Bruce Boardman covers Network and Systems Management for Network Computing. You can find his choices for Well-Connected Award winners in his beat area here, including Symantec, Opsware, Coradiant, WebSideStory, ClearSight and ScriptLogic.

Click on the video below and hear straight from Bruce about this year's best network and systems management products and most important trends. (.wmv)

Every year at this time, Network Computing makes our picks for the best IT products and services of the past year -- the NWC Well-Connected Awards.

This is no mere popularity contest. Our tech editors have spent the year testing countless products over countless hours in the NWC Real World Labs. For the awards, they relive the highs and lows of a year spent testing and reviewing producs and services in eight core areas of coverage: Security, Network & Systems Management, Enterprise Applications, Wireless, Messaging & Collaboration, Network Infrastructure, Application Infrastructure and Storage & Servers.

There's a lot going on at Interop 2006, and whether you can make it to the show or not, be sure to stop here for the NWC Interop Video Blog to catch all the happenings. We have almost a dozen editors trolling the event, and via video posts, podcast segments and plain old-fashioned text posts, we're going to cover the show from top to bottom.

Among the highlights:

- Behind-the-scenes access to the Best of Interop testing, which is being handled by NWC's own tech editors.

- A virtual guest pass to the NWC Well-Connected Awards Ceremony

- Daily news and analysis reports live from the show floor

- And more.

And now, in the spirit of our video blogging efforts, please spare 30 seconds to click on the video below for a brief video introduction to the Interop 2006 Video Blog. (.wmv)

How low will opponents of net neutrality go? Into the gutter, it seems. Rep. Joe Barton, Congress's chief enemy of net neutrality and best friend of AT&T, claims net neutrality is "kind of like pornography: You know it when you see it."

One of the most startling pieces of news I've seen on the tech side recently was the decision by Citigroup last week to rate Dell stock as a "sell." Turns out that in the ever-twisted world of Wall Street, Dell's high margins (a situation that zillions of companies would kill to have) aren't as important as the drop on its sales and market share.

Here's a merger that was completely unexpected and out of left field. Avocent, makers of KVM and remote access products, is purchasing LANDesks, a desktop management vendor. "The agreement, which is expected to close within 60 to 75 days, provides for total consideration of $416 million, including $200 million in stock, $200 million in cash and $16 million in assumed options. The transaction value may be increased by up to $60 million if LANDesk meets certain financial targets specified in the agreement."

Recently, I conducted a podcast interview with Christine Ewing from Altiris. They traditionally have focused on desktop and system management. A new product has come down the pipe, Software Virtualization Solution (SVS). It's a "virtual machine" that works at the application layer instead of OS layer. Instead of segmenting hardware, or allowing for multiple operating systems to run simultaneously, SVS lets multiple incompatible applications be installed simultaneously. Software can be enabled, disabled, installed or removed in a sandbox environment, without affecting other DLLs, files or registry keys. Sounds handy.

The music featured in this episode is called "Music for a Future City", by Camtarn. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Free municipal Wi-Fi networks may sound like a good idea, but this article serves as a good reminder of what folks should really expect from their government's efforts.

A new law passed today by County Executive Andy Spano, makes Westchester, NY the first county to fine businesses for running open, Wi-Fi networks.

If you think about it, Scott McNealy had an amazing run as Sun's CEO -- one that went for a long, loooong time in this business. He co-founded the company in 1982 and became CEO and chairman two years later; that's 22 years at the helm. In the tech industry, that's several eons.

Another Web 2.0 Office application beta goes live, this one from ThinkFree.

When eBay bought Skype for the staggering sum of over $4 billion, Skype had to meet certain revenue targets. But trouble is ahead: It looks as if Skype is falling behind, and won't be able to get the full payout.

Having a tough time with our Web Applications TechQuiz (based on our April 27th cover package)? Our answer key is available here -- try not to cheat though!:

Google co-founder Larry Page says that the company is looking at ways it can "expand" Internet access for its users, and won't rule out bidding to buy wireless bandwidth so the search giant can create a nationwide Wi-Fi network.

