When IT's messy problems seem insurmountable, there's an easy antidote: Have a close look at a year's worth of great products. You'll renew your faith that innovation can overcome any difficulty. We at InfoWorld have that honor every January when... When IT’s messy problems seem insurmountable, there’s an easy antidote: Have a close look at a year’s worth of great products. You’ll renew your faith that innovation can overcome any difficulty. We at InfoWorld have that honor every January when we roll out our Technology of the Year awards. Executive editor and head of reviews Doug Dineley, the InfoWorld Test Center, and its many contributors all pore over the hundreds of products we’ve reviewed during the past 12 months and call out the ultimate winners. This year we’re presenting 49 awards in nine general categories, several of them featuring the most ingenious solutions we’ve encountered in years. Doug says that the value of Technology of the Year awards — our most popular article of the year — goes beyond merely skimming the cream of the crop. “We recognize the IT solutions that are not only the best products in their categories, they’re the best products in the most important product categories on the IT landscape today. These are the solutions that are pushing information technology where business needs it to go.” That momentum yielded some clear trends this year, according to Doug. First and most striking is that blade servers have matured and gone mainstream — for large enterprises, SMBs, or any operation where physical space is constrained. Along with serving as an ideal hardware platform for server virtualization, blade servers use less power than multiple, conventional severs, a benefit that fits nicely into the burgeoning green IT trend. ESBs (enterprise services buses) are another favorite area of InfoWorld coverage. In the past year, ESBs became rich middleware suites for enabling SOA (service oriented architecture). Doug notes that service orientation is also affecting rich Internet application development, as several tool vendors begin to merge AJAX toolkits with server-side mashup platforms. In the security field, the focus on data protection and compliance continues. Encryption has gained ground everywhere, embedding itself into disk drives and backup solutions. The more progressive security solutions are focusing on monitoring and controlling user behavior. And finally, we’re compelled to point out that during the past year, open source software has climbed to the top tier in several areas, including VoIP, content management, middleware, and application development. Great new ideas are always bubbling under the surface of the IT industry, but seldom surface in predictable ways. The Technology of the Year awards give us an excellent opportunity to take stock and highlight the best and most important solutions. We hope you enjoy the results. Technology Industry