Intelligent Enterprise

With all eyes on the economy, smart enterprises will have to make the most of technology to outmaneuver the competition and navigate the shoals of a challenging marketplace. The competition will be fierce, and it's more important than ever for companies to make the most of information and deliver timely insight, to quickly adapt applications and processes to changing conditions, and to maximize financial and operational performance.

Technology complacency is not an option if you expect to outsmart the competition; nor is this a time for heedless investment without specific goals for competitive advantage or return on investment. To guide you to vendors that have been leading the way in innovation and business optimization, we present our 10th Annual Intelligent Enterprise Editors' Choice Awards. We considered scores of companies that are helping organizations move toward the ideal expressed by our publication's name, Intelligent Enterprise. In our estimation, all 48 companies that made our Editors' Choice list are leaders, but a select group of 12 were named among "The Dozen" elite companies that will matter most to intelligent enterprises in 2009. We highlight 36 other vendors as "Companies to Watch" in five categories:

As always, this year's Editors' Choice award nominations were a collaborative endeavor, with extensive input from a dozen Intelligent Enterprise contributors:

We are grateful for the input and analysis provided by these experts. However, Intelligent EnterpriseEditor-in-Chief Doug Henschen was responsible for the final selection of "The Dozen" and "Companies to Watch." We encourage practitioners and independent experts to share their comments in our discussion forum (below), while those representing or otherwise tied to individual vendors should send comments to dhenschen@techweb.com.