Reader's Choice Awards

The dawn of a new year is always the perfect time to reflect on the past while predicting the future. I can't think of a better catalyst for reflecting and predicting industry tech trends than the Readers' Choice Awards. As determined by our readers, this is the "it" list of today's tech visionaries. This year, there were plenty of surprises on hand to liven up the proceedings, but before we get into the nitty gritty, it's important to understand how the voting process worked.

Lead Advantage handled the voting procedures, breaking out responses from over 150 consumer goods executives. The ballot consisted of a multitude of technology categories including RFID, Trade Promotions, Enterprise Resource Planning, Data Synchronization, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and more. Voters were asked to identify and rank the tech vendors they currently use, and rank their customer experience using each. Top 10 and
top five lists were determined by a combined score of sheer number of votes weighed against customer experience ratings.

Breakout Winners
Rounding out the Best-In-Class ballot are "Breakout Winners", companies that received special kudos in areas of Customer Experience and success among Small/Midsize Business. Customer experience is based on a one to five scale, five being the best,while the category Small/ Midsize Business allowed participants to define their company size in order to determine the most widely used vendors among CG firms with $1 billion or less in revenue. In some cases, firms like Good Technology landed on one of the Breakout Category lists, even though they did not place in the overall top 10 due to high ranks in customer experience or popularity in the mid-market.

The Winner's Circle
Of course, there's much, much more to the Readers' Choice than just SAP. A plethora of newcomers make their mark this year like the aforementioned Good Technology, Web Methods, John Gault and Vendor Managed Technologies. By placing respectably across the Top 10 categories these innovative tech firms are proof positive that there is still room for the niche players to rub elbows with the big guns of the tech industry. It will be interesting to
see how they fare next year.

Abundance of RFID
As the industry settles into a more comfortable RFID stride this year it will be interesting to see how the power struggle plays out between hardware, software and service providers. As our rankings an commentary indicates, the need to be the best in the RFID realm sometimes means partnering with industry heavyweights (OATSystems and IBM) or unleashing powerful, new capabilities. Microsoft, who lands at the No. 3 RFID software position is releasing the RFID Services platform, a middleware product designed to connect RFID hardware and software systems while making sense of EPC signals. The product is designed for businesses that want to incorporate RFID into their own systems, as well as for other software companies that want to build a product based on Microsoft's technology. Expect big headlines to
appear from this venture.

Companies on the Move
Even though this year's Reader's Choice contains 14 different tech categories, some companies could not find a comfortable home within these broad parameters. In response, "Companies On the Move" was created to highlight tech companies that really are on the move and merit recognition for their offerings and efforts to make sense of the complex world of information technology. Make no mistake, "Companies On the Move" is not just a short list of obscure vendors. Quite the contrary. This section is a valuable guide that includes information on "Newcomers" like M-Factor and Optiant in addition to industry heavyweights that like to think "Outside the Box" like TDLinx. How can we improve the quality next year? Drop me a line at: [email protected].