Such The Drama

That’s how “2008: An Economic Odyssey” played. The year was filled with images of layoffs, cutbacks, going-out-of-business signs and more. Pundits said the technology sector held up better than most, showing only that “weak” is better than “down” in financial terms. Meanwhile, companies lived quarter to quarter, hoping they didn’t simply fade to black.

To be sure, there were bright spots with the emergence of cloud computing and composite applications. Amazon was the star of that picture, but other platform providers sought billing. For development managers, the line they kept hearing was, “Do more with less.“ Agile development practices played a larger role. And with the move toward services came an increase in the use of open-source software, as companies looked to cut costs and increase time-to-market. This created a market for governance and certification software.

It was the year that most of us found Facebook and learned to tweet on Twitter. These social media sites proved that collaboration is easier than ever. For distributed teams, “development as a service” followed this trend as hosted platforms accessed via a browser emerged and grew.

So here are the companies that led the way to this new software world through their ideas, inventions and new implementations.

Continue to the first Best in Show: Application Life-Cycle Mgmt. 2009
Previous Winners
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