Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Magic Software Named to the SD Times 100 Five Years Running



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.