Award: ISP Service Level Agreement
Winner: Epoch Internet
Epoch may not be the biggest or the most popular ISP, but it had the best SLA (service level agreement) of all the providers we looked at. The agreement has incremental guarantees for outages and Epoch penalizes itself with real paybacks to the customer. No other company offered the refunds and outage guarantees that Epoch wrote into its contracts. While some service providers would credit only a few days on a customer's bill, Epoch would credit the entire month if only eight hours of downtime occur.
With one of the smallest networks, Epoch makes up what it lacks in size by providing its customers with the best service guarantees. Larger service providers may feel that they don't have to make quality guarantees. But if your enterprise is more concerned with customer support and service agreements than with size, in the case of Epoch, smaller is better.
Award: International IP Service
Winner: Concert Communications Co.: IP Select Premium
For international IP service, Concert strikes just the right note. A truly intercontinental company, Concert was created by British Telecom and AT&T to provide connectivity across the Atlantic. The company has evolved into a worldwide presence, offering a single network able to provide global enterprise customers with one-stop shopping.
Concert has created an all-IP network with connections in more than 40 countries, allowing international enterprises to easily interconnect their offices -- unless they're doing business in Antarctica. Using a state-of-the-art MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) backbone, customer traffic travels securely from point to point over Concert's private network.
Award: Web Content Switching
Winner: F5 Networks: BIG-IP Controller 3.1
As Web sites attract more users, Web content switching has become increasingly important. Our choice for the best content switch on the market today is the BIG-IP Controller 3.1 from F5 Networks. The BIG-IP Controller 3.1 sits between the enterprise server farm and the rest of the network, constantly monitoring the servers and the network, examining all incoming requests and determining the best server to answer each.
A hardware and software solution, the BIG-IP Controller 3.1 provides load balancing to the server farm in static and dynamic modes, allowing requests to be made in a round-robin fashion or based on either server usage or processing capabilities. By querying the servers on a regular basis, the BIG-IP Controller 3.1 not only tests the availability of a particular server but also rates the validity of the answer based on criteria of what should or should not be present in the server response.
Award: Electronic Bill Payments
Winner: VeriSign: Payflow
Enterprise customers conducting credit-card transactions on the Web need a way to perform EBPP (electronic bill presentment and payment). With Payflow, VeriSign offers a good solution for security-conscious customers who care about keeping prying eyes from their payment data. Payflow provides a secure method for connecting customers and their banks to purchases and the related vendor's bank.
Payflow is offered in two versions -- customers can link to payment services, or payment processing can be performed using customer software. VeriSign has excelled in the security arena by offering secure messaging, PKI (public key infrastructure) and certificate management. All payment processing is handled within VeriSign's secure data center, and all transactions are carried over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) links. Integration with existing platforms is made simple with VeriSign's messaging agent, which can be downloaded directly from the company's Web site.
Award: Web Content Management Solution
Winner: Documentum: 4i eBusiness Platform
Keeping track of an enterprise's Web content is no longer a one-person job. Companies now require the services of special WCM (Web content management) software to maintain the mountains of data stored on their Web servers, and Documentum has what we consider the best solution for them. The company's 4i eBusiness Platform software runs on a variety of platforms and can access popular databases from Informix Corp., Oracle Corp., Sybase or Microsoft Corp. Designed as an open architecture, 4i is compatible with both front- and back-end applications, and it is capable of managing a huge amount of data on several servers. Distribution is tracked and delivered to Internet or intranet servers while maintaining site integrity. Fault tolerance and failover systems are provided, as is the ability to back up and replicate data.
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Winners & Finalists
