Ed Brill

I'm sitting here this evening judging submissions for the Lotus Awards -- "Maximizing Value with an Open Source Solution" category, and realized I had not yet written about the first round of winners that were announced last Friday.  I judged one of those categories, too, along with the IBM Beacon Award for best Lotus solution.  All told I'll invest somewhere around 6-8 hours in these judging efforts, watching videos, reading customer reference stories, and finding out more about the great technology and solutions being built atop IBM collaboration solutions.

There was some negative energy in the blogosphere about the Lotus Awards this year, which I didn't shy away from.  Neither, apparently, did the majority of eligible business partners, as we had more nominations in each of the three categories that I judged than I've ever seen before.  They came from all over the world, and even for this 18-year veteran of Notes technology, some of the solutions surprised me with their depth and capabilities.  

I want to thank all the partners that took the time to submit their nominations; I may not have clicked on every link, but I did read everything you submitted and watched demos and looked at samples.  Thanks.

Congratulations to winners announced thus far: Silanis, Ascendant, Ascendant, iEnterprises, Trilog Group, Fritz & Macziol, and Polycom; and to finalists Tungle, Applicable, Prolifics, Rigelsoft, Ascendant, GEDYS IntraWare, Brookstone Technologies, EdifiXio, Silanis, GROUP Business Software, iEnterprises, Plantronics, and KMSLab.

Link: IBM.com: IBM Lotus Awards 2011 >