. and CanIt-PRO 3.0 from Roaring Penguin Software, Inc.

SAS Institute won the Compliance Software category again, but with a different product than SAS Credit Risk Management. This year SAS Fair Banking not only won in this category, it had more votes than finalists in any other group. Finishing second was Approva Corp.’s BizRights 3.0, followed by Access Suite 4.0 from Citrix Systems, Inc., DigitalPersona Pro Kiosk from DigitalPersona, Inc. and Ketera Contract Management from Ketera Technologies, Inc.

In the new Corporate Blogging Platform category, iUpload Application Suite 2005 from iUpload emerged as the victor, followed by WordPress 2.0 from WordPress. Also competing in this category were Marquis Inc.’s Blog Module, TeamPage 3.6 from Traction Software, Inc. and Moveable Type 3.2 from Six Apart, Ltd.

Reuters Messaging 5.0 from Reuters easily topped the Enterprise IM category, though the race for second place, won by IM Manager SMARTGig 6000 from Imlogic, Inc., was close. Other finalists were e/Pop IM Server 3.0 from WiredRed Software and Perimeter Manager for IM from Postini, Inc.

Returning to the winner’s circle in the Enterprise Linux Product category was Firefox, the open-source browser from the Mozilla Corp. Firefox 1.5 beat back a respectable challenge from Red Hat, Inc.’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Other finalists were Zimbra Collaborative Suite from Zimbra Inc. and Asterisk 1.2 from Digium Inc.

The closest thing to a contest came in the Enterprise Security race, won by SpyWall from Trlokom, Inc. over runner-up ThreatWall from eSoft, Inc. Frontline 3.2 from Digital Defense, Inc. finished third, followed by Enterprise Security Analyzer from eIQnetworks, Inc. and Pointsec for PC 6.0 from Pointsec Mobile Technologies.

SAS grabbed its second award this year in the Enterprise Server category with its SAS Enterprise BI Server, outdistancing second-place finisher StorEdge 6920 from Sun Microsysystems, Inc. Other finalists were Kazeon Information Server IS1200 from Kazeon Systems, Inc. and Xserve G5 from Apple Computer, Inc.

The Treo 700w from Palm, Inc. vaulted to the top of the Handheld Device category, which didn’t include last year’s winner, BlackBerry, as a finalist. Finishing second this year was iPaq hx2790 from HP, followed by the Axim X51 from Dell Inc. and MyPal A730W Asus.

OpTier Ltd.’s CoreFirst 1.4 was the winner in the Network & Systems Management category. Finishing in second place was Citrix Presentation Server from Citrix Systems. Rounding out the ballot were Double-Take from NSI Software, Inc., Business Software Configuration Management from Managed Objects Solutions, Inc. and Availl Inc.’s Backup 3.0

The Wireless Software category was led by Laptop Analyzer 6.0 from AirMagnet, Inc., with the OptiView OC3/OC12 WAN Analyzer from Fluke Networks grabbing the second slot. Other finalists were SpotLock from JiWire, Inc. and Elektron Enterprise Edition from Corriente Networks LLC.

Over the next couple of weeks, Datamation will run stories about the winners in each of our 10 categories.