Your guide to InfoWorld’s best tech of the year

The Technology of the Year Awards is InfoWorld’s most important article of the year. It’s the living, breathing manifestation of InfoWorld’s dual mission: To call out the best new enterprise technologies and deliver deep tech analysis, written in plain English, by thought leaders who possess meaningful hands-on experience.

In our 2014 edition of Technology of the Year, we’ve served up 35 of the best products we evaluated, with links to original product reviews for those on the cusp of purchasing anything from specialized data center hardware to programming tools and frameworks. If you know enterprise tech, it’s pretty stunning to see all that innovation lined up end to end.

[ See all the winning hardware, software, development tools, and cloud services in our slideshow, “InfoWorld’s 2014 Technology of the Year Award winners.” | For quick, smart takes on the news you’ll be talking about, check out InfoWorld TechBrief — subscribe today. ]

Here, I haven’t called out every winner, but I’ve done my best to surface the major themes and high points. Allow me to highlight the winning products with the broadest appeal first: Microsoft Office 365 and Apple iOS 7. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the great work Microsoft has done with Office 365 bodes well for its cloud future. While iPhone and iPad hardware might have been a bit of snooze in 2013, iOS 7 delivered, helping to cement iOS’s position as the post-BlackBerry platform of choice for the mobile enterprise.

Catering to coders The first thing you’ll notice about this year’s winners is the preponderance of application development products and projects. That was inevitable. Developers continue to rise in importance — and it takes only a glance at InfoWorld’s traffic patterns to see the high degree of interest generated by app dev topics. Plus, the innovation in this area simply won’t quit.

You’ll find only one traditional dev product in the winners circle: Microsoft Visual Studio 2013, which Microsoft has enhanced to create a powerhouse enterprise development environment, with a rich set of debuggers, frameworks, diagnostics, and ALM features. Support for agile development has been beefed up, and Visual Studio now supports Git version control.

JavaScript development is a runaway train, so this year we’ve deepened our coverage, with a nod to no fewer than four JavaScript frameworks: Bootstrap, D3, Ember, and Node.js. The last one is a server framework, of course, and wins for the third straight year. The other three help coders build advanced browser-based apps, with D3 devoted to the increasingly important task of data visualization. Plus, contributor Martin Heller offered heartfelt kudos to JetBrains WebStorm, which he terms “a serious IDE for serious JavaScript developers.”

The collision of cloud and coding has yielded all kinds of innovation. It’s no surprise that Pivotal Cloud Foundry won: In 2013, this PaaS (platform as a service), which offers great usability and broad language support, became the center of an open source cloud ecosystem and earned the backing of IBM. We also gave an award to CloudBees, an independent Java PaaS that stands out in its enablement of continuous delivery. Of course, we’d be remiss if we failed to call out the new center of the coding universe, the cloud repository and versioning platform GitHub.

Data center decisions Software may be eating the world, but hardware ain’t dead yet. Repeat winner Riverbed Steelhead won a 2014 Technology of the Year Award, mainly because it showed how Riverbed has evolved its technology from WAN acceleration into a “full-blown enterprise traffic management system,” according to longtime InfoWorld contributing editor Keith Schultz. And despite Dell’s travails on the desktop, its servers continue to earn our admiration, as the Dell PowerEdge VRTX did this year.

Kick up the innovation a couple of notches and you’ll discover the Nutanix NX-3000, an appliance dedicated to easing infrastructure management for VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM deployments. According to contributing editor Paul Ferrill, Nutanix’s innovative software creates cloudlike clusters using commodity server hardware and eliminates the need for network storage.  

Speaking of storage, check out the Synology RS10613xs+, a 10-drive SAS/SATA storage system that delivers great performance for the buck. Further up the storage food chain, HP’s 3PAR StoreServ offers blazing speed, particularly in its all-flash configuration, and its close integration with VMware makes it a perfect storage system to support a farm of virtual servers. 

One of the hottest areas in enterprise tech centers are the solutions to orchestrate all that data center hardware. From our roundup of configuration management solutions posted in December, we selected Puppet Enterprise and SaltStack Enterprise as Technology of the Year winners.

Big data dreams It’s not hard to identify the center of the big data tech: Hadoop changed everything, providing a platform where you could use commodity servers to crunch gobs of semi-structured data to gain new insight. This year Apache released Hadoop 2.0, which features a new resource management layer beneath MapReduce known as YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator). With YARN, multiple Hadoop applications can run simultaneously, and big data mavens can move beyond batch processing — so once again, Hadoop earned an award.

At InfoWorld, we also consider NoSQL databases to be part of the big data trend, mainly because of how easily they scale: Just add servers to a cluster and the database is replicated and distributed across as many nodes as you want to throw at it. This year we honored the NoSQL document database MongoDB, a favorite of Web applications developers. The graph NoSQL database Neo4j, intended to gain insight into the relationships among data elements, also snagged an award.

That’s a big chunk of enterprise technology for one year, even though I’ve left a few winners for you to discover for yourself. Without the tireless efforts of InfoWorld Executive Editor Doug Dineley, who has run the Technology of the Year Awards from the beginning, rounding up the best enterprise tech every year would just be a nice idea. Kudos and salutations also go to the many experts who worked on this year’s awards: James Borck, Brian Chee, Paul Ferrill, Jonathan Freeman, Victor Garza, Rick Grehan, Galen Gruman, Martin Heller, Woody Leonhard, Matt Prigge, Phil Rhodes, Keith Schultz, Paul Venezia, Peter Wayner, and Serdar Yegulalp.

This article, “Your guide to InfoWorld’s best tech of the year,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.