Another new category for 2012, "user experience" has become the latest buzzword to become top of mind. Whether the user of your application is accessing it on his or her desktop, via a browser on a tablet, or as a smartphone application, he or she comes to the app with expectations of how it will work. It's not just about mouse clicks anymore; now it's slide bars and haptic technologies, and leveraging the new underlying hardware. Here are the companies on the leading edge of user experience.

The keys to any service architecture are connectivity and information exchange. From CORBA to ESBs and from SOAP to RESTful APIs, organizations need the ability to expose such things as order forms and inventory information to their partners, and to collect and use the updated information, electronically and automatically. The companies that are leading the way are recognized here.