First, Happy New Year from the ZDNet Research team!
Using our BT trax tool we took a look at all the activity in our directory of over 57,000 white papers, case studies, Webcasts and other downloadable resources over the past year. The top tech categories as measured by number of total downloaded titles are networking & telecom, software, and hardware with little differences between them: each category had slightly less than 1/5 of the total activity. Security came in at fourth place with 14% of downloads in 2005.
While top news lists can give you a sense of which announcements and events are deemed industry landmarks, the next stage of decision making—where IT professionals evaluate and consider vendor solutions and new technologies—reveals what decision makers and buyers find important when they roll up their sleeves and get to business. To that end, below is a list of the top 10 most downloaded resources over the last 12 months. Note that sponsorship and premium placement which we, for the time being, cannot filter plays an influential role in the outcome of the rankings.
Top 10 downoaded resources in 2005
| 1 | Global Knowledge Network | Windows 2003/2000/XP Security Architecture Overview |
| 2 | ShoreTel | IP Telephony Pocket Guide |
| 3 | Cisco Systems | Cisco IOS Tips and Tricks |
| 4 | RL Information Consulting | Project Management Best Practices |
| 5 | Hewlett-Packard | Plan a Windows Server 2003 Migration |
| 6 | Avaya | What you need to know before deploying VoIP |
| 7 | Hewlett-Packard | Creating Better Backups through Replication |
| 8 | Cisco Systems | Disaster Recovery: Best Practices White Paper |
| 9 | Computer Associates | How to Eliminate Spyware to Protect Your Business |
| 10 | Diskeeper | Antivirus Software and Disk Defragmentation |