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 F E A T U R E 
May 15, 2000 By Dave Molta Selecting 50 products that deserve to be Well-Connected Award winners has never been an easy task. In the competitive market for IT and network hardware, software and services, it's tough to keep track of all the changes. And, as we've learned in this past year of high-tech acquisitions and mergers, the toughest part may be keeping track of which vendor's name is affixed to a product. Chances are pretty good that if we tested it and liked it 12 months ago, Cisco Systems bought the company that made it. Being a Well-Connected Award winner or finalist is a special honor because it's a true reflection of product quality rather than merely product popularity or marketing effectiveness. Editors don't nominate an item simply because it's been hyped; they know if they do, they'll get ripped apart by the rest of the staff once we announce the winners internally. Instead, editors select products because they work and they've survived the abuse we inflict on them in our Real-World Labs®. From this year's 50 Well-Connected Award winners, we chose three that deserve special attention. Our Hardware Product of the Year is the Altiga Networks Concentrator...uh, make that the Cisco 3060 VPN Concentrator. Regardless of its name, this product defines the state of the art for VPNs, providing a great management architecture, solid configuration options and excellent troubleshooting tools. It's quite a package. On the software side, Novell NDS eDirectory took the top prize as Software Product of the Year. Directory infrastructure is critical to enterprise and e-business applications, and nobody does directory services as well as Novell. NDS eDirectory provides a rich set of functions, has cross-platform support and is both mature and stable. Our pick for Most Innovative Service Provider of the Year is Digital Island. This company isn't your typical ISP emphasizing the provision of fat-pipe Internet connectivity. Instead, Digital Island bundles a range of network services, with global hosting, content delivery and application services that can help you establish a professional and responsive e-commerce presence. A full list of the winners and finalists, along with descriptions of the winners, is posted online at Network Computing. To all the vendors that made the list this year, we offer our congratulations--and to the winners we say, watch out for Cisco.
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