2006 Jolt Awards
At this year's SD West 2006 Conference and Expo, 14 Jolt Awards and 42 Productivity Awards were presented, along with one inductee into the Hall of Fame. It's noteworthy that 15 of this year's winners had never before entered the competition. Newcomers Lattix, WelcomRisk, and Elemental—of which addressed the issue of complexity and development environments—received Jolt Awards in the categories of Design Tools and Modeling, Enterprise Project Management, and Security Tools, respectively. Likewise, several past Productivity Award winners moved up to become "Jolt worthy." Two-time Productivity winner Perforce, for instance, earned a Jolt by being the best in the Defect Tracking, Change, and Configuration Management category. According to one Jolt judge, "Perforce has demonstrated scalability, supporting thousands of developers and hundreds of thousands of modules without difficulty. Moreover, it's faster than blazes. It is almost certainly the best enterprise SCM product available this year."
This was also a good year for Microsoft, which garnered Jolt Awards in the categories of Database Engines and Data Tools; Development Environments; and Libraries, Frameworks, and Components. Microsoft also received a Productivity Award for its Visual Studio Team System, and was joined the ranks in the Hall of Fame for its Visual Studio Professional Edition.
Other Jolt winners include AppForge's Crossfire 5.6 in the Mobile Development Tools categories, Rally Software's Rally 5.6 for Quality Project Management, VMWare's VMTN Subscription 2005 in the Testing Tools category, TechSmith's Camtasia Studio 3.0 for Utilities, and in the Web Development Tools division, Rails 1.0 from Rubyonrails.org.
—Rosalyn Lum
