25th Annual SIIA CODiE Awards

This year I once again served as a judge for the SIIA CODiE awards, and I'm proud to say that all my favorites have made it to the finals!!!  For the first time I was given the opportunity to judge the "Best Solution by an Emerging Company" category, and I was truly impressed.  I also judged the "Best DRM Solution" and was able to reconnect with several friends from my previous space.

Before I give you a quick highlight, some advice for ANY software company competing in an awards: YOU HAVE SALES PEOPLE, USE THEM.  When you have a huge opportunity, who do you send?  This is who you should send to do your demos.  If you want to bore the judge to death, put your engineer and product managers together and rattle off a few thousand features.

At the end of the day, the process is really no different then a sales call.  Put your best sellers in front of the judges, not necessarily your smartest engineer.  

ALL of the companies who listed who competed within the Emerging Company category deserve a round of applause, and I apologize if I don't do any of you proper justice here:

IQM2 (a finalist) - Offers truly powerful collaborative solutions for the public sector and government... and I'm actively trying to see how I can use it for our internal collaboration needs (new vertical, hint hint).

Cloudshare (also a finalist) - Allows you to create mobile Datacenters, just like you would any image of an OS.  As software solutions become more and more complex and network environments require true variation for customer demos, Cloudshare makes it easier then ever to perform your demos and other collaboration needs.  Cloudshare is offering a FREE public beta, I recommend signing up.

Marketo- Offers an impressive lead generation management suite.  Anyone from the marketing world who is constantly having to answer to the sales team for leads, I recommend looking into this product.

NetProspex - Are you a big Jigsaw fan and wish they could somehow clean up the mess?  Searching for relevant and valid contacts and leads in a world full of pollution?  Check out NetProspex.

Peer39 - Ad inventory is hard enough to sell, now imagine placing a key account ad in a truly undesirable location.  Peer39's semantic management system helps you prevent just that from happening.  Its a safe bet CNN (below pic) is in a little bit of trouble for sending out the below notice.  Omaha Steaks and former VP's heart attack.  I can already here the Peer 39 sales call...

Tempo Payments - These guys allow you to create affinity card programs for just about any cause or group WITHOUT a huge amount of hassle or costs.  By leveraging swings in card penetration and other market factors, Tempo is able to offer huge value to every party.  I've already sent the email to my group, World of Hope, to get on board.

Coveo - offers some very cool data intersection capabilites for enterprise search and its on your mobile too!!

WanDisco - Makes it so your remote development teams can all be working off effecient, local and updated development source trees.

KnowledgeTree - Trying to figure out how you can enable collaboration and document management without building a huge system or being held hostage by IT capital budgets?  Here's your answer.

If you want to see the full list of competitors and categories, scroll through here.