Best products of 2004 

Anyone who thinks that IT innovation has stalled must be sleeping. As our annual roundup of the best IT products shows, the competition just keeps getting better.

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This feature represents the judgment of our Test Center analysts on the best and most innovative products for the coming year. And while the 19 winners include several of the usual suspects (IBM and HP each snagged two, for example), plenty of smaller companies also join the list.

Austin, Texas-based Vieo, for example, captured honors for the Best Systems Management Solution. Its Vieo 1000 adapts to traffic spikes and performance problems in real time, making systems management simpler and more flexible. And the Best Wireless LAN Solution went to Vernier Networks of Mountain View, Calif. for its Vernier IS-6500p, which provides wireless security using existing network and wireless infrastructure.

In what may be a harbinger of things to come, both awards in the Enterprise Applications category went to hosted solutions -- one from Salesforce.com (for its CRM system) and one from Grand Central Communications (for what amounts to a Net-based, Web services switchboard).

No set of awards would be complete without booby prizes, and some of our winners also got dinged. Apple, for instance, which won Best Operating System for its Panther OS, also earned our Dude, Where’s My Product Road Map? award for failing to offer guidance on a G5 version of its Xserve server.

And don’t miss the Products We Needed Yesterday. It’s a guide to the winners we hope to see next year. Among them: better cooperation among competing identity management systems and a universal IM client. (Hey, we can dream, right?)

There’s one more treat in store for readers of this column. Starting next week, this space will be shared with our clever and sometimes provocative editor in chief, Steve Fox, who will write Editor’s Letter on alternate weeks.

Steve’s background includes stints as editorial director of CNET, editor of PC World, and editor in chief of The Web magazine, a short-lived chronicler of the early Internet. Since joining InfoWorld in March, he directed our coverage during the move from tabloid to magazine format and invented or supervised many of our most popular cover packages.

Steve aims to continue the solid reviews, news, and tech strategy for which InfoWorld is known, but also to bring contentious issues to the fore. “I don’t think of InfoWorld as supporting any particular ‘political’ point of view in IT,” he says, “but instead as a forum where smart, highly informed people -- including readers -- can express their opinions.”

So, 2004 should be a doubly interesting year. Best wishes to you all!