2006 Year in Reviews

In the past twelve months, virtualization caught fire, SaaS and SOA gathered steam, and network security turned inward as IT battled the insider threat. AJAX made rich clients richer; networked storage went small to court SMBs; groupware donned Web 2.0 garb; and integrating systems and data became more important than ever. Our reviews tracked all these developments and more: In this fourth annual year-end roundup, you'll find summary evaluations of every product we tested and previewed this year, listed alphabetically by vendor in eight categories.

Application development

We gave the Web front end plenty of attention in 2006, with roundups of lean freebie AJAX tools including open-source offerings from Dojo, Open Rico and Prototype, and Zimbra ; rich enterprise AJAX IDEs from Backbase, MB Technologies, JackBe, and Tibco; AJAX controls for .Net from Infragistics and telerik; not to mention a fresh look at a charter member of the rich Internet application "old guard," the Flash-fueled Adobe Flex 2.

On other fronts, Microsoft's Team Suite made a successful debut, Jtest honed its edge, NetBeans marched on, and Klocwork trumped Coverity in source analysis. In business rules management, Blaze Advisor topped rival JRules and Corticon showed a matchless rules GUI.

Applications

Our deep coverage of the enterprise service bus grew even deeper as we followed our 2005 blockbuster ESB comparison with tests of BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, Software AG, and Tibco Web services integration offerings this year.

We tracked an impressive group of mail and groupware platforms, including the Exchange 2007 beta, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 7, and the Linux-based Scalix and Zimbra, then we went on a bender for third-party Exchange monitoring and HA solutions. We also put two strong BPM solutions on the bench, Appian and BEA; look for more BPM reviews in the year ahead.

Data management

Databases have had a busy couple of years: 2004 gave birth to Oracle 10g, and 2005 to SQL Server 2005. In 2006, it was IBM DB2's turn for a landmark release, with "Viper" trotting out a hybrid relational-XML data engine and other innovative features.

The year also brought strong enterprise search solutions, led by Vivisimo but with Google and others close behind, and a new twist on content management with RSS managers for the enterprise from Attensa, KnowNow, and NewsGator.

We also tracked developments in event stream processing, or complex event processing if you prefer, with StreamBase a half-step ahead of a fast-moving field including AptSoft, Progress Apama, and iSpheres.

Hardware

The year in hardware belonged to Sun, whose Opteron-based Sun Fire servers surged ahead of the competition. Stratus' fault-tolerant Windows server earned top marks and Dell's ninth-generation PowerEdge made a good showing, whereas the Egenera BladeFrame EX proved to be an odd mixture of exceptional hits and minor misses.

In systems management, Kace packed enterprise-class Windows management into an SMB package, and PremiTech brought the too-often-ignored client-side perspective to performance monitoring of enterprise apps. Splunk brought Web-style search to log mining, and LogLogic continued to build on a heavy duty log management and analysis platform.

Networking

After most of the vendors declined our invitation to a WAN shootout last year, we settled for a series of standalone reviews of WAN accelerators this year. As usual, Riverbed's Steelhead shined -- so did products from Silver Peak, Blue Coat, and Cisco Systems, though they still swam in Steelhead's wake. Perhaps competition will be stiff enough for a comparative test in 2007. Stay tuned.

Elsewhere on the networking front, Extreme and HP ProCurve scaled our 10 Gig enterprise summit, but Cisco didn't show up. However, the Cisco Catalyst and Integrated Services Routers did succeed at wowing us in stand-alone reviews.

Platforms

Novell's Suse Linux 10 was the landmark operating system launch of the year, giving us a bigger and badder Linux server and a startlingly smooth Linux desktop. We also got good looks at Microsoft Vista and Windows Longhorn betas, and at BEA's venerable WebLogic 9.1.

No offense to OSes and app servers, but if we had to pick a platform of the year it would have to be the hypervisor. Virtualization attacked on all fronts in 2006, with VMware, Scalent, and SWSoft scoring high marks at the server, Altiris and Parallels leading at the desktop, and VMware/Akimbi and Surgient pointing the way in virtual lab management.

Security

Given a sharp nudge from federal and state mandates, the security focus has shifted from intruders and malware to data protection and the insider threat -- and the likes of Vontu, Reconnex, Oakley Networks, and PortAuthority are meeting the challenge.

Another emerging category we're watching closely is policy-based network access control, where nimble specialists such as Caymas, Elemental Security, and Vernier are in front of lumbering NAC initiatives driven by Cisco, Microsoft, and the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect.

Elsewhere, the year's top dogs included SonicWall in firewalls, McAfee in IPS, and F5 in VPNs. As per usual, IronPort and Symantec led in mail security and anti-spam.

Storage

In EMC's march on the enterprise NAS market, two big feet fell this year in the form of the company's Rainfinity (global file system) and Infoscape (file classification) releases, which we took for early spins in EMC's labs. The year also brought a smooth rev of Windows Storage Server, a swell mid-range SAN from Compellent, and a slick tape library from Spectra Logic.

Taking a cue from compliance and data protection imperatives, our primary focus in storage this year was backup and archiving, especially for e-mail, where Symantec Veritas and Zantaz shined, but not as brightly as HP. For enterprise-wide backups, Asigra's Televaulting platform and WysDM Software's reporting package showed the right stuff.

By InfoWorld Test Center staff