It’s time once again for the SD Times 100, in which we attempt to recognize the organizations or individuals that have demonstrated leadership in their markets, either through the strength of their products or the technological innovation that drives our industry forward.
This year, though, we’re doing things a little differently. Instead of having 10 categories with 10 winners each, we’ve expanded the number of categories to 15, with no set number of winners in each. We believe that this better reflects what’s happening in the industry, as organizations rush to follow the hot new thing while leaving the more mature markets to a smaller group of players. For instance, this year, we have added categories for software security, business process management and build management, which emerged in 2005 as areas that development managers needed to pay closer attention to as enterprises worked overtime to get their IT departments in line with their business goals.
Meanwhile, the old Integration & Middleware category became SOA & Integration, and Collaboration & SCM became Software Configuration Management & Change Management, to align better with the work that development organizations—and the companies that serve them, such as software vendors, consultants and, yes, even industry analysts—are doing.
The addition of some categories and the renaming of others has also resulted in a whole slew of newcomers to the SD Times 100, such as AJAX tools vendor ClearNova and Catalyst Systems in build management. Of course, no honor roll of the software development world would be complete without heavyweights IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, which appear on numerous lists. Their sheer size—of market share, of R&D spending—make them the companies to look to year in and year out.
So then, here, in the estimation of our editors, are the trendsetters, newsmakers and noisemakers of 2005:
- Application Servers 2006
- Build Management 2006
- Business Process Management 2006
- Components, Libraries and Frameworks 2006
- Data and Host Integration 2006
- Databases 2006
- Embedded & Mobile 2006
- Influencers 2006
- Modeling 2006
- Rich Client
- SOA & Integration
- Software Configuration Management & Change Management
- Software Security
- Test, QA & Performance Management
- Tools & Environments
