Show awards...

The judges picked the winners for the show awards, and we presented them yesterday afternoon at the show floor. My notes...

Best Application Development Tool: Ingres Consolidated Application Foundation for Eclipse: looks like a good solid corporate development tool for people who want to get started with Tomcat, Hibernate, and JSF. More info: Ingres in two bundling deals

Best Business Application: xTuple ERP 3.0. Looks like a way to scrap the secret shame of many Linux-using small companies: the proprietary server running the accounting package. But network effects matter for this kind of software: will your CPA learn it?

Best Clustering or Grid Solution: DataSynapse Fabric Server 2.6. "a dynamic application service management platform that configures, activates and scales applications based on business policies and demand."

Best Desktop Solution: Ubuntu Desktop Edition 8.04 LTS. Another one for the trophy case on the Isle of Man.

Most Innovative Hardware Solution: Violin Memory, Violin 1010. Costs about as much per megabyte as putting more memory in your database server, but runs cooler. A secret weapon for MySQL performance tuning or running memcached.

Best Integration Solution: Openbravo Network. Part of the encouraging trend of ERP going open source. Makes sense since customers need extensive customization on ERP anyway, and the legacy ERP projects are IT budget killers.

Best Messaging Solution: Barracuda Message Archiver 850. Be on your best email behavior from now on. Someone is automatically keeping a copy. And if you can't say something nice...

Best Mobility Solution: Unicon Systems Hermes Mobile Platform. This company won last year, and the judges are always coming up with ideas of all the cool stuff you could make. That's a good sign. (Did I mention that you could put a social network/GPS/automatic ride sharing system with it?)

Best Security Solution: Trusted Computer Solutions. Security Blanket Enterprise. How many of your organization's servers are 100% configured in accordance with your server hardening policy? Are you sure? This might let you save your security-tweaking time for the hard tasks.

Best System Management Tool: Altinity Opsview v2.12. Bundles all the top open source management tools: Nagios, Linux-HA, Puppet, Syslog-NG and Xen. Not fair to the people who spend weeks getting all the tools installed and configured. Now the lazy people will be able to name-drop too. (Be honest: how many of you use the users as your monitoring tool? And how much less work would it be to get a program to tell you what's wrong instead of having to get it out of the user?)

Best Virtualization Solution: Pivot 3 : Serverless Computing. A storage platform that also runs application servers in virtual machines.

Best of Show: GoGrid. Another one that sets off ideas. Want to do a big administrator training, or a test network, or a big build farm? Judges are impressed with "cloud computing" working this smoothly.

And I'm off to Jon Loeliger's git talk (podcast, schedule and slides). See you at the show.