14 tips from our second annual Innovation Award winners
by Gordon Graham, Editor, SoftwareCEO
CLICK HERE FOR SINGLE-PAGE & PRINT-READY VERSIONS (SITE MEMBERS ONLY)
Innovation is at the heart of the software industry; without it, we wouldn't be here.
To help acknowledge the people creating the breakthrough ideas of today, we created the SoftwareCEO/CompTIA Innovation Awards.
(CompTIA is the Computing Technology Industry Association based in Chicago that publishes SoftwareCEO.)
Last year we launched these awards, and the concept took off. This year we had close to 100 entries, for everything from a simple utility to cut wasteful printing to a platform for holding virtual trade shows.
The award winners were announced at a special reception at the Software Marketing Perspectives conference in Santa Clara, Calif. the first week of May.
This feature presents 13 award-winning software firms that are busy working on fresh and exciting ideas. (One company won in two categories, giving us 14 awards in all).
How we picked the winners
Innovation seems to pop up in all different forms in our industry. If you could predict an innovation, or locate it within some overall pattern, it wouldn't be nearly as innovative.
So like last year, we had a broad range of entries, with no apparent trends to help sort them into neat categories.
The judging criteria included three key aspects:
- Scope: What business problem/opportunity does the innovation address? What's the size of the problem/opportunity?
- Impact: What practical results in terms of sales, users, profits, and so on has the innovation had on a software product or the industry?
- Novelty: How much does the innovation break with traditional ideas or processes?
Based on these criteria, our judges — each of them an industry expert — awarded points to each entry.
This narrowed the field to several dozen finalists, as listed here. Then an award went to the top-scoring entry in each category; if the scores were very close, we gave more than one award per category.
Now we have two double-plays
Two firms have now received two Innovation Awards in the first two years of this program.
For its ongoing innovations in SaaS enablement, OpSource received an award both years.
And SAVO this year received awards in two different categories, both for most innovative enterprise software and for most innovative business/service model.
Way to bat 1000, you guys!
And the award goes to...
The following table shows all 14 winners in the 2008 SoftwareCEO/CompTIA Innovation Awards.
continued »
|
