Another merger of two formerly independent categories, security and QA have moved to the fore with the growth of cloud computing. Building applications that rely on someone else’s services or hardware requires protection for your assets, as well as some measure of confidence that the application will perform as anticipated. These companies are on the lead in this growing area.
If components are the raw materials, tools and frameworks are the developer’s workspace. It is here that applications come to life, as developers choose their language, platform and deployment options. The number of companies cited in this category shows the growth of these alternatives to “heavy” platforms.
What do they say… A craftsman is only as good as the materials he uses? This category recognizes the providers of the nails, boards and bricks developers use to build their applications. With charts, grids, drop-down lists, maps, ribbons and more, these companies make assembling and styling applications easier than ever.
This year sees the merger of these two categories into one, as we have seen “life-cycle management” expand to include such concepts as continuous integration and delivery, and agile development. These are the companies that make the tools that help enterprises stay current with changes in their industry and take advantage of new opportunities.
The SD Times 100 is about innovation and leadership. While every project and organization on the list meets those criteria, there are a few that, through the work they accomplished in 2010, were able to shift an entire industry toward a platform, methodology or emerging standard. This list includes many of the major players in software development, as one would expect, as well as a few newcomers.
With the explosion of smartphone and tablet use around the world, enterprise development teams are being given new marching orders: “Get our applications into the field!” We recognize those companies and projects that are trying to create standards and bring commonality to this space.
This is where the pundits say organizations need to be, citing the big benefit of cost reduction to an organization in terms of hardware and people to maintain the server room. The *-as-a-service model is also appealing to companies who want to “pay as they go” for software and platform use. It’s a race to the clouds, and these are the early leaders.
The lifeblood of any transactional application is the database that populates its fields. Some are in the back end, some are caches that hold data outside the database. The key for developers is to build the integrations that allow that data to interact with applications and services, whether on the ground or in the cloud. These providers flat-out know databases, and how to connect them to a multitude of endpoints.
