For Information Strategy -- or "getting the whole picture", the winner was IBM because of their stated direction: Integrated information on demand, managed by self-healing systems that "autonomically" respond to the agile business. IBM now offers alternative business integration solutions to bring together all forms of information.

For Business Intelligence, the winner was Business Objects basically for their solid incorporation of Crystal's technology into their latest release, XI. What is interesting is to note who was in the "Companies to Watch" bracket - Qliktech, a relative newcomer that changes the paradigm of preset cubes, aggregations and views to let users be more creative in their analyses. And ProClarity for bringing performance and speed into Analytics Platform 6.

Business Execution or business process management (BPM)- This was a surprise to me: FileNet. The company;s P8 archteicture combines content management applications with process management.

Customer Intelligence or solutions that provide strong visualization and interactivity and that must put higher customer intelligence at the service of real business problems, such as campaign management. The winner should be no surprise here: NCR/Teradata with their "active" data warehouse. Again of interest are the companies to watch which include Netezza with their offer of an "appliance" that bundles advanced database, storage and server technology. And Spotfire - focusing on the marriage of advanced data visualization with analytic depth.

Last one is Unstructured Intelligence and the winner is SAS! Surprising at first but after reading the explanation, I agree with their decision. This special topic area recognizes a company that are helping organizations accomplish very strategic objectives. According to Dave, "Expertise in text mining and other fields is valuable, but the convergence of structured and unstructured intelligence solutions is what organizations really need."