Winners of 2015 SIIA CODiE Awards for Cloud Computing

On Thursday, May 7th, The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) announced the winners of the 2015 CODiE Awards across over 75 categories, including four cloud computing categories: best cloud infrastructure,  best cloud management solutions, best cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and best software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

The SIIA is a US based software and IT trade association, founded in 1984 to lobby US policy makers and to conduct surveys and business research. For 29 years, since 1986, the SIIA has held the CODiE awards as a way to evaluate and honor the information industry’s leading products and services.

“SIIA’s 2015 Software CODiE Award winners are some of the most innovative, high-impact software products in the market,” said Rhianna Collier, VP & General Manager for the Software & Services Division at SIIA, in a speech at the awards ceremony Thursday.

Here’s our round-up of the CODiE awards across cloud computing categories, or, as I like to call them, the cloudies:

Best Cloud Infrastructure

Winner: Nasuni Service 6.0 – Nasuni Corporation

“Nasuni provides an enterprise storage service that combines on-premises storage controllers with a cloud-based service that enables global enterprises to provide all employees with fast access to an infinitely scalable global file share. Files are locally available across all locations, synchronized globally, and a global lock prevents simultaneous editing of the same file. Backup, disaster recovery, mobile access to files, and centralized management are all included for up to 70% less than traditional solutions.

Customers do not make any capital investment. Local storage controllers are leased, with a refresh every three years or sooner, if necessary, and capacity is billed on a TB/year basis. Customers pay only for useable storage and may keep an infinite number of snapshots of at no additional charge. IT can back up the entire environment as frequently as once every five minutes; recovery is instantaneous.

Nasuni acts in the environment like a standard NAS box and is even easier to install. Once each location has a Filer with credentials and encryption keys installed (IT can use VMs for smaller locations), the system is ready, and IT can manage data access, protection, security and storage capacity for the entire global infrastructure from a single console.”

Finalists:

AirWatch Enterprise Mobility Management – AirWatch by VMware

INetU Managed Cloud Hosting – INetU

iQ API – iQ Media

Best Cloud Management Solution

Winner: Red Hat CloudForms -Red Hat, Inc. 

“Cloud platforms are constantly evolving, and management solutions need to keep pace with the rate of change for each platform. With CloudForms, Red Hat provides the industry’s most robust management experience for users across multiple platforms.

Red Hat CloudForms provides unified cloud management that enables organizations to rapidly transform their existing virtual infrastructures into highly scalable, private clouds as well as take advantage of public cloud resources. For private cloud implementations on OpenStack, CloudForms allows organizations to reduce execution time by automating key processes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, including self-service provisioning, workflow processes with approvals, capacity and utilization, quota enforcement, intelligent workload placement, and post-provisioning operations – giving customers full life cycle management of OpenStack workloads.

For public clouds, CloudForms support for Amazon EC2 allows organizations to use Amazon as an extension of their datacenter. It provides provisioning, capacity utilization, and life cycle management for Amazon workloads, aggregating that information together with their enterprise virtual infrastructure landscape into a single unified management console.

CloudForms has enabled customers to deploy global private clouds, accelerate service delivery, increase agility, improve service levels, and maximize resource efficiency.”

Finalists: 

xStream Private & Hybrid Cloud Management Platform – Virtustream

Best Cloud PaaS

Winner: OutSystems Platform – Outsystems

“OutSystems provides the enterprise Rapid Application Delivery (RAD) platform that makes it easy to develop apps once and deliver seamlessly across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Web – deeply integrated with existing cloud and on-premises databases and systems of record. OutSystems Platform enables the rapid delivery and effortless change of large application portfolios and is available as a public cloud, private cloud and on-premises solution. Over 450 enterprise organizations in 25 countries across 22 industries use the Platform to deliver beautiful mobile and web apps in record time.

With OutSystems Platform, developers can model all aspects of applications visually, without any low-level coding. The “develop once for all devices” approach leverages responsive design and hybrid architecture to create multi-device applications (including native capabilities) without extra effort. A powerful set of open source connectors allows for easy integration to everything – including enterprise systems, cloud services and databases. Using powerful visual modeling, the Platform allows users to create and change application with blazing speed.”

Finalists:

Stackato – ActiveState

Intuit QuickBase -Intuit, Inc.

NetSuite SuiteCloud – NetSuite, Inc. 

Best SaaS Application

Winner: Adaptive Suite 2014.2 – Adaptive Insights

“The Adaptive Suite 2014.2 provides the only unified Corporate Performance Management suite built from the “cloud up” for today’s biggest brands and hottest companies. It enables finance departments to automate budgeting, planning and forecasting, financial consolidation, reporting and analysis that are incredibly easy to deploy and use. Available in 8 languages with support for more than 190 currencies and exchange rates, the Adaptive Suite powers more than 2,500 organizations in more than 85 countries worldwide.

Organizations are proven to reduce cycle times by up to 90 percent with the Adaptive Suite, automating expense planning, balance sheet and cash flow planning, headcount planning, sales planning and forecasting, financial reporting and more.

The Adaptive Suite is built for the cloud and is always up-to-date and provides easy scalability, with built-in analytics and collaboration capabilities at the core, as well as web and mobile access from anywhere. Organizations can integrate financial and operational data, actuals, budgets, and forecasts into powerful dashboards and visualizations that are easy to analyze and take action on, and create fully integrated financial statements. Financial consolidation enables organizations to achieve a “virtual close” and publish comprehensive financial, management, and board reports, with visibility to the transactional level of detail.”

Finalists:

www.clearslide.com – ClearSlide

TRACT – goTransverse

Infor CloudSuite – Infor, Inc.

cliQ – iQ media

Judging Criteria

The CODiE awards are judged in two phases: a first round review in which each nominated product is assigned to judges for evaluation, and a second round of SIIA member voting on finalists selected in the first round.

According to SIIA rules, judges must have proven experience in their category, must disclose any conflicts of interests, and may not review any products from companies that they’ve worked for in the past three years. Judges may not accept fees, gifts or personal benefits from vendors.

Nomination Process

Though judges aren’t allowed gifts or fees, the CODiEs are still, in the strictest sense of the term, a pay-to-play awards program. In order to nominate their products for selection in the awards, vendors must pay a fee to the SIIA— around $400 for SIIA members and non-profit organizations, and roughly $1000 for non-members.

That said, fees are simply for consideration in the awards program and there is no indication that they affect judging or voting decisions.