Last night was the ceremony to announce the winners of "Best of TechEd 2009" awards, provided by Windows IT Pro magazine. We were finalists for a category called "Business Intelligence" and way back on Monday, about half an hour into the whole exhibitor week, I was interviewed by one of the judges on our offerings in the field of business intelligence and what we provide for knowledge workers.
She quickly disabused me of spouting "marketese" (rats! It's getting so I can do that in my sleep) and we had an enjoyable conversation about what we provide for developers in the area of analytics so that they can incorporate it into their applications. It should come as no surprise if you have been reading my daily TechEd diary to learn that this includes the pivot grids for WinForms and ASP.NET, our charting product XtraCharts and its ability to graph the current view of a pivot grid, and our printing/reporting product XtraPrinting Library and XtraReports to produce printouts on paper, as PDF, XLS, etc. This bundle of products, easily obtainable as part of DXperience Enterprise, gives our customers the ability to write analytical software very simply.
Well, to cut a long story short, DevExpress won the Best of TechEd 2009 Business Intelligence award for our analytics products.
We were ecstatic at that but there was more to come. All of the finalists are automatically entered into the Attendees' Pick award, and it's up to the attendees themselves to vote for their product of the year.
I'm sure you've guessed it by now, but DevExpress also won the Best of TechEd 2009 Attendees' Pick award for our analytics products.
This is absolutely marvelous news and we are overjoyed with the result. More than that, we're all walking around with very goofy smiles on our faces this morning, so do come on over to the booth to see 
.
In fact, looking back on my notes, that makes three years in a row that we've won the Best of TechEd Attendees' Pick award. We won in 2007 with DXperience ASP.NET, in 2008 with DXperience, and now in 2009 with our business intelligence products. Many thanks to every attendee who voted for us this year (and in previous years), you are the best.
I'd like to thank all of our customers who voted for our products, to all of our customers who have bought licenses and believe in the controls and libraries we make, to all those who evangelize them within their organization and at user groups and conferences. We are very grateful indeed. It all shows that we continue to develop the controls and frameworks and tools that developers need, enjoy using, and want to buy.