IDG's InfoWorld recently announced the recipients of its 2008 Technology of the Year honors, recognizing 45 products across 9 general categories. The selection process was handled by InfoWorld Test Center editors and reviewers.

The annual awards identify the best and most innovative products on the IT landscape and the winners are drawn from all of the products that have gone through the testing process during the past year, with the final selections made by InfoWorld's Test Center staff.

"InfoWorld tests upwards of 200 IT products every year, and we see many, many good ones," said Doug Dineley, InfoWorld's Test Center Executive Editor. "Our Technology of the Year award winners represent not only the cream of the crop, but the best products in the most important product categories. From the top AJAX development tools and SOA middleware to the best blade servers and VoIP systems, these are the products at the leading edge of IT."

The Virtualization Report takes a look at three of the winners from the Platform category. You'll probably recognize the names and products from Symantec (application virtualization), VMware (Windows and Linux desktop virtualization) and Parallels (Mac OS X virtualization). All great virtualization tools and well deserved winners of the award. Other winners in this category included Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Sun Solaris 10.

Symantec SVS Professional 2.1
Symantec's choice of AppStream as its streaming partner make SVS Pro the most complete of the three leading application virtualization platforms. Thanks to the AppStream Web portal, users can surf to and access the desired applications in a kiosk-like, on-demand fashion, outshining both Microsoft SoftGrid and Thinstall in Web-based access to packaged applications. In this regard, SVS Pro provides a solution that is closer to the subscription-based delivery model that's been the holy grail of commercial developers for nearly a decade.

Click here for the full story.

VMware Workstation 6.0
VMware Workstation has long been the standard bearer for desktop virtualization among hard-core users, and version 6.0 solidifies VMware's position as the dominant player in developer and product support circles. A combination of class-leading features, direct hooks into popular IDEs, an ever-expanding roll call of supported operating systems, and excellent scalability make VMware Workstation the only choice for serious virtualization users.

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Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac
Parallels Desktop 3.0 brings several new features to the Mac OS X virtualization game, including direct graphics acceleration capabilities, snapshots, and offline browsing of VM file systems. It's an intuitive, easy-to-use virtualization platform for switchers who need to run Windows applications alongside OS X. Convenient, GUI-based tools and a quick Windows install are the product's real strengths. It lacks VMware Fusion's support for 64-bit operating systems and some versions of Linux, but for most users it's the better choice.

Click here for the full story.

You can find out about all of the other great winners of the award, here. It includes categories such as Application Development, Applications and Middleware, Data Management, Hardware, Networking, Security and Storage.

Posted by David Marshall on January 8, 2008 06:15 PM