VMware continues to stack up software awards early on in 2007, as the virtualization giant gets the nod from industry analysts, the media as well as consumers. VMware Lab Manager recently won the 2007 Jolt Product Excellence Award in the Utilities category. The Jolt Product Excellence Awards, sponsored by Dr. Dobb's Journal, are designed to recognize the most innovative, trend-making, ahead-of-the-curve products VMware continues to stack up software awards early on in 2007, as the virtualization giant gets the nod from industry analysts, the media as well as consumers.VMware Lab Manager recently won the 2007 Jolt Product Excellence Award in the Utilities category. The Jolt Product Excellence Awards, sponsored by Dr. Dobb’s Journal, are designed to recognize the most innovative, trend-making, ahead-of-the-curve products for developers. VMware describes Lab Manager as a product that automates the setup, capture, storage and sharing of multi-machine software configurations and makes them available on demand to local or remote development and test teams through a self-service portal. The product also includes a unique delta-tree image library management feature, which enables large image libraries to be maintained while eliminating data redundancy and reducing the amount of disk storage required compared to other lab management systems, as well as seamless integration with downstream production operations systems. The result is a system that uniquely helps enterprise operations and application development teams maximize utilization of development and test lab assets, accelerate software development cycles and increase the quality of delivered software systems.“VMware Lab Manager bridges the gap between application development and IT operations teams to maintain maximum efficiency and quality control during the software lifecycle from start to finish,” said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware. “Winning this distinguished industry award affirms the capability of VMware Lab Manager to automate and streamline this process for our customers so they in turn can more rapidly deliver business-critical applications into production.”The company also announced that Redmond magazine readers have named VMware Workstation the best desktop virtualization product and VMware Server the best server virtualization product, marking the fourth consecutive year that VMware products have been honored by Redmond. Past recognition by Redmond includes the Editors’ Choice, Most Valuable Product, “Products We Love!” and Readers’ Choice Awards. “Customer feedback is the most effective way to judge a product’s relevance to the market,” said Dan Chu. “Receiving these top awards directly from Redmond readers demonstrates our ongoing commitment to delivering high-quality products and validates the choice made by the increasing number of VMware users who have adopted virtualization as a strategic component of IT architecture.” Software Development