The year’s best products

See correction below

Hardware and Software Platforms Best Server Hardware HP ProLiant DL760 G2 Almost unrivaled in terms of reliability, redundancy, and raw processing power.

Best Server Blade System RLX ServerBlade 2800i and System 600ex The rest of the industry could learn a lot from RLX’s approach to management.

Best Systems Management Solution Vieo 1000 v1.1 Easy-to-deploy management appliance learns normal system behavior and responds to changes by dynamically provisioning existing resources. 

Best Operating System Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) Sets the bar for simplicity and ease of use, extends support to 64-bit hardware, and it’s secure by default.

Best Application Server IBM WebSphere Application Server 5.0 Tight integration with tools, smooth application deployment, granular management. 

Networking Best Networking Hardware Extreme BlackDiamond 10K (see our review online Jan. 16) An excellent mix of raw 10Gig performance and polished management capabilities.

Best Wireless LAN Solution Vernier IS-6500p Provides extensive yet flexible control over who can access what, when, and where from 802.11 networks.

Storage Best SAN Solution TotalStorage SAN Integration Server Edged out competing EMC and HP solutions as the all-around best performer in our midtier SAN roundup.

Best SAN Switch Maxxan MXV320 Conquers multivendor SANs with useful virtualization, replication, and other application-layer capabilities.

Best NAS Solution HP StorageWorks NAS b3000 High-performance file server scales to 48TB and can connect to Fibre Channel SANs.

Best Storage Management Software Fujitsu Softek Automated Storage Provided the greatest control over mixed SAN hardware among the solutions we tested.

Application Development Best Development Tool Eclipse 2.1 An extensible, soup-to-nuts IDE whose Standard Widget Toolkit is breathing new life into client-side Java software.

Databases & Data Management Best Analytics/Reporting Solution Iteration Real-time Reporting Suite Innovative reporting software combines real-time information streams, events-based alerting, and easy-to-create dashboards.

Enterprise Applications Best Hosted Application Salesforce.com Winter ’04 An easily customized SFA/CRM application that allows you to bend automated workflow to match the way you do business.

Best Web Services Integration Solution Grand Central Business Services Network Provides flexible, reliable, and auditable routing of SOAP messages among business partners.

Collaboration Software Best Enterprise Collaboration Platform IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 6.5 Greatly improved interface for both Web and stand-alone clients makes Notes-Domino a win-win.

Best Team Collaboration Solution Groove Workspace 2.5 A well-integrated, peer-to-peer workspace extensible via an elegant SOAP API.

Security Best Network Security Product Niksun NetDetector A near perfect match of innovation and execution. Not only detects but records and replays intrusions.

Best Application Security Product KaVaDo InterDo 3.0 Powerful wizard takes the mystery out of setting up a strong and complex Web application firewall.

Correction In our Technology of the Year Awards, the correct name of the winning Extreme Networks product is BlackDiamond 10K. The product name has been corrected in this article.