New year, new scores

Let’s hope your new year’s carousing didn’t burn you out on festivities, because this issue — our first of the new year — is a celebration in its own right. With our fifth annual Technology of the Year awards, we honor the most enterprising enterprise products, ones that have fundamentally altered the IT landscape.

InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year awards are part retrospective, part forecast. In choosing the winners, we started by identifying the nine disciplines that matter most to enterprise IT: hardware and software platforms, networking, storage, systems and network management, app dev, databases and data management, enterprise apps and integration, collaboration software, and security. Within those categories, Executive Editor Doug Dineley and the InfoWorld Test Center crew look back at the disappointments and triumphs of the previous year and gaze forward to developments on the horizon. They also identify 33 products that represent the best and brightest, the most luminous stars in the enterprise firmament.

In fact, many of the products we’ve reviewed during the past 12 months are so impressive that we’ve instituted another New Year’s institution: toughening up the grading curve. Starting with Test Center reviews in this issue, vendors will find it harder for products to get a verbal rating of Excellent, Very Good, or Good. The basic 10-point rating system won’t change, but the labels applied to those scores will. (For all the gory details, see our scoring methodology.)

“As the technologies we cover mature,” explains Dineley, “the solutions built upon them have gotten better over the years.” Given this steady improvement, many products were earning high marks, leading to grade inflation.

Frankly, all of the impressive scores we’ve seen in the past year or two are no surprise. The Test Center does substantial preselection, picking only the most promising products for review. In addition, competitive pressures, industry consolidation, and the growth of open source have weeded the field, removing many weaker players from the mix. So, raising the verbal bar should adjust for changing market conditions and “assure a broader distribution of scores, allowing us to better emphasize the differences among a vast array of strong products,” Dineley says.

Given the volatility of product development, look for possible adjustments in the scoring criteria every January. With any luck, we’ll have to readjust our ratings 12 months from now, ratcheting up our expectations especially if enterprise hardware and software continue to evolve and improve. But that, too, would be cause for celebration.