2015 Reader's Choice Awards Announced
It should come as little surprise that the largest hardware and software providers surrounding the Microsoft ecosystem received the most votes in this year's annual Reader's Choice Awards (PDF). And once again, Dell Inc. won the most awards, this time in 46 categories.
Dell's edge of course comes from the numerous software, security and hardware companies it has acquired in recent years. So who's nipping at Dell's heels? The strongest gainers this year were Hewlett Packard Co. and VMware Inc., while strong showers Cisco Systems Inc. and SolarWinds Inc. also maintained last year's number of awards. Some strong players in more narrow segments are also coming at Dell -- among them Kaseya, ManageEngine, Netwrix Corp., Goverlan, Acronis, Veeam Software, LANDesk, Flexera Software LLC, NetIQ Corp., Barracuda Networks Inc., Kaspersky Lab, Webtrends, IBM Co., EMC Corp. (including RSA Security division), NetApp, AppDynamics, Proofpoint and Lenovo Group Ltd.
These awards are decided by readers, not Redmond magazine, and are based on responses to our survey, fielded in late June to early July to our circulation database of 100,000 readers of which 1,056 participated. We include all known vendors in each category except for Microsoft (with a few exceptions) to get a sense of what "third-party" software, hardware and services were most favored for working with and in support of Microsoft's core platforms. The exceptions were in the browser, public cloud and tablet categories, where we wanted to see how Internet Explorer, Azure and Surface stacked up these days.
The entire list of categories and winners is available for download.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 09/11/2015 at 12:03 PM