A good number of the winners of the Best of TechEd 2009 awards sponsored by Microsoft and Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazines were companies with a developer focus. In a year where attendance at TechEd was down—I heard estimates that varied between 4500 and 5000 attendees—this was good news for developers and the vendors that serve them. Traditionally, TechEd has been an IT-Pro-focused conference, with developer products and sessions making strong inroads, including a well-attended separate show last year. However, recession-deflated travel budgets cut into the developer presence at TechEd this year. If companies are going to fund travel, they may be saving some of those tight dollars to send developers to the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) later in the year (November 17-21) in Los Angeles. Most of the developer vendors I spoke with plan to be at both TechEd and PDC this year.
When you brush away all the fun stuff such as goofy swag, booth games, and all those shiny give-aways, it’s always good to be reminded that behind and within the flash of the sales floor are some of the brightest entrepreneurs in any industry. Microsoft can take products only so far; these vendors and partners are the ones who understand what still remains to be done, capitalize on it, and create products that make life easier for the technical professionals who need them on a daily basis.
A case in point is ScaleOut Software, who used TechEd to announce new extensions for the distributed ScaleOut StateServer caching software product. Dr. William L. Bain, founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software observed, “Our Company’s history has been that of identifying and delivering new caching technology to meet our customers’ needs. This release adds important new features which enable SacleOut StateServer to further address these evolving needs with the most comprehensive, powerful, and best supported distributed caching platform possible.” An earlier entrepreneurial effort of Bain’s was acquired by Microsoft and is now called Network Load Balancing within the Windows Server OS.
The winners and finalists of the Best of TechEd awards, selected from among over 170 entries, reflect this exciting creative technical spirit. They were evaluated based on each finalist's strategic importance, competitive advantage, and value to customers. It was a year when developer products finished strong.
The winner in the Best of TechEd Business Intelligence (BI) category, which was open to products dealing with any aspect of BI, went to Developer Express for its DevExpress Analytics. These products provide pivot grids and charts for Winforms and ASP.NET AJAX. Developer Express also won the Best of TechEd Attendee’s Pick award. In addition, Developer Express was the winner in many categories in this year’s asp.netPRO Reader’s Choice awards.
AVIcode for Intercept Studio won in the Developer Tools category. This AVIcode tool, which provides deep application health monitoring and error analysis, is useful for troubleshooting .NET application performance.
The winner in the Software Components and Middleware category is another developer-focused company—JNBridge. Their product, JNBridgePro, is useful for businesses running both .NET and Java applications. JNBridgePro enables developers to join .NET and Java applications at the object, class, and component level.
Quest Software, who was a Best of TechEd finalist in five categories and has products of interest to a broad spectrum of technical interests—from power users to IT Pros to DBAs and developers—won in the Database Development category with their Toad for SQL Server. This product is particularly useful for businesses running multiple versions of SQL Server. It connects to SQL Server 2000 and later and provides advanced T-SQL performance tuning and transaction log recovery.
Read the blog on WindowsITpro.com for a complete list of the Best of TechEd winners.
And don’t forget to check out the winners of the asp.netPRO Readers’ Choice awards.