Intelligent Enterprise

Vendor consolidation, social networking and Web 2.0 technologies, software as a service, the open source movement, virtualization. These are just a few of the influences that are irrevocably changing the IT landscape. Just as categories of enterprise software begin to mature, along come acquisitions, startups and entirely new types of offerings that complicate the vendor selection process.

Editors' Choice Awards 2008

To help make sense of the trends and cut through the confusion, we present our ninth Intelligent Enterprise Editors' Choice Awards. Looking into the year ahead, we considered scores of companies that are helping organizations to move toward the ideal expressed by the 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 2008. We distinguish 36 other vendors as "Companies to Watch," listed in five categories:

Business Intelligence
Enterprise Applications
Information Management
Performance Management
Process Management

This year's Editors' Choice award selection was a highly collaborative endeavor, with extensive input from Intelligent Enterprise contributors including:

Tony Byrne, CMS Watch
Rajan Chandras, integration expert and author
Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard
Seth Grimes, Alta Plana
Phil Kemelor, CMS Watch
Sandy Kemsley, Kemsley Design
Nelson King, software development expert and author
David Linthicum, Zapthink
Mark Madsen, Third Nature
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, CMS Watch
Bruce Silver, Bruce Silver Associates
Mark Smith, Ventana Research
David Stodder, Ventana Research

We are grateful for the input and analysis provided by these experts, but Doug Henschen, Editor-in-Chief, is 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@cmp.com.