The 10 Most Influential Biztech Products of 2008

Here is a synopsis of the 10 Most Influential Biztech Products of 2008 as seen by Larry Dignan, Sam Diaz and Tom Steinart-Threlkeld of ZDNet’s Between the Lines, fame.  Check out the complete source article for more detail on each product:

10. HP EliteBook laptops

Hewlett-Packard has already overtaken the top spot for worldwide PC sales, but the company is making a stronger run than ever at the business notebook market. HP’s EliteBook line of business laptops now offers a variety of industrial-strength features that cater to IT departments.

9. Zoho online productivity suite

Zoho has quietly been building an impressive fleet of Web-based productivity and business applications that are far more numerous and sophisticated than what Google offers and truly take advantage of the Web rather than just bringing offline apps into the browser. Especially for small businesses, Zoho is a viable alternative to Microsoft Office, and it not only saves money but also provides productivity benefits with online collaboration.

8. LifeSize HD videoconferencing

A lot of businesses are naturally tightening up their 2009 travel budgets, so you can expect that video conferencing will be one of the growing areas of IT in 2009.  Cisco Telepresence offers an amazing video conferencing experience, but the price tag is often at least a half million dollars. Meanwhile, LifeSize  HD video conferencing is nearly as good and it costs far less (usually under $40K). It also uses a lot less bandwidth, which also saves big money.

7. Splunk

One solution that does a great job of consolidating all of that IT data and making it viewable and searchable: Splunk.  Splunk easily gathers data from virtually any system or source and makes it searchable and visual through Web-based reports.

6. Force.com

Salesforce.com is arguably the business world’s most popular Web-based application. It is a customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) tool that is easy to deploy and simple for always-on-the-go sales professionals to access. Now, Salesforce.com has extended this concept to other applications by opening up the platform that Salesforce.com is built on to businesses to allow them to use it to run their own applications, from Salesforce.com extensions to custom line-of-business apps to third-party apps.

5. Amazon Web Services

Another company that is having an important impact on the way business technology is done is Amazon. Like Salesforce, Amazon has taken the platform it used to build its core business and opened it up to other businesses. In this case, Amazon.com’s robust e-commerce platform that runs its $15 billion retail business has been opened up as Amazon Web Services, which offers storage, databases, payment processing, fulfillment services, and Web site scalability.

4. Palo Alto Networks next generation firewall

Palo Alto Networks has developed a new line of firewalls that transforms them from blunt objects into much more sophisticated tools.

3. Apple iPhone 3G

While the interface has continued to improve with software updates, the second generation iPhone made this year’s list because of the enterprise-grade capabilities that Apple brought to the iPhone in 2008, including Exchange ActiveSync support and remote kill capability for IT. It remains the best-designed and easiest-to-use smartphone on the market, and its widespread publicity has helped stimulate the smartphone market as a whole.

2. Riverbed WAN acceleration

With businesses looking for easy levers to pull to cut costs out of the 2009 budget, one of the best solutions that IT can recommend is WAN acceleration, which can lower fixed leased-line costs while also improving performance for remote offices and telecommuters.  Thus, these appliances can significantly reduce bandwidth consumption and – after the first transfer – dramatically decrease the response time for file transfers and applications that rely on files that get transferred over the WAN. Lots of companies offer WAN acceleration products now, but the market leader is Riverbed.

1. BlackBerry Bold

Despite the buzz and momentum building around the iPhone, BlackBerry remains the predominant smartphone platform for the enterprise, especially in security-sensitive environments such as government and the financial sector. With the Blackberry Bold, Research in Motion has brought its smartphone to the forefront.  This device features top performance combined with all of the familiarity and manageability of the BlackBerry platform – and it includes a real keyboard.

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