2009 Technology of the Year Awards: Applications

The best: browsers, Office alternatives, Web CMSs, and data integration and mashup solutions

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox

Google Chrome may be the browser of tomorrow, but Firefox is the king today. No other browser provides Firefox's wealth of features or can boast of so many useful extensions. Firefox 3 broke new ground in usability and improved every other aspect of the browser from security through performance. If you're seeking a browser that is customizable, quick, reliable, and stable, look no further.

Read the review

Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show

Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show

If you're ready to embrace the SaaS future, then Zoho could be the productivity suite you've been waiting for. Zoho can provide both personal productivity and business back-end applications, and with Google Gears, you can keep working on documents even if you can't find the Internet. Zoho is the only Microsoft Office alternative we know that you could easily use to run a complete business. It's also the only one that can run virtually all the Excel macros you might have developed.

Read the review

Day Communique WCM

Day Communique WCM

Communique WCM 5 is designed for business users, but the ease extends to developers and IT admins as well. An AJAX-enabled interface provides drag-and-drop page design and in-context content editing. The supplied component library includes Flash elements, form builders, and Google Gadget support. An integrated BPM engine supports advanced workflows, while federated, social search, built-in analytics, plus hot backup, disaster recovery, and clustering round out an enterprise-grade feature set.

Read the review

Telligent Community Server 2008

Telligent Community Server 2008

Telligent Community Server has the customary blog, forum, and media-sharing social features. It stands out from the crowd with impressive scalability, business intelligence reporting, and superior integration with Microsoft's SharePoint Server, which allows users to interact with blogs and forums from within SharePoint. This, along with better overall customization via the REST API, pushes Community Server to the top of our enterprise social software list.

Read the review

Oracle Database 11g

Oracle Database 11g

The two big kids on the block, Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL Server, both had significant releases this year. Oracle Database 11g is richer in features and more configurable than SQL Server, giving skilled DBAs more powerful capabilities -- though we love SQL Server's lower cost and manageability. Among the top new features in the gigantic 11g release, the killer combination of Active Data Guard and Real Application Testing make Oracle Database our hands-down winner.

Read the review

Talend Open Studio

Talend Open Studio

This open source solution hits all the highlights one would look for in traditional integration platforms -- batch delivery, transforms, ETL (extract, transform, and load), data governance, and a strong set of connectivity adapters -- but at an untraditionally affordable price. Talend also boasts broad reach via Java and Web services, a highly distributed and scalable architecture, a library of connectors supporting a wealth of data sources, and a central metadata repository that encourages reuse.

Read the review

Denodo Platform

Denodo Platform

Denodo provides a rich set of tools to unify both structured data from relational databases and unstructured data from Web sites, e-mail boxes, and other sources. A recording button helps simplify building code, while frequent "test" buttons help you debug as you go. The years of development that went into the Denodo solution shows in the wide range of options you get for bringing data together.

Read the review