Magic Software has been named to the SD Times 100 for the fifth
year in a row. As stated on the awards page: “Each year the SD Times 100
recognizes companies, non-commercial organizations, open source projects and
other initiatives for their innovation and leadership. It is not a product
award. Judged by the editors of SD Times, the SD Times 100 recognizes the top
innovators and leaders in multiple software development industry areas.”
“When choosing the SD Times 100, we carefully considered
each company’s offerings and reputation. We also listened for the “buzz”—how
much attention and conversation we’ve heard around the company and its products
and technologies—as a sign of leadership within the industry,” wrote David
Rubinstein when the awards debuted in 2003.
“The SD Times 100 looked for companies that have determined
a direction that developers followed,” Rubinstein added as he expanded on the
criteria. “Did the company set the industry agenda? Did its products and
services advance the software development art? Were its competitors nervously
tracking its moves? Were programmers anxiously awaiting its developments? Those
qualities mark a leader.”
We will never know for certain what qualities and
characteristics of the Magic Software offering entered into the judges decision
these last five years. Nevertheless, I have identified here what I believe to
be some of the key developments that the judges could have looked at in making
their decision.
In 2010, Magic Software was recognized in the SOA &
Middleware category. Not surprisingly, in the prior year Gartner and Forrester
had both recognized Magic Software as a Visionary and Top Performer in their
respective quadrants and waves related to integration and Service-Oriented
Architecture.
Leading up to that time, Magic Software had innovated its
application and integration platforms with features such as Web services wizards;
SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL automation; RESTful Web Services; Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA); and Event Driven
Architecture. While Magic’s support for these technologies had their roots all
the way back to 2001, support for Web Services in 2001 and the release of the
Magic integration platform in 2003 had clearly become mainstream by 2010.
Magic Software was recognized in the SD Times 100 2011 Database
& Integration category. While the grouping of Database and Integration may
have seemed like an odd pairing by the editors, it was appropriate enough in
Magic Software’s case.
Our platforms had long included high-speed Native Database
Gateways which were particularly important in the pre-in-memory computing era.
The diversity of our database, file and variable support also shined through in
the Magic xpi Data Mapper, which has a connection to those databases. On the
integration side, platform-level features for drag, drop and configure visual
integration flows, process flow automation and business process orchestration
were also well established and gaining in market adoption and awareness by that
time.
In 2012, Magic Software was named to the SD Times 100 in the
APIs & Integration category. One of the uniquenesses of the SD Times 100
program has been that the categories have changed over the years. The topic of
API integration started to reach a peak that year and the Magic xpi Integration
Platform clearly contained rich API handling capabilities that simplified
integration for thousands of medium and large sized enterprises. The API
library in the Magic xpi Integration Platform included an Application Adapter
Library; Technical Component Library; Message Queue Adapters; Composite Object
Mashups and Communication Protocol Adapters.
By 2013, Magic Software’s Rich Internet Application (RIA)
technology had come into widespread adoption. So it is no surprise that we were
named to the 2013 SD Times 100 in the category of User Experience. Magic
Software had introduced desktop Rich Internet Applications (RIA) within the
Magic xpa Application Platform’s unitary development and deployment architecture.
At the same time as the RIA introduction, Magic’s technology became fully .NET compliant,
providing the end user a rich .NET user experience while affording the developer
a simplified environment for development of .NET applications.
For the first time in the history of the SD Times 100, Magic
Software repeated in the same category in the 2014 SD Times 100. Once again,
Magic Software was recognized in the User Experience category. If Magic
Software’s desktop RIA was obvious to the market in 2013, it was likely not
until 2014 that the editors would have noticed our Mobile RIA capabilities.
Magic’s single development environment for both Mobile Client and Server coupled
with its deploy anywhere support for iOS, Android, Windows, and RIM is further
enhanced by providing users with a native look and feel in both online and
offline mode.
Are these the precise reasons that Magic Software has been
recognized as a leader in the industry year-after-year? Perhaps the editors
would have cited other innovative factors. But one thing is clear, Magic
Software is widely and consistently recognized for innovation and leadership in
the software development industry.
