A decade of innovation and leadership

By Alan Zeichick

May 31, 2012 — Ten years! That’s how long the SD Times 100 has been published.

Ten short years, if you consider that the IBM PC appeared in 1981, C was developed in the late 1960s, and the COBOL code in the basement might have been written even earlier.

Ten long years, if your developers are using agile methodologies to create cloud-based mobile applications in HTML5, and rely on Git and Twitter to keep their teams connected.

How things have changed. The debut SD Times 100, published in 2003, listed some companies whose named disappeared a long time ago, like Rational Software, TogetherSoft, Rogue Wave, Select Business Solutions, Mercury Interactive, Wily Technology, Borland, BEA Systems, Metrowerks, Merant, Telelogic, Actional, webMethods, even Sun Microsystems... it’s a real walk down memory lane.

Not everything changed. Peruse back a decade, and you’ll still see familiar names like IBM, Microsoft, Eclipse, Apple, the World Wide Web Consortium, Oracle and Red Hat—all names that you’ll find in the 2012 SD Times 100. And, of course, some of the disappeared names were subsumed into industry giants. Sun is part of Oracle now; Rational is part of IBM.

What is more fascinating is the list of who is missing from the early SD Times 100 entries. No Google, which didn’t show up until 2007. No Twitter, which appeared on the list in 2010. No cloud development companies. Not much that we’d call agile.

Even the companies that have been persistently on the list have changed and evolved. Today, we look at Apple as a leader and innovator in mobile. Back in 2003, though, the company was recognized for its brand-new Mac OS X.

The software development industry continues to change in ways we cannot anticipate. In 2003, technology reporters didn’t cover enterprise service bus technology, AJAX-based Web applications, mobile app stores, NoSQL databases, crowdsourced quality assurance, wrapperless Web multimedia, touch-based user experiences on tablets, or cloud-based storage.

Can’t wait to see what will come next.

For more on the SD Times 100, see this year's list and our list of All-Stars and One-Hit Wonders.

Related Search Term(s): SD Times 100

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