When everyone on the planet finally realizes that peak oil is already here or just around the corner, they can look to the server industry as one business that got the big picture early on. Of course, this isn't entirely out of altruism (although server manufacturers will be happy to tout that side of the equation, and with no complaints from me). Rather, in the data center, energy efficiency and savings are simply a matter of good business -- and sooner than later, all businesses are going to have to realize that.

I am pondering the Risk-Cost security equation a lot these days, as I'm certain you all are.

Some things just absolutely must be protected, others just aren't that important. Some days, I think we as an industry forget that little fact.

And legislation/compliance aren't helping any.

Opera today announced the availability of Beta 1 of version 9 of its browser. New features include AJAX-based components called 'widgets', a BitTorrent search engine, and updated content blocking.

Here's some potentially disturbing news for Skype and VoIP users in Europe: The cell-phone giant Vodafone may block VoIP traffic, including Skype. So reports ExtremeVoIP.

Memo to Bill Gates: I’m not sure that wining and dining an avowed Communist in a $100 million dollar high-tech mansion owned by the world’s richest man makes a strong case for the financial harm caused by software piracy.

Ask a real-estate agent for the three factors that most significantly influence the price of a property, and you're likely to get a somewhat tongue-in-cheek response: location, location, location. In the world of wireless networking, location-based services are emerging as one of the battlegrounds as wireless equipment manufacturers and service providers wrestle to differentiate their products and services.

Skype has been playing footsie with dictators: Its CEO admits that it censors text messages containing words that the Chinese authorities don't like, such as "Falun Gong" and "Dalai Lama."

Google’s digging deeper into the enterprise, today announcing a new Google Search Appliance. The key new feature on the latest version of the product is what the search giant calls Google OneBox—it’s the same top-of-the-search results you find as a consumer using the Google search engine, only now applied to enterprise applications data.

The telecom bubble of the late 90s appears to be drawing to an end, as so-called "dark fiber" -- unused bandwidth -- begins to be used as demand picks up. And leading the way to lighting up that dark fiber is VoIP.

You've likely heard the rumors that the Green Bay lab is moving across town. While you'd think most of the hard work would be in tearing down our infrastructure and bodily moving it across town, turns out that setting up data services is a lot more painful...

A recent HarrisInteractive survey about VoIP awareness in the U.S. and Britain found this intriguing fact: Men are more aware of VoIP than women by about a two-to-one margin. And, one would assume, from those numbers, they're much more likely to use VoIP as well.

You know identity theft has gone mainstream when pen manufacturer Uni-ball launches an ad campaign touting a high-security ink designed to fight ID fraud.

Rumors abound that Google may join with EarthLink to launch a nationwide Wi-Fi network. And here's the kicker: It would be a for-pay network, not a free one.

Do your eyes go all kaflooky when the site you're on pops up with one of those scrambled text signups? You know -- the ones where a string of letters or numbers appear up against a weird background that makes it hard to read? The problem with these security measures are that some vision-impaired users cannot always make out the characters. Plus, they're not as secure as some people think -- the right batch of malicious code can slip right past them.

Scott Wahle describes the "secret" language known as L33t5p34k, and gets it all wrong.

Is it just shoddy reporting or a case of technical incompetence?

It just wouldn't be Friday without a freebie. This one is a useful set of command line utilities for Windows that makes administration of web, database, and general purpose servers just a bit easier...

How meaningful is it that Sun has canned 200 employees of its Sparc group?

The explosion of online, AJAX-enabled word processing applications is far from complete. The latest entry is AjaxWrite, offered to you by Michael Robertson (of MP3.com, Linspire, and GizmoProject fame - or is that infamy?).

The Earthlink-Google deal to provide a wireless network for San Francisco is only the first step to a much bigger Wi-Fi GoogleNet, says EarthLink CEO Garry Betty. Betty has been telling all who will listen that the firms are planning to expand the network to a second city. And after that, the sky's the limit.

One of the promises of 3G cellular has been integrated voice and data.In this column I examine what this means, why and where it's important,to what extent the different cellular technologies support it, and howthis capability will evolve over time. I'm bringing it up now because Cingularis currently rolling out an enhanced version of Universal MobileTelecommunications System (UMTS) that includes High Speed Downlink Packet Access(HSDPA), which supports integrated voice and data. Meanwhile, Sprint and Verizonhave recently made announcements about an upgrade to CDMA 2000 Evolved DataOptimized (EV-DO), called Revision A, that provides a key building block forintegrated voice and data, a capability currently not available for EV-DO.

AT&T and the telcos are threatening to charge Google and other Web sites extortion-type fees unless Google and others pay for adequate bandwidth. But Google and others may soon have this answer for them: No, thanks. We'll build our own fat pipe into customers' homes.

Apparently this year's O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference sported a few ...side shows.

Skype isn't content to own the PC-based VoIP market -- now it has its eyes set on your mobile phone as well. A buyout of two startups specializing in mobile VoIP makes clear that Skype aims to dominate that market.

Do you remember 2002? The Angels beat the Giants in the World Series. Mozilla 1.0 debuted. Star Wars fans saw Clones Attack. And two British engineers were close to debuting a cell phone embedded within a tooth. The hype became so feverish that the product-to-be landed on Time Magazine's 2002 Best Inventions list.

A few weeks ago we asked our readers to send in their ideas for our Top 11 Punishments We'd like to see for Spammers. After reading some of the responses, we came to the immediate conclusion that many of you have been deeply and personally hurt by Spam. How else could we justify some of the more unusual responses? Colonoscopies? Schock treatments? 24 hour reruns of the Osbournes show? My God people -- what did these spammers do to you?

I think it's time for a group hug, don't you? Meanwhile, let's take a look at the unique suggestions offered on how to punish Spammers.

Buried in a survey on IM adoption by comScore Networks, was a little tidbit that might shed some light on why Ebay gobbled up Skype last fall.

I spotted a piece in EE Times the other day that says Carly Fiorina is taking a seat on the board of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of the giants in chip manufacturing. The item went on to note that Fiorina is also working on a book for this fall "about her career and her views on such issues as what constitutes a leader, how women can thrive in business and the role technology will continue to play in reshaping our world."

That's right, after months of buzz surrounding Oracle and JBoss, Red Hat tips its hat, filled with $350M, to the OSS enterprise service platform vendor...

China's Shanghai Telecom has become the latest telecom worldwide to block VoIP calls, joining an international roster that spans the globe from South America to Europe and Asia. When will these dinosaurs enter the modern age?

I had planned to be writing this from this week's LinuxWorld conference in Boston. That was before the flu. But with or without me, the action was indeed in Boston this week -- somewhat low-key, but certainly not without interest.

Today's freebie is all about networking and keeping your neighbors off your wireless connection.

Those who use Verizon's unlimited mobile broadband service may be in for a nasty surprise: The company may begin charging high-bandwidth users extra fees, says a top Verizon exec.

A blog entry by Michael Sciannamea in The Wireless Report caught my eye late last week. The post summarized an article concerning coverage in Tempe, Arizona's muni-wireless mesh network, and ended by saying "Hopefully, these bugs will be worked out quickly..." If providing adequate coverage were only a bug! A comment on that post by fellow colleague Glenn Fleishman pointed to an article that was the likely original news source. In that article, NeoReach, the wireless network operator, admitted that it had not fully informed registering customers that the wireless service generally required an indoor bridge for the best possible experience.

If any technology is closely associated with the Web 2.0 phenomenon it's Asynchronous Javascript and XML aka AJAX. AJAX-based applications are all around us and in theory offer business low-cost alternative to collaborative applications.

Talk about mind-boggling changes. A new project will allow businesses to connect GoogleTalk users to their Asterisk, telephony servers, Mark Spencer told me yesterday.

Our industry relishes in looking for the latest Cisco-killer. Usually we're left hypothesizing about Juniper's next move or about Huawei-3Com, but now we've got an even better dark-horse to pin our hopes on – the $13 billion Alcatel-Lucent merger.