Response to InfoWorld's Choices on 2007's Top Technology

First of all, I must note for the record that InfoWorld has never given me an award as being top in any category. I'm thankful that they've spared their readers that pain. Now that I've gotten that over with, I'd like to comment on an article I recently read over at InfoWorld.

David Marshall, a well known comentator on the virtualization arena and quite an interesting person, comments on his choices of the best technology from 2007. Although several fine products are mentioned, they seem to be the obvious choices because they offered technology that certainly was good enough to statisfy the needs of many organizations and were both highly and successfully publicized by their developers.

What about the technology that was less highly publicized but, very interesting nevertheless? I suspect that the products that were easiest to defend were selected due to the limited space allowed for such discussions. The products that are easiest to defend may not be the best products for any given organization to deploy.

In 2007, I spoke with nearly 100 different companies, each of which offered something interesting that was worthy of note.

• ClearCube and Pano Technologies are offering interesting tools for those interested in access virtualization.
• Endeavors Technologies, LANDesk, Thinstall, DataSynapse and several others are focused on application virtualization.
• In the realm of processing virtualization, companies such as Virtual Iron, Qumranet and several others come to mind. (VMware and Parallels were already mentioned in the article)
• Management of virtualized environments was a hotbed of activity last year. Cassatt, Embotics, Fortisphere, Racemi, Scalent Systems and VMLogix all presented interesting technology.
• Catbird is offering an interesting approach to securing virtual environments

Although I could go on and on about what was interesting and what was not, I think I've made my point that picking out a few of the front runners and leaving out all of the others does a disservice to the industry in some ways. Just because a product is popular does not also indicate that it is the best technology or even that it would be best for any given organization's needs.

What would your choice be for the top virtualization technology be? What criteria would you use to select the best?