Your guide to the year’s best technology

To have an eye for the best new technology, particularly enterprise technology, you need to look beyond sheer coolness and consider how those products or services fit in with the fabric of what’s already been deployed.

That’s why most of InfoWorld’s contributors actually work in IT — they bring a perspective informed by assembling real-world solutions. The reviews of products and services those contributors write year-round provide the basis for the InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards every January.

[ Read about the winning hardware, software, development tools, and cloud services in our slideshow, “InfoWorld’s 2013 Technology of the Year Award winners.” | Cut straight to the key news for technology development and IT management with our once-a-day summary of the top tech news. Subscribe to the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ]

This year, clear themes emerged from the 35 winning products picked by our contributors and staff. Here’s a quick perspective on what rose to the top.

Open source wins big

Each succeeding year, the Technology of the year Awards looks a little more like the InfoWorld Best of Open Source Software Awards.

I doubt you’re surprised that Apache Hadoop and Ubuntu won awards. But so did two other Apache Foundation projects: Lucene for the best search technology and the Cassandra as the winning columnar-family database.

Cassandra was one of three winning NoSQL databases (four if you count Hadoop) that offer open source licensing. Couchbase has both enterprise and community editions, the latter offered under an Apache 2 license. And the graphical database Neo4j offers developers the good graces of the GPL if they write code for open source projects. (For a great overview of NoSQL, I highly recommend “Which freaking database should I use?” by InfoWorld’s Andrew Olliver.)

Jaspersoft BI Suite, a fine reporting and analytics platform, comes in both an open source Community edition (under the GPL or LGPL) and commercially licensed Express, Professional, and Enterprise editions.

Three of our four winning application development solutions are also open source or have an open source version: Node.js for JavaScript developers, the Bootstrap Web development framework, and Sencha Touch for cross-platform mobile app dev.

Microsoft rakes ’em in The fourth winning developer tool is in a class by itself: Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. This indispensable suite for Windows development keeps getting better with each iteration. Its award was one of four earned by Microsoft this year.

But first, what didn’t win: Regular readers of InfoWorld will hardly be shocked to learn that Windows 8 failed to achieve award status. In our view, pushing the Modern UI in the faces of desktop and laptop users is a blunder of astounding proportions. And while Windows Phone 8 has finally delivered compatibility with enterprise-class Exchange security settings, it still lags behind the competition.

Even as Microsoft stumbles in delivering end-user products, it continues to excel with software for IT pros. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 is a stunning achievement, with significant improvements to virtualization, server control, clustering, ease of use, and more. Together with System Center 2012, Microsoft has provided the foundational technology for its own version of a private cloud. We were also very impressed by the latest version of Windows PowerShell, which offers event-driven job scheduling, an enhanced scripting environment, and improved remoting.

Yet the sleeper winner is Microsoft Windows Azure, which has evolved from its introduction four-and-a-half years ago to — in my view, at least — the most promising competitor to Amazon Web Services. Last summer, Microsoft quietly retired its PaaS-only dogma and began offering IaaS as well. Fortunately, in the Azure cloud, the Microsoft-only mentality does not seem to apply, with support for Linux, Java, Python, Node.js, MySQL, and NoSQL (although tons of Microsoft app dev offerings are still available, of course). Microsoft makes it remarkably easy to spin up full-featured virtual Windows machines at the drop of a hat.

Winners in the cloud Microsoft Windows Azure was one of six cloud winners this year. Among cloud services, Azure’s nearest competitor was Joyent Cloud, which won for its high-performance IaaS offering underpinned by Solaris and a souped-up virtualization layer. Joyent is perhaps best known for bringing the world Node.js.

While Google’s IaaS offering, Google Compute Engine, remains in “limited preview” and was therefore not eligible, Google Drive is fully baked and provides a simple, free, incredibly useful cloud productivity suite and storage solution that easily earned its award. As for developers who yearn to sling Java code in the cloud, we highly recommend giving CloudBees a whirl.

For those more concerned with human side of things, consider Zendesk, a cloud-based turnkey suite for customer support. To gain remote access to PCs for support or other purposes, contributing editor Serdar Yegulalp was highly impressed by LogMeIn in its Free, Pro, and Ignition versions. The free and pro versions are public cloud services accessible via browser, while the Ignition edition is locally installed.

Jaspersoft’s BI Suite points to a variation on the usual cloud theme: Along with offering locally installable versions, it’s one of only two BI vendors certified for use with Amazon’s Relational Database Service and Redshift data warehousing service. It has also joined Google’s Cloud Platform Partner Program and released an open source connector for the online analytical processing system Google BigQuery.

More of the best You’ll find lots more great stuff in this year’s Technology of the Year Awards, including some terrific hardware from perennial winners Dell and Riverbed. Keep in mind, though, that we don’t pretend to cover the entire universe of enterprise products — and you’ll definitely want to check out winners from previous years to get a more complete picture.

This article, “Your guide to the year’s best technology,” 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.