Quoting from official announcement:
VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that VMware ESX Server received the InfoWorld 2005 Technology of the Year award. The InfoWorld Technology awards recognize significant technologies of the past year that promise to make the greatest impact on enterprise IT strategies as well as the products that best exemplify the implementation of those technologies.
“With our fifth annual Technology of the Year awards, we honor the most enterprising enterprise products, ones that have fundamentally altered the IT landscape,” said Steve Fox, editor-in-chief at InfoWorld.
“VMware created its ESX Server virtualization product for businesses that need truly enterprise-class virtualization. ESX Server implements the consolidation, dynamic provisioning, resource pooling and all-bases-covered availability assurance of expensive system and storage hardware,” commented Tom Yager, technical director at the InfoWorld Test Center. “But ESX Server does it with ordinary servers, modular SANs and vanilla operating systems.”
Yager continued, “Those coming down to x86 from Sparc, Power, or PA-RISC hardware should consider no option other than ESX Server. And those running more than a rack’s worth of x86 servers should think seriously about trading some raw performance, so often wasted, for the high-availability, ultimately reconfigurable server infrastructure that this product enables. It’s remarkable – even marvelous – to see VMware carry IT so far with software that fits on two CDs.”
VMware ESX Server is virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating and managing systems in mission-critical environments. Adopted by thousands of IT organizations worldwide over the last three years, ESX Server has saved hundreds of millions of dollars in costs through providing server consolidation, fast provisioning and disaster recovery. ESX Server provides a highly scalable platform with advanced resource management capabilities, which can be managed by VMware VirtualCenter. Using VMotion technology, enterprises are able to respond to changing business demands in real-time and move virtual machines from one physical server to another with continuous service availability.
“We are very honored to have received the prestigious InfoWorld 2005 Technology of the Year award,” said Karthik Rau, director of product management at VMware. “We take tremendous satisfaction in seeing thousands of enterprises deploy our virtual infrastructure software in ways that drive real value and solve real problems. The InfoWorld award reaffirms what our customers have been telling us all along – that enterprises are looking at VMware virtual infrastructure as a critical technology layer for all their x86 based systems.”
Past industry recognition includes the CNET Enterprise Product of the Year award, IDG Enterprise Product of the Year award, Microsoft TechEd Europe Best of Show award, PC Magazine Technical Excellence award and Windows IT Pro Magazine Best Overall Product in 2004 award